Prior to relocating to the UK, Toh was senior curator at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), where she curated major photography exhibitions like Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022) and Chua Soo Bin: Truths and Legends (2019). The latter paid homage to the 92-year-old fine-art lensman and Cultural Medallion recipient.
In 2023, she also published a book, Imagining Singapore: Pictorial Photography from the 1950s to the 1970s.
It was her expertise in Southeast Asian art that led to her appointment at Tate. Despite the institution’s great age – it was established in 1897 – it only started to build its photography collection around 15 years ago, and is now expanding the collection rapidly.
The biggest difference between working at Tate and NGS, said Toh, is the scale. “The kind of artwork I have access to, and the kind of programmes and exhibitions I can curate, it’s expanded a lot, which is why I took the job.”
Curation, if nothing else, is storytelling. And having woven multiple narratives of Singapore and Southeast Asia back home, Toh felt the need to tell a bigger story. “This kind of international collection allows me to really challenge the history of photography and the history of art, which I couldn’t really do in Singapore.”
The move to Tate was therefore a “very natural step”.
A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Toh’s first exercise in this regard, Global Pictorialism, is slowly taking shape. Pictorialism is an international style of photography and aesthetic movement that was popular in Europe and North America from around the 1880s to the 1940s. Major pictorialist photographers included Henry Peach Robinson, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.
Rather than using the camera to record reality, pictorialists focused on creating atmospheric images to evoke emotional responses, using various techniques to do so. Photographs of this style tended to have soft focus, painterly effects and were printed in browns or blues rather than stark black and white.
In the West, pictorialism gradually gave way to a newer style: Modernist photography. But Toh contends that outside of Western canon, the art form has existed much longer. “In Singapore, for example, the height of pictorialism was the 1950s. What I’m trying to do in this exhibition is bring all that back into the narrative,” she said.
