0Maria Taniguchi was born in Dumaguete City, the Philippines in 1981. Her works encompass painting, sculpture, video and installation, and her practices investigate space and time along with social and historical contexts. Her series of “Untitled” brick paintings is an ongoing series that had been initiated in 2008. Each painting consists of seemingly countless rectangular cells, each one outlined by hand with graphite and filled with gray and black tones. The painstaking process creates a subtle yet complex pattern on the surface. These paintings develop in various extents, most of them reaching meters in size. The constructive structure embodies architectural elements, resulting in the paintings themselves manifesting as monumental existences within the space.
These days, artists are seemingly attracted to the idea of “compression.” This concept is not only limited to the compression of tangibles such as scientists who recently succeeded in transforming hydrogen into metal, but also the compression of intangibles such as data or time. Our contemporary society heavily relies on information technology that is now based on data storage devices that consist of an innumerable accumulation of the binary system, a system that soon will be a thing of the past as we approach mass-scale quantum computing. While the paintings’ simplicity in form could possibly be thought of as something related to minimalism, the paintings also serve to embody a device for storage in the technological sense of the term, and subsequently represent a historical meaning of human development.
A group of large and architectural sized sculptures made from hardwood called Java Plum native to India and Southeast Asia depict the letters “I” and “O”, an enigmatic reference to a form of electronic interfacing (input and output). The artist has referred to her brick paintings as the fundamental root of her larger artistic practice, while the other artworks are reflection, or refractions of it. The sculptures are no exception, representing a search for possibilities by coalescing the moment of contact (input / output) and the seeming anachronism of woodcraft.
Taniguchi has won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015 and participated in LUX Associate Artists Programme in 2009. Recent exhibitions include the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); “History of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue,” The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2016); “Afterwork,” Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); “Global: New Sensorium,” ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2016); The Vexed Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015) and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2015). Her works are held in a number of collections including the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco/Paris; the M+, Hong Kong and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
