Ringo Bunoan (b. 1974) is an artist, writer, researcher, and curator whose work explores material and conceptual histories and issues of visibility and representation. Through common and found objects, installations, site-specific projects, photographs, and videos, she examines and reflects on the transient conditions of contemporary art and everyday life.

Bunoan received her BFA in Art History from the University of the Philippines in 1997 and has exhibited widely in Manila, Asia and the United States. Her works have been featured in several international exhibitions and biennales, including the recent Time of Others at the Singapore Art Museum and Queensland Art Gallery and Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia at the Mori Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Thirteen Artist award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2003. 

She taught at the UP College in Arts and worked as the Researcher for the Philippines for Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. She is the co-founder of Big Sky Mind (1999–2005), King Kong Art Projects Unlimited (2010–present), and artbooks.ph (2014–present). She was the lead curator of Chabet: 50 Years, a series of exhibitions in Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the inaugural Manila Biennale: Open City in 2018. 

Roberto Chabet (1937–2013) was a pioneering Filipino conceptual artist, curator, and teacher. Known for his experimental works, ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations made out of mostly ordinary and found material, Chabet insists on a more inclusive approach to art. In his works, abstraction and the everyday collide, creating spaces for new meanings.

Chabet was the founding Museum Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) where he initiated the Thirteen Artists Awards in 1970 to support young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past.” After his brief tenure at the CCP, he led the alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts and at key artist-run spaces in Manila. Since the 70s until his death in 2013, he supported and curated exhibitions of young Filipino artists.

Chabet is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967–1968), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP Centennial Award of Honours for the Arts (1998). He was posthumously awarded the Gawad CCP Para Sa Sining in 2015.

Rocelie Delfin’s raw, poetic images often recall the remote areas of Lanao del Norte where she grew up: lush forests, flowing rivers and unnamed islands. Details of rocks, birds and plants are patiently and meticulously rendered with hundreds of minuscule lines and strokes, a process that she developed intuitively. She puts pen and ink to paper, drawing purely from memory and imagination. Some of these plants and trees are fictional constructs, as if they are from fairy tales or strange lands. These drawings carry the distinct tension of simple happiness, freedom and spontaneity layered with obsessive and laborious execution.

Beejay Esber (b. 1980, Malabon) graduated Fine Arts major in Advertising at the Technological University of the Philippines (2005), and is known for his canvases that have been described as “eclectic and phantasmagoric abstraction,” making use of myriad colors the visual spectrum, from somber shades to neon bright hues.

In another dimension to his abstract pieces by incorporating found materials—cardboards, stickers, holograms, and glittery paper—the solemnity (and purity) of the abstract form is undermined by Esber’s inclusion of common school and hobby materials inside the frame. Their combination with his similarly cartoonish and candy-coated acrylic paintings provides a light moment against the di cult nature of abstraction and is a fresh outlook on the possibilities of painting and its relationship with the surface material.

Along with his appetite for album covers, psychedelia, science fiction (robots, UFO’s, and analog synthesizer sounds), comics, and wasteland / post-apocalyptic movies, Esber’s paintings would resemble cerebral fragments of contemporary society in abstract expressionist form.

Robert Langenegger (b. 1983, St. Gallen, Switzerland) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. His art has deliberately gone against moral conformity and academic technique, using images as carnivalesque allegory.

Taking up Fine Arts at UP Diliman and Kalayaan College, Langenegger first exhibited his paintings at the artist-run space Big Sky Mind in 2003. By 2008, he was cited as one of the finalists for the Sovereign Art Prize. During that same year his one-man show Irish Bull of the Mother and Child, held at Finale Art File in 2007, was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards. Soon after, his show at MO_Space, ONLY DOG CAN JUDGE ME, was also shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2018. His works have been shown in various art galleries in Manila, Malaysia, Australia, Austria, Germany and New York. Through the years, he had various solo exhibitions in both local and international galleries such as Finale Art File in the Philippines and Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill in Graz, Austria. He participated in group exhibitions as well that showed at Artesan Gallery (Singapore) and Goliath Visual Space in Brooklyn (New York), to name some.

It is with timelessness that Elaine Roberto-Navas (b. 1964) works her brush and palette over canvas. With subjects ranging from flowers to furniture, from the sky to water, she paints with oil in thick strokes; the object appears swathed in movement. Still life or landscape as they may be considered, they move with each glance, and if you stare, the motion starts to permeate outside the four corners of her paintings. What Roberto-Navas captures in her work is not merely an object in nature, but its spirit in movement, and together with her technique, artistry, and will, her paintings exist in a timelessness that might outlive us all, yet carry our humanity onwards.

Elaine Roberto-Navas graduated with BA in Psychology from Ateneo de Manila University (1985), and a Fine Arts degree, Major in Painting from the University of the Philippines (1991). Roberto-Navas has received various awards including the Jurors’ Choice Awards from the Art Association of the Philippines (1994, 1995), the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards (1995), and the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards (2002). She has shown at the Ayala Museum, Silverlens Gallery, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Art Informal, West Gallery, UP Vargas Museum, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Valentine Willie Fine Art in Singapore to name a few.

Lubin Nepomuceno (b. 1971) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of the Philippines (UP). He has participated in both solo and group exhibitions at the Vargas Musuem at UP, TAKSU Singapore, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Artinformal, among others.

Juni Salvador (b. 1962) is a Filipino artist based in Sydney, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising from the Philippine Women’s University College of Fine Arts. He taught at Maria Montessori Children’s School and at International School-Manila. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including the Institute of Contemporary Art, La Salle Singapore, Manila Contemporary, SLOT space in Sydney, Mag:net Gallery, the Yuchengco Museum, Finale Art File, and West Gallery.

Soler Santos (b. 1960) attended the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts from 1978-82. He is a painter and photographer. Santos founded West Gallery with his wife and fellow artist, Mona Santos, in 1989.

Santos has represented the Philippines in international events such as the 1st ASEAN Youth Painting and Workshop in Thailand (1983), the 2nd Asian Art Show in Japan (1985), and the 11th International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2004). He is the recipient of the First Prize from the ASEAN Painting Competition (1983) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (1992).

Santos has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at spaces including the Luz Gallery, Blanc Gallery, Silverlens Galleries, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Artinformal, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the ICA La Salle College of the Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Gerardo Tan (b. 1960) works across various media from painting, collage, artist books to video, found objects, and installation to deal with conceptual plays and issues of representation. He recreates images culled from the world of art and mass media in order to subvert hierarchies and give way to new itinerant meanings.

Tan took his BFA at the University of the Philippines and his MFA at the State University of New York in Buffalo, USA. He has participated in several international exhibitions including Pause (4th Gwangju Biennial, 2002), Signs of Life (First Melbourne Biennial, 1999), The 3rd Asian Art Biennial Bangladesh (Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka, 1986), and The 2nd Asian Art Show (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1982). His recent solo exhibitions are Points of Departure (Noestudio, 2013 Madrid, Spain), Hablon Redux and Other Transcriptions (Random Parts, Oakland, USA, 2016) and Visualizing Sound (Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2019).

He was conferred the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1988. His other distinctions include the Fulbright-Hays Grant at SUNY Buffalo (1990-92), the Barbara Schuller’s Art Associates Award in Buffalo, NY (1992) and the Juror’s Choice at the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Competition in 1997.

Oscar Villamiel (b. 1953) studied Fine Arts at the University of the East (UE). He is a multi-media artist who produces large scale installation works through the collation and collecting of found materials from urban and rural environments. Villamiel has worked as a set designer and entrepreneur the past two decades and went back to his first vocation as a studio artist in 2006, starting with group exhibitions.

Villamiel held his first one-man exhibition, a large-scale installation titled Wounded Spirit, in 2009 at the Art Center of SM Megamall in Mandaluyong, featuring large-scale multimedia paintings. His second solo show, Mourning Glory, was held at the Crucible Gallery in 2010, while his third solo show, titled Stories of our Time, was organized at Light and Space Contemporary in 2012.

Villamiel’s large-scale installation, titled “Payatas,” was exhibited as part of the Singapore Biennale exhibition, If the World Changed (2013) at the Singapore Art Museum. He continued to produce installation works for his solo exhibitions in 2014 at the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum and Light & Space Contemporary, in Quezon City. Villamiel currently lives and works in Marikina City.