Juan Alcazaren (b. 1960) is a sculptor, bricoleur, collagist and object maker who works with a wide variety of materials ranging from construction steel to industrial and household detritus to ubiquitous everyday things like plastic monoblock chairs, school supply materials and melaware plates. Everything is material to him. In the 90’s he learned steel welding from Napoleon Abueva, CCP National Artist for Sculpture and has since always come back to this medium attracted by the way steel only “knows” how it wants to be formed. He always maintains a patina of rust on his steel pieces to show earthly life’s steady march towards death.

He tries to coax profundity out the ephemeral and overlooked in the world of the permanent and covetable. Alcazaren’s faith informed sensibilities make him see humble material as a metaphor for our own material nature, being creatures created by the Uncreated one. Juan Alcazaren has a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture and studied sculpture the University of the Philippines where he also was a lecturer in 1995 at the College of Fine Arts. He was conferred the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 2000. He lives and works in Pasig City, Philippines and continues to actively exhibit in major galleries and art fairs in his home country and around the region.

Poklong Anading’s (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines) practice utilizes a wide range of media from drawing, painting, video, installation, photography and object-making. Taking a more process-oriented and conceptual approach, his continuing inquiry takes off from issues on self-reflexivity, both of himself and others, and site-specificity in an ongoing discussion about society, time and territory.

He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines (1999). He completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila, Philippines (2003 to 2004), Common Room, Bandung, Indonesia (2008), Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2013), Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2013), Philippine Art Residency Program - Alliance Francaise de Manille in Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle in France (2014) and das weisse haus, Vienna Austria (2018). He had solo exhibitions in Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria (2010, 2012 and 2020), Taro Nasu in Japan and Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2016), 1335MABINI in Manila, Philippines (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019). He has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012), No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore (2013 to 2014), 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015), The Shadow Never Lies, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and in the Architecture Biennale for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Philippine Pavilion: Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), disco nap, ‘We Didn’t Mean To Break It (But It’s Ok, We Can Fix It), Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (2019), Far Away But Strangely Familiar’, Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Normal scheduling will resume shortly, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2019) and Arts in Common Artjog MMXIX, Jogya Nationa Museum, Jogyakarta, Indonesia (2019),

Anading lives and works in Manila.

Felix Bacolor (b. 1967) finished his BFA in Painting at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. His works have been shown at different international galleries through solo and group exhibitions including, the Valentine Willie Fine Art Project Room, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, La Salle College of the Arts, Osage Gallery, Kwun Tong, Finale Art File, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Galleria Duemila, and Artinformal.

Englebert “eng” Chan (b. 1970, Manila) gained a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, Major in Visual Communication. He won 2^nd place in the oil / acrylic category in Shell National Students Art Competition in 1992 and was the finalist of the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards in 1995. Chan had his first solo exhibition in 1995 entitled Color My World in Ayala Museum. He also had solo exhibitions in De La Salle University Art Gallery, Gallery 139, Finale Art Gallery, and Jorge B. Vargas Museum. He also participated in group exhibitions since 1993 in the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Boston Gallery, The Junk Shop, SM Megamall Art Center, The Drawing Room Gallery, and Pintô Art Gallery to name some.

Lena Cobangbang (b. 1976, Philippines) studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman QC. Her work is broad-ranging, moving across video, installation, and found objects to embroidery, cookery, performance and photography. Integral to her art practice is doing collaborations with other artists, such as with Yasmin Sison under the created fictional identity as Alice and Lucinda; and with Mike Crisostomo as The Weather Bureau.

Apart from making art, she writes and works as an independent curator. A part of the seminal artist collective Surrounded By Water, her art practice extends to doing art administration and exhibit organizing, having been a fellow at the 2008 HAO Summit for emerging artists, curator and art managers in Asia in Singapore in 2008, and having undergone an artist/curator research residency exchange between Green Papaya Art Projects and Pekarna-Magdalenske Mreže in Maribor, Slovenia in 2010. She was also part of the touring exhibit, Bastards of Misrepresentation, curated by Manuel Ocampo which has been held in Berlin, Hamburg, Bangkok and New York and the Manila Vice show in Sète, France.

In 2005, she was nominated for the 3rd Ateneo Art Awards. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2006, and was one of the participating artists in the 2008 Singapore Biennale. She did curatorial projects for galleries Pablo, Post Gallery, Galerie Anna, Galerie Roberto, Art Anton, and Secret Fresh in Manila, Philippines. She was part of a residency program hosted by Langgeng Art Foundation in Jogjakarta in 2016.

Painter and sculptor Louie Cordero began an active exhibiting career while pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. After graduating in 2001, he became a core member of the painting collective Surrounded by Water and artist-in-residence with the artist-run initiative Big Sky Mind. His work explored imagery and narratives at the nexus of Philippine Catholicism, politics, mass culture, mining the collective consciousness of the Pinoy everyman with a humorous edge. He won the Grand Prize (Painting), 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2002-3. In 2005, he co-founded Future Prospects alternative art space. He is the creator of Nardong Tae, the underground comics of cult status in the Philippines.

Fascinated with kitschy outsider aesthetics and colonial-era leftovers, acrylic has become Cordero's medium of choice in painting since 2005 as he turned towards the super-flat aesthetics of spray-painted Philippine jeepneys and other waning commercial art forms. He received the Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and earlier. Solo exhibitions overseas include DELUBYO (Giant Robot, Los Angeles, 2008), Actuality/Virtuality (3 Sogoku Warehouse, Fukuoka, 2003), Soft Death (Osage, Hong Kong and Singapore, 2009) and Sacred Bones (Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2010). The recent years display an intensity in the bricolage-method of image construction that takes us through a thrill ride through unbridled imaginations and rerouted libidos, coupled with awkward rendering and visionary courage. His work has been included in World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia, 2008; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2008; Singapore Biennale 2011; the 14th Jakarta Biennale, 2011; and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum, 2012.

Cordero’s puzzling, imploring, and visually striking juxtapositions are often punctuated by blood and gore, as if to imply the history of violence and bloodshed that his nation and people have sustained. Cordero’s artwork makes references to his native Philippines, a nation rich with diversity—the result of multiple changes in political regime and subjugation throughout its history. With a complex mixture of eastern and western influences, the cultural fabric of The Republic of The Philippines is a unique combination of ethnic heritage and traditions, composed of indigenous folklore, Asian customs and Spanish legacy reflective in the names and religion.

Figures from Filipino mythology and its strong oral tradition are referenced through the artist’s gruesome monsters and zombies, while another source of inspiration derived from his nationality involves the Jeepney (U.S. military vehicles abandoned after WWII, and converted by locals to use as public transportation). Each Jeepney, unique and elaborately decorated in vibrant colors, features an ornate mash-up of pop and religious iconography. By combining these elements, varied and obscure (to Westerners), with imagery appropriated from Cordero’s assorted interests including kitsch, Indian advertising, cult American b-movies, and pulp horror, the contrasting influences reflect the complex diversity of the artist’s heritage itself.

Geraldine Javier (b. 1970, Philippines) lives and work in the Philippines. Javier has held many solo and group exhibitions in her home country since 1995, and since 2004, she has been exhibiting her works internationally. She is recognized as one of the most celebrated Southeast Asian artists both in the academic and art fields. Her works revolve around the universal world of spirituality rather than concentrating on a specific religion. Javier’s interests root from the artist’s personal history of having lived her whole life struggling with the catholic culture in the Philippines, and are manifested through the unique region-specificity of Southeast Asia, in which the influx of Western culture has been naturalized. In other words, Javier goes beyond the logic behind religion, to pursue fundamental values that can be collectively embraced.

Javier was one of the artists who received the Thirteen Artists Award of Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2003.

Romeo Lee is an artist and musician known as “the king of punk” and the “ukay-ukay king,” having gained a reputation since his student days in the University of the Philippines in the 1980s. An artist for over three decades, he has shown in both solo and group exhibitions in various spaces locally and internationally, including West Gallery, Manila Contemporary, Mag:net Gallery, NOVA Gallery, Vinyl on Vinyl, Finale Art File, Crucible Gallery, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Fries Museum in Berlin, and the Musee International des Arts Modestes in Sete, France.

Pardo de Leon’s paintings are reminiscent of the style of the old European Masters, and she is known for her distinctive style of painting marked by a ‘sense of line, gesture, and touch.’ Belonging to a generation of painters whose works are mainly based on found photographic imagery, de Leon approaches painting both intuitively and methodically. Working adeptly in both abstraction and figuration, she confronts conventions in painting through the juxtaposition of images, the layering of different forms and motifs, or by zooming in on particular aspects and details of the subject.

Pardo de Leon graduated with a degree in Painting from the UP College of Fine Arts in 1987. She was a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988. She also received a studio residency grant from the Italian-Swedish Cultural Foundation in Venice, Italy in 1999, which was awarded the best show of the year by the state council. De Leon has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and museums including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Blanc Gallery, Manila Contemporary, Valentine Willie Fine Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art – La Salle College of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Baguio City.

At Maculangan (b. 1965) is among the most sought-after photographers in the Philippines. He graduated with a degree in Painting from the Fine Arts Program of the University of Santo Tomas. He began exploring mixed media work and working with found objects. After graduation, he decided to study film. At 20, he moved to Italy and lived there for 15 years before returning to the Philippines. Maculangan is the founder of Lomomanila, a group for amateur and professional photographers who share an interest in lomography (a photography art movement). 

He has mounted several solo and two-man exhibitions featuring his photography in galleries like Finale Art File (2013) and Silverlens (2012) in Makati, Philippines; Valentine Willie in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2011); Novara in Italy (2002). He has also been part of several group exhibitions like The Philippine International Visual Art Fest, Shangri-La Mall (2010); Without a Murmur, Museum of Contemporary Design, Manila (2012); and Adobo Country, Taksu, Singapore (2013). His work was also exhibited at Art Fair Philippines in 2016. 

Maculangan has been involved with the documentation of art shows and art projects by several artists, and has garnered the distinction as one of the most seasoned photographers of paintings and other works of fine art. He has continued to remain active with the documentation of artworks and other cultural events through a photography and print gallery he co-founded, the Pioneer Studios in Mandaluyong.

Kaloy Olavides graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) with a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts. Aside from his visual arts practice, he has been doing production design for films, music videos, and audio visual presentations. He is the guitar and vocals for the bands Pastilan Dong! and Grows, and is also a member of the experimental sound collective, Elemento. Since 2012, Olavides has been teaching at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. He is a recipient of the Philippine Art Awards Juror’s Choice Award of Merit (2013), and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2012). He has had solo exhibitions at several galleries including Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, 856 G Gallery, and Light and Space Contemporary. He has also shown in group exhibitions at Osage Gallery Hong Kong, Osage Gallery Singapore, the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, California, the Central Trak Gallery in Texas, Silverlens Gallery and Post Gallery.

Mawen Ong (b. 1964) is an artist and gallery director in Manila. She is a member of King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an initiative dedicated to archiving and preserving the works of Roberto Chabet. She obtained 2 business degrees at St. Scholastica’s College and eventually studied Painting at the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts. She has been exhibiting since 2005 in both solo and group exhibitions at Future Prospects, Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Blanc Gallery, and Silverlens Manila, among others.

Bernardo Pacquing (b. 1967, Tarlac) currently lives in Parañaque City. He studied Editorial Design from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. In 1999, he won the Grand Prize from the Art Association of the Philippines for an Open Art Competition (Painting Non-Representational), and was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award in 2000. In the same year, he was also given the Freeman Fellowship Grant at Vermont Studio Center in Vermont. Pacquing has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various local and international venues such as Manila Contemporary, La Salle College of the Arts in Singapore, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, TAKSU Singapore, and Silverlens Gallery.

Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Manila) received his Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines where he was a recipient of the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. He was granted residency programs in Japan and Bangkok. Pastrana was awarded residencies in Japan and Bangkok, and received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). He is one of the co-founders of Future Prospects Art Space (2005–2007), and has exhibited his work and curated shows both in his hometown and abroad, at galleries like Silverlens Singapore, Finale Art File, the Singapore Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, and has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong (2013), the New Museum Triennale in New York, USA (2012), the Aichi Triennale in Japan (2010) and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2008). Pastrana has also authored publications such as New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables (USA) and Tomorrow, Today: Contemporary Art from the Singapore Art Museum 2009–2011, both published in 2012.

Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila) lives and works in Dallas and Laguna. She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. The daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, she combines sculptural installations with paintings in her explorations of identity. A Filipino-American with a transnational narrative, Hanna Pettyjohn possesses firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Autobiographical details and “fragments of memory” inform her work, which is tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs-turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety, loneliness, and alienation that afflict the uprooted.

In 2004, Pettyjohn won first prize at the 37th Shell National Students Art Competition. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Award in 2015. In addition to having exhibited in Manila, Miami, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Pettyjohn’s works are also part of prestigious private collections across Southeast Asia.

Yvonne Quisumbing is a multimedia artist based in Cebu. She is known in the fashion field–representing the Philippines at the Concours de Jeunes Creatur de Mode in Paris in 2001 and 2005; and with international awards that include: Japan Airlines Award in Makuhari Asian Fashion Competition, Osaka (1999); and grand prize in the Philippine Fashion and Design Competition for Apparel (2001) and Accessories (2005). She studied design, film and is currently taking her MFA. In her first solo show, Infernal Desire Machines (2005), the breadth of her skills is explored with a dynamic fusion of fashion, sculpture and painting to create wearable and interactive art.

Yvonne Quisumbing’s emergent is found in mobility. Wedged by high society on one side and a constructed “rural” idyll on another—a mapping of her usual movement reveals a defined pattern. The former (the center or Metro Manila) is where she attends to her fashion clientele; the latter is (the margins or her Cebu hometown) is where she designs and creates in her atelier. Inspired and critical of the spectacle that feeds her dominant, for which she is obliged to move back and forth, the artist found the in between itself as a necessary alternative space for recuperation.

In her narrative, the medium of paint and its attending long processes gives back the time lost in transit. This is the value of her art practice—in the pursuit of possibility/ies, with emphasis on uninterrupted temporal movement. Through a constant shuttling between her two work spaces due to demand and capital, Quisumbing has arrived at a realization that weight lies not in the commodity/finished product but in the continuing negotiation of value itself. This self-referentiality propels the artist to go beyond creating mere inspirations, detournements (parodies), et al, on her canvasses. Instead, Quisumbing’s paintings perform as thoughtful documentation and critique of a contemporary condition that reveals the instability of the image as mediator of social relationships, that ultimately comprise the spectacular/society wherein she operates.

Gerardo Tan, also known as Gerry Tan, is a visual artist, curator, and art educator. He finished Bachelor of Fine Arts, Major in Painting, at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman College of Fine Arts (CFA) in 1982 and Masters of Fine Arts, Major in Painting, at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992 as a Fulbright Fellow. He was a professorial lecturer at UP CFA from 1993 to 2000 and the former dean of the University of the East College of Fine Arts from 2002 to 2005. Tan was awarded the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 1988.

As a conceptual artist, Tan explores the nature of art and how forms and materiality can be articulated in ideas and concepts, be it through painting, sculpture, found objects, artists books, or installations. Often referencing and revisiting his earlier work, Tan deals with aesthetic questions related to the reproducibility of images and the spatial and temporal authenticity of a work.

Tan has exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and Lopez Museum, among many more institutions in the Philippines. He has participated in several international exhibitions such as the 2nd Asian Art Show in Fukuoka Museum, 1982, the 1st Melbourne Biennale,1999, the 4th Gwangju Biennale, 2002, and the inaugural exhibition of The National Gallery of Singapore, 2016. He continues to work with contemporary artists making up the Bastards of Misrepresentation that is curated by Manuel Ocampo, which has aggressively and independently been exhibiting since 2010 in Berlin, Germany, Queens New York, and Sete, France.

In 2022, his work was featured at the Philippine Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale entitled Milk of Dreams, curated by Yael Buencamino and Arvin Flores.

MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city. 

These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.

The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.

MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).

Reg Yuson is a sculptor and creative director of Spacespecific. He was a former member of the Committee on Visual Arts, from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (1996–2001), and the Society of Philippine Sculptors (1993–1998). He received the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artist Award in 2003.

Yuson has made commissioned pieces in public spaces, including the University of the Philippines (UP) Sculpture Garden, Greenbelt 3 in Makati City, the Mind Museum and in Bonifacio High Street, Taguig City, Resorts World Genting Club, and the Manila Hotel. He has exhibited in both solo and group shows at galleries and institutions such as the UP Vargas Museum, West Gallery, Pinto Art Gallery, Finale Art File, Mag:net Gallery, ART FORUM Gallery Singapore, Manila Contemporary, Galleria Duemila, and the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, among others.