The first Singaporean to hold the position of senior curator at the Tate, Charmaine Toh intends 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 the Tate: the announcement in May 2024 of Charmaine Toh's appointment as Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) surprised even London's art world. For this Singaporean photography specialist, this new role represents both 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 reinterpretation 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 her in London: the organization, by 2026, of a large-scale 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 wishes to incorporate trajectories from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where this aesthetic has endured and even evolved independently.
“Pictorialism did not die out everywhere at the same time,” she recently explained to CNA LifestyleIn Singapore, for example, this style emerged in the 1950s, driven by amateur club photographers who saw it as a form of personal but also national expression, in a period of nascent independence.
© Võ An Khánh
At Tate, Toh is not starting from scratch. She arrives with solid experience in the conservation and acquisition of works. In particular, she played a role in integrating the works of 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 passing of their authors.
Her curatorial approach is distinguished by a contextual and critical reading of images, blending history, society, and geopolitics. She does not so much seek to “diversify” the collection as to reformulate the frameworks of interpretation themselves: who decides what deserves to be shown? Who is legitimate to tell the story of photography?
In this perspective, Global Pictorialism It will be not just a retrospective of old images, but also a space for dialogue between eras and continents. Although the details of the exhibition remain confidential, it is known that Toh plans to combine historical prints with contemporary interventions, to question the survival of this aesthetic in the digital age.
The stakes of this mission extend far beyond the pictorialist case. In a museum like the Tate, one of the most visited institutions in the world, Toh's appointment is part of a broader movement toward openness to non-Western art scenes. But where some see it as a cosmetic effort, it seems to aim at laying lasting foundations. "It's not about adding a few artists from the Global South to an existing list, but about reassessing what that list means," she summarizes.
Charmaine Toh embodies a generation of curators for whom photography is not only an aesthetic medium, but also a tool for memory, resistance, and collective storytelling. She has proven this for years through in-depth, rigorous, yet profoundly human exhibitions, in which images are as much witnesses as actors in history.
