Across time and space, artists have – through the panorama format in paintings – reflected the most iconic and consequential of subject matters, pondered upon historic and historical places and scenes and conveyed powerful momentous sentiments. This way, they have accorded panorama paintings outsized places of importance in art history.

Spread across three historical spaces on the second floor of The Arts House, Singapore’s oldest colonial building, Everything Light Touches reveals how the wide view panorama format literally offers an expansive breadth of possibilities to artists. Through the exhibited paintings, a capsule history of salient styles and themes in Asian art is revealed. From Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s paradisiac Visionary Landscape which marks modern Asian art’s birth in the artistic fountainhead of early 20th century Paris, to the wild, almost abstract gesticulations of expressionist painter Affandi in At The Beach as he seeks to be at one with his subject, the crashing waves at Parangtritis beach, it is clear the panorama format rouses heightened emotion – how does it do so?

Image Credit: Affandi, At the Beach, 1983