In the grand scheme of things, we experience paradox with our senses—the taste of unsavory elicits flavor; the image of unsightly highlights beauty; and fiction becomes lenses to our reality. Pam Yan Santos unceasingly captures the banal, the personal, and the domestic with the quintessential wit in her works. Drawing from her insights as a mother / wife / daughter, she subsumes us with her art, making us part of her world, her family, their history – our story.

In this exhibition, Yan Santos uses ampalaya (bitter melon) as a starting point in exploring themes of societal biases and impressions. She scrapes out irony from her fascination towards the fruit’s furrowed and warty skin and its bitter taste, along with its potency as a cure and as a healing agent. With her mixed media works and objects, the subject’s tactility and physicality are peeled out, exposing layers of ideas that blend in within the viewer’s imagination.

The show revisits one of Yan Santos 2015 work “Seed,” a painted cross-section of a bitter melon with an inscription “if long hand points at twelve time to eat.” Recalling an incident where her son, Juno, associated his mother’s insistence to eat the healthy fruit-vegetable to the clock’s hands striking twelve-noon – a task that needed to be done. It portrays a child observing how the world around him works; paying attention to minute details and deems them notable; and being able to experience life through the lens of innocence. In a panoramic array of images rendered in mixed media, the “Seed” seems to have germinated, presented in a variety of ways of seeing the cross-sectioned fruit-vegetable. “It’s not a vegetable. It’s a paradox.” displays Yan Santos combined technical acuity of her medium with her incisive sense of humor. From a distance, the work resembles MRI images or scans used to examine changes in the brain or an object’s activities, and even seen close it retains its abstraction without the aid of a hint. The repeated re-imagining of the subject in colorful but muted palettes allows the viewer to disassociate it from its tactile characteristics—from its known quality of bitterness. 

In her series, “Good Pain,” Yan Santos uses epoxy, acrylic paint, to create ampalaya objects in variable sizes. Pierced with acupuncture needles, the multiple reiteration and combination of the subject is a sight of pain and comfort of equal measure. Their unusual pairing provides an unmitigated balance as the ampalaya’s rough and irregular surface is countered by the needles’ linear qualities. Their combined form evokes recognition of their healing tendencies despite our predisposed notion of unpleasant taste and of piercing pain. The artist’s insightful use of these contrasts engages us to reevaluate societal stereotypes and caricatures of certain things. It signals a possibility to delightful perspectives and offers a succinct recipe on how to do it.

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All work photos courtesy of Kerwin Kaiser Yu.