ChaCha Town momentarily anchors Louie Cordero and Kawayan de Guia’s ever-transient spaces with a series of collaborations that provides a glimpse of the two artists completing each other’s sentences. As distinct as their respective identities as artists are, what their practices have in common is a wicked sense of humor, a shared world of esoteric music, and an encyclopedic approach to reference and use of imagery. These kindred sensibilities laid the groundwork of trust for their collaboration, which neither of them has done before with each other.

It’s an exchange of visual languages and notions that have been shaped by their respective practices over the decades. After all, the precarious matter of communication is often taken for granted; it’s a dance in itself—often improvised, rarely set in stone. The works are initiated without a predetermined outcome, and the elements of risk and uncertainty lend a certain volatility to the process of creation. In negotiating ambiguities and permitting their own processes to collide, the door is opened for the works to yield their own pleasantly unexpected surprises—much like how the idiosyncratic moniker ‘ChaCha Town,’ nabbed from an amusement park sign seen only in passing from a train window in Japan, came to be a code word emblematic of how their paths have haphazardly intersected.

This exhibition is also a dialogue between their cities: the coastal port of Cordero’s Malabon and the tiered slopes of de Guia’s Baguio. The respective identities of both milieus are tangible in their works. The artists reflect on the theme-park realities that now pervade their cities, each through their own repertoire of local folklore and urban legends, regional jokes, and the demotic and commercial visual language of their environments. Cordero’s long-standing pop ruminations on the jarring contradictions that defiantly co-exist in urban living find that they share a certain spirit in de Guia’s at-once nostalgic and irreverent funhouse reflections on the colonial and indigenous inheritance of the Cordilleras. Their cities provide their own localized array of images and iconography that, however disparate, are integrated into an organic whole. By embracing its own paradoxes, the result of their collaboration becomes more than the sum of its parts.

After all, the driving impulse behind cartography is to connect by discovering paths that surmount geographic obstacles, which in turn, paves the way for new territory of an interpersonal nature. ChaCha Town is a statement of intent by Kawayan and Louie of the value of bridging cities, regions, and circles which do not always have sites of interface with one another, all done in the spirit of an absurd dance.

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