Toh served as senior curator at the National Gallery Singapore ( NGS ) before moving to the UK, where she co-curated major photography exhibitions like Chua Soo Bin: Truths and Legends ( 2019 ) and Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia ( 2022 ). The first paid tribute to the 92-year-old social medal winner and fine-art photographer.
In 2023, she even published a book, Imagining Singapore: Pictorial Photography from the 1950s to the 1970s.
She was chosen for her session at Tate because of her expertise in South Asian art. Despite the university’s great age – it was established in 1897– it just started to build its pictures collection around 15 years ago, and is now expanding the collection quickly.
The biggest difference between working at Tate and NGS, said Toh, is the range. The amount of drawings I have access to and the amount of programs and events I may clergyman has greatly increased, which is why I took the job.
Curation, if nothing else, is storytelling. And Toh felt the need to tell a bigger tale after weaving numerous tales of Singapore and Southeast Asia up residence. This particular international collection allows me to” challenge the history of photography and the history of art,” I thought, which I could n’t do in Singapore.
So, Tate’s decision was a “very normal step.”
A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Toh’s second training in this regard, Global Pictorialism, is gradually taking shape. From around the 1880s to the 1940s, a global movement of pictures and aesthetics was well-liked in Europe and North America. Henry Peach Robinson, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen were a few of the most notable portrait photography.
Pictorialists focused on creating ambient images to elicit emotions by using a variety of techniques rather than the cameras to record truth. Photographs in this style were typically printed in brown or blues rather than dramatic black and white, with soft focus and artistic effects.
In the West, pictorialism gradually gave way to a newer tone: Modernist images. Toh contends that the art form has been around much longer than American lore. ” In Singapore, for instance, the level of pictorialism was the 1950s. What I’m trying to do in this show is take all that up into the narrative”, she said.