At just 39, Belinda Tanoto is keeping busy. The youngest daughter of Indonesian palm oil tycoon Sukanto Tanoto is a managing director at RGE Group, alongside her siblings Imelda and Anderson; she also sits on the board of trustees at the Tanoto Foundation, a philanthropic organisation founded by her parents in 1981. All this, on top of juggling motherhood.
Most recently, Tanoto has dipped her toes into the world of art. The Tanoto Art Foundation (TAF), of which she is a trustee, was launched at an event in the School of the Arts this January.
“TAF aims to build an organisation with a soul,” Tanoto tells Options. The idea, she elaborates, is to take “a nurturing approach to developing discourse around contemporary art by ensuring space and time for unexplored connections to unfold between the geographies of Southeast Asia, wider Asia and South America”.
Building on this, the launch event — a symposium aptly titled Soul Song of an Organisation — brought together artists and experts from around the world.
Melati Suryodarmo from Indonesia and New York-based Chang Yuchen gave performances, while speakers included Colombian-American artist Gala Poras-Kim and Manila-based Joselina Cruz from the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design. Presentations and panel discussions covered topics around diasporic art and growing art engagement, among others.
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Developing a passion
Tanoto’s love for the arts is one she shares with her mother, Tinah Bingei Tanoto.
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Originally from a small town in rural Sumatra, Indonesia, Tinah Bingei had “no access to museums or visual art as we know it”, says Tanoto; the first items she collected were ulos, traditional woven fabrics by North Sumatra’s Batak people. This sparked a lifelong passion that would lead to her setting up the Tanoto Foundation Centre of Southeast Asian Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Art in 2007.
Tanoto says her own journey in art started “much later” when she moved from Singapore to China. “I took advantage of the vibrant, developing art scene in China and visited as many museums, galleries and artist studios as I could,” she recalls of her time there.
One core memory came in a visit to Foshan, Guangdong, where Tanoto saw a solo exhibition by American artist Roni Horn titled A dream dreamt, in a dreaming world is not really a dream… but a dream not dreamt is. “I saw these large glass sculptures, glowing in daylight,” says Tanoto, describing the experience as “transcendental”.
Now also an avid art collector, Tanoto gravitates towards female artists, a tendency she says came about after becoming a mother herself. “Motherhood was a life-changing experience that made me realise how hard women had to work to balance family and work, in addition to overcoming the stereotypes and biases women still face today.”
Among her favourite artists of the moment is Hu Xiaoyuan, whose work she saw at a 2023 mid-career survey in Shanghai. Hu, whose work frequently includes raw silk, has used the material to wrap everything from wood to fruit and bread.
In pieces with perishable material, deformation and decay over time leave a silk cast of what once was. “Xiaoyuan was experimenting with capturing time and space and the concept of temporality,” says Tanoto. “The works were very poignant and represented how all of us felt at that time, during Covid.”
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A ‘global majority’
One major goal of TAF is to reshape the perception of the so-called Global South. Although the term may seem deceptively geographic, it has typically been used to categorise countries, particularly in Africa, South America and Asia, as less developed and lacking compared to those in the corresponding Global North.
At the launch event, art historian Joan Kee discussed the links between Black and Asian artists around the world. By considering these artists as part of a “global majority” rather than as part of the Global South, Kee pointed out “alternative ways of understanding the world and inviting new forms of cultural engagement”, beyond the usual lenses of geography and postcolonialism.
Tanoto is looking to do just that with TAF. “Our mission is to nurture dialogues around the experience of contemporary art in Southeast Asia and to build new, unexplored connections, bridging culture and communities across Asia, the Pacific, South America and beyond.”
She adds that the foundation’s programmes “go beyond preserving the cultural heritage of a region or a country, but to facilitate and catalyse unexplored connections” between these regions. “Think exchanges, permeability, multiplicity, rather than separation and purity of things.”
What’s to come
Speaking about the decision to establish the not-for-profit foundation here in Singapore, Tanoto points out that the city-state is “rising as an emerging art hub in an increasingly multipolar world”.
While numerous art institutions have been established in East Asia — such as the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai and the Art Sonje Centre in Seoul — she notes that there is room to “do something meaningful in Singapore, to craft a mid-scale private institution that is nimble, agile and focused on presenting the art of our time with immediacy”.
Interestingly, unlike most other art institutions, TAF does not have a physical space. “We’ve intentionally decided to shape the foundation of TAF first, with people, ideas and networks,” says Tanoto. She adds that there are plans for a year-long programme of activities, such as in-person events and quarterly talks, to address “different facets of the art ecosystem”.
TAF artistic director Weng Xiaoyu, who previously worked at Solomon R Guggenheim in New York, says materiality will be a key theme for the foundation this year and in 2026. “Materiality is not simply about the physical substance, textures and techniques [used] in the making of art, but more about how the use and process of involving materials connects to different cosmologies and ways of world-making,” she adds.
“Revolving around this theme, we are planning a recurring conversation series that will bring both Asian and Southeast Asian artists to a larger international platform and [introduce] different and diverse practices to Southeast Asian communities. We are also planning an exhibition to open in early 2026.”
For Tanoto, all this ultimately feeds into TAF’s mission to “deepen appreciation and engagement with art” and to create a common platform for artists, audiences and diverse voices to converge. “We aspire to create a space for everyone to reflect and to learn and relearn about the world.”
