The first Singaporean to hold the position of Senior Curator at Tate, Charmaine Toh aims to redefine the global photographic narrative with an approach rooted in Southeast Asia and open to the global South.
A Southeast Asian art historian at the heart of Tate: the announcement in May 2024 of Charmaine Toh's appointment as Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) came as a surprise even in London art circles. For this Singaporean photography specialist, the appointment represents a culmination - and a new beginning.
Trained at the University of Melbourne, where she defended her doctoral thesis, Toh was Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where she curated several landmark exhibitions. Among them, Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022), an ambitious rereading of regional photographic history, and Chua Soo Bin: Truths & Legends (2019), which offered an intimate approach to portrait photography in Asia.
A major project now awaits him in London: the organization, by 2026, of a major exhibition entitled Global Pictorialism. This project aims to broaden the traditional perspective on Pictorialism, a movement often confined to the Western history of photography. Charmaine Toh aims to integrate trajectories from Asia, Africa and Latin America, where this aesthetic has endured, or even evolved autonomously.
" Pictorialism didn't die out everywhere at the same time," she recently explained to CNA Lifestyle. In Singapore, for example, the style came into its own in the 1950s, driven by amateur club photographers who saw it as a form of personal expression, but also a national one, in a period of budding independence.
© Võ An Khánh
At Tate, Toh isn't starting from scratch. She comes with a solid background in curating and acquiring works. In particular, she played a role in the integration of works by Lim Kwong Ling and Foo Tee Jun into public collections in Singapore, aware of the urgency of preserving these archives in the face of the gradual disappearance of their authors.
Her curatorial approach is characterized by a contextual and critical reading of images, blending history, society and geopolitics. Her aim is not so much to "diversify" the collection as to reformulate the reading frames themselves: who decides what deserves to be shown? Who has the right to tell the story of photography?
From this perspective, Global Pictorialism will not only be a retrospective of old images, but also a space for dialogue between eras and continents. Although details of the exhibition remain confidential, we do know that Toh plans to mix historical prints with contemporary interventions, to question the survival of this aesthetic in the digital age.
The stakes of this mission go far beyond Pictorialism. In a museum like the Tate, one of the world's most watched institutions, Toh's appointment is part of a wider movement to open up to non-Western art scenes. But where some see it as a cosmetic effort, she seems intent on laying a lasting foundation. "It's not a question of adding a few artists from the South to an existing list, but of re-evaluating what that list means," she sums up.
Charmaine Toh embodies a generation of curators for whom photography is not only an aesthetic medium, but also a tool of memory, resistance and collective narrative. For years, she has been proving this through her meticulous, rigorous yet deeply human exhibitions, in which images are as much witnesses to history as they are actors in it.
