ChaCha Town
Louie Cordero x Kawayan de Guia
24 February – 25 March 2018
Curated by
24 February – 25 March 2018
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.
About the Artist
About the Artists
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.
Kawayan de Guia (b. 1979), son of the well-known local filmmaker and National Artist for Cinema Kidlat Tahimik (Eric de Guia) and German stained-glass artist Katrin de Guia, is a painter, installation and performance artist based in Baguio City, Philippines. He finished his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines (UP). In 2011, de Guia initiated AX(iS) Art Projects—a biennial gathering of artists from different fields working on the idea of transience, site-specific and community-based works. He is a recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards (2008), the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2009), and the First New York Arts Project Residency Grant (2008). He has had solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, China, and Germany, in spaces such as the Vargas Musuem at UP, the Soka Art Center in Beijing, ARNDT Singapore, Rossi & Rossi Ltd. in London, The Luggage Store in San Francisco, California, The Drawing Room, Singapore Art Museum, the Lopez Memorial Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Artinformal, and MCAD Manila. He was also one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale in 2013. De Guia has participated at the Art Fair Philippines and the recent Manila Biennale.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
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.
Kawayan de Guia (b. 1979), son of the well-known local filmmaker and National Artist for Cinema Kidlat Tahimik (Eric de Guia) and German stained-glass artist Katrin de Guia, is a painter, installation and performance artist based in Baguio City, Philippines. He finished his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines (UP). In 2011, de Guia initiated AX(iS) Art Projects—a biennial gathering of artists from different fields working on the idea of transience, site-specific and community-based works. He is a recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards (2008), the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2009), and the First New York Arts Project Residency Grant (2008). He has had solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, China, and Germany, in spaces such as the Vargas Musuem at UP, the Soka Art Center in Beijing, ARNDT Singapore, Rossi & Rossi Ltd. in London, The Luggage Store in San Francisco, California, The Drawing Room, Singapore Art Museum, the Lopez Memorial Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Artinformal, and MCAD Manila. He was also one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale in 2013. De Guia has participated at the Art Fair Philippines and the recent Manila Biennale.
Related Exhibitions
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