Fluidity and Encounters: Current Versions of the Philippine Contemporary

March 7 – March 30

Unit 3C, Yally Industrial Building, 6 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan/ Yason Banal/ Vermont Coronel Jr./ Gaston Damag/ Kiko Escora/ Dex Fernandez/ Robert Gutierrez/ Riel Hilario/ Manuel Ocampo/ Diokno Pasilan/ John Frank Sabado

Special Viewing: 5-10PM Sun 15 Mar

This exhibition is in collaboration with Rossi & Rossi.

/////
The artists in this exhibition portray this breadth of discourse on what practice is in regards to how they interpret the postcolonial conditions that they inherit, likewise what it means to live in the glut and velocity of the time-space compression of the current world. Artistic traditions, for instance, are recalled into the field of contemporary art through direct lineages of Gaston Damag, Riel Hilario and John Frank Sabado. The indigene’s material culture, and how this circulates in contemporary representation, is in the works of Damag who uses the Ifugao sites as a backdrop for inquires on the physical surface of photographs; while Sabado indexes the myriad values of his people in the Mountain Regions through biro-point portraits akin to the fashion of their local weaving. The ceremonial echo of craft reverberates through the existential-ridden carvings of Hilario who have been schooled in the tradition of religious sculpture-making.

In terms of the postmodern cultural fabric of the Philippines, the vestiges of cosmopolitan beginnings are portrayed by street-affiliated artist Vermont Coronel Jr. through his stencil-based images of a fallen city. More dystopian are Robert Gutierrez’s sci-fi-cum-ethnographic landscapes alluding to a return to mythology and spirituality in contemporary society. Dex Fernandez, on the other hand, further implodes identity politics of the youth through the urban branding language of graffiti and collage.

A certain kind of peripheral ethnography is accentuated in Kiko Escora and Diokno Pasilan’s portraits. As Escora would render the aura of a subject from the archetypal urban underground, Pasilan on the other hand refers to the sea as a reminder of senescence in the collection of ID portraits of a struggling island community.

The artists from the selection span a transnational practice, posing inquiries beyond essentialised tropes. Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan subjects such contexts of practice through their series of belonging and re-rooting, all the while communicating materials and voices from wherever they are producing work.

In terms of criticality, Yason Banal and Manuel Ocampo prod into the aura of colonialism – its structures of power and how the Philippines grapple with these in the microcosms of the global art market and cultural production.