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The Diasporic Filipino Artist - Highlights from Filipino Artists in the Dubai Collection

Author
Anna Bernice delos Reyes
Published
16 October 2023

What does it mean to be an artist in, or of, the Filipino diaspora? To live in the Filipino diaspora is to often be in search of rootedness. It is a constant questioning of your identity and how yours traces back to the motherland (or if it should). It is being in constant nostalgia, a perpetual desire to grasp on to something, anything, that will keep you tethered to where you came from.

I find that in this yearning for ‘home’, feeling seen by another can be the most important validation. Often, we turn to art and artists to mirror these feelings for us, to remind us that we’re not alone in our longing. When I met Augustine Paredes and his work in July 2020 — this is exactly how I felt. To know another Filipino trying to make a living in the art world while interrogating the challenges of being a migrant, an ‘other’ — made my own struggles feel seen.

And yet Augustine was the first Filipino artist I met making work in the Gulf in my then four years of living in the region. We continued to ask each other — where are all the Filipinos in the contemporary art spaces here? I asked him, how are you the only one visible and exhibiting? If Dubai is 20% Filipino, shouldn’t art spaces be reflective and representative of its population? If then, why isn’t the art space 20% Filipino?

Born out of these curbside conversations, in between his commercial shoots and my then-management consulting job,
Sa Tahanan Collective
became the lovechild of our desire to create an inclusive artistic platform for Filipino artists in the Gulf—an attempt to create the visibility we felt was lacking.

This collective, amongst the community-building work we have been doing, has since been a medium to gather and archive the works of other diasporic Filipino artists. We began tracing the history of Filipino artists in the Gulf — honoring the work of the collective Brown Monkeys that came before us; the 2016 exhibition Marker: The Philippines in Art Dubai; Stephanie Comilang and Pacita Abad’s solo exhibitions in 421 and Jameel Arts Centre, respectively, in 2021; and finally, the inclusion of Filipino artists like James Clar, Nicole Coson, and Kristoffer Ardena in the recently formed Dubai Collection.

The role of the artist in the diaspora is important in reflecting the nuances of being Filipino, as the overseas Filipino experience is not a monolith and one’s identity is composed of a plurality of influences. Even in looking at the practices of the three Filipino artists in the Dubai Collection alone, we understand that they anchor their practices to their ‘Filipino-ness’ in disparate ways, despite all being artists ‘abroad’.

 

James Clar’s latest career undertakings exemplifies the balikbayan — a Filipino who has been away and has now returned ‘home’. An American-born-and-raised Filipino whose practice has taken him to New York, Tokyo and Dubai, Clar has recently decided to relocate his studio to Manila, the Philippines’ capital, in pursuit of understanding his roots and Filipino identity. As a media artist, Clar’s artistic work focuses on the sculptural potential of light and technology as a mediator of the human experience, and his recent experimentations and collaborative explorations while living in Manila has created a tangent in his already rich, multidimensional practice. Clar has since collaborated with local parol (Christmas lantern) fabricators to create a colossal parol installation that he engineered as a large-scale information processing system. He has also created sculptural installations with the first Filipino olympic gold medalist and weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz, using her brainwave data in various states of being and wide sheets of aluminum bent by the weight of her dropped barbells. Through his balikbayan journey, Clar exemplifies the journey many of us go through upon returning ‘home’ — the complex process of getting to know a place, a people that we supposedly ought to know, but don’t.

 Leaving the Philippines in pursuit of an art education abroad, Manila-born, London-based Nicole Coson’s larger-than-life monotype prints nest in-between. Sometimes between the Philippines and elsewhere, the organic and mechanical, the anonymous and personal. At times, they are also a meditation of her longing for the Philippines and her loved ones, like her piece Fortress, which was created during the COVID-19 lockdown. More interesting though is the gesturing to the presence of brute military force and American soldiers in the Philippines in her work Camouflage. As her exhibition text explains, “It was in the country when American soldiers, wanting to quell the growing Philippine revolt, opted for khaki—in lieu of blue—uniforms. They would eventually strategize this color to become the skin of disguise and evasion, as ubiquitous as tanks and bombs during wartime.” In referencing this, Coson’s work reclaims the aesthetics of our colonized history, expanded on large canvases that invite further reflection.

 Kristoffer Ardena’s recent practice, which exists between Madrid, Spain and Bacolod, Philippines, is anchored in the adaptive re-use practices in the Philippines, the familiar aesthetics in a Filipino household, and references the distinct effect of the tropical atmosphere on materiality in the Philippines. Ardena’s Ghost Paintings is a series of large-scale abstract paintings wherein the artist paints many layers of elastomeric paint over tarpaulin ads commonly seen in the streets and on public transportation in the Philippines. He paints the familiar visual patterns of a retaso basahan, a household rug (basahan) made of weaved scrap fabric (retaso). He then purposely cracks sections of these large-scale paintings, revealing the textures and visuals of the material lying underneath. Ardena likens these cracks to the paint cracks on the walls of houses in the tropics, where humidity transforms once smooth paint surfaces to become textured, ‘cracked’. One look at these paintings with a Filipino eye and a collective memory is triggered; a typical Filipino home is not complete without at least one retaso basahan on the floor.

 So what does it mean to be a Filipino artist in the diaspora? There really is no one answer. Whether through the act of returning home, the processing of melancholic nostalgia, the revisiting of colonial history, or the exploration of aesthetics and materiality, Filipino artists in the diaspora allow their ‘Filipinoness’ to influence their works in different ways. As diverse the Filipino diasporic experience is, so are its manifestations in the lives and works of Filipino artists.

Though to live in the diaspora means to be in constant search of rootedness, it also is the gradual acceptance that our roots will form elsewhere and other places and experiences will form the kaleidoscope of our life. While highlighting how Filipino artists like Clar, Coson, and Ardena root their works to their Filipino-ness, is important in understanding the plurality of the Filipino experience, it is also fair to conclude that these are artists who happen to be Filipino, not Filipinos who happen to be artists. To be a Filipino artist in the diaspora also means to accept and celebrate the multiplicity of identities we hold, and not limit ourselves to only expressing our national identities in our body of work.

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