Curated by Art Agenda, Everything Light Touches: Panorama Paintings from Private Collections is a rare showcase of a dozen panoramic pictures on loan from private art collections in Singapore. Spread across three historical spaces on the second floor of The Arts House, Singapore’s oldest colonial building, these pictures present a capsule history of modern Asian art. The exhibition reveals how the wide view panorama format offers an expansive breadth of possibilities to artists.

Artists have typically reserved the panoramic format for the most iconic subject matters, using it to capture historical events, places and scenes, as well as convey powerful sentiments. This impulse has accorded panoramic paintings an outsized importance in art history. From Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s Visionary Landscape, which marks modern Asian art’s birth in the artistic fountainhead of early 20th-century Paris, to the wild gesticulations of expressionist painter Affandi in At The Beach, it is clear the panorama rouses heightened emotion—but how exactly does it do so?