Jan Balquin works across different traditional media ranging from paintings to collages often exploring the conventional notions of material and subject matter. Dealing with concepts of value, materiality, and banality, Balquin’s paintings expand to sculptural forms from traditionally two-dimensional materials. Recently, she’s been exploring ways of representing the blank canvas often focusing on its qualities of being an object. 

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Balquin (b.1989) works and lives in Quezon City. She studied Fine Arts and majored in Studio Art at the University of the Philippines Diliman and received a grant for her thesis. She has been joining exhibitions since middle school at the Philippine High School for the Arts in 2007. Balquin has been actively exhibiting since 2010 with having had 9 solo exhibitions within and outside the Metro including Art Informal, Drawing Room, West Gallery, Finale, to name a few.

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Lesley-Anne Cao is a visual artist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Her practice is a series of divergent processes that explore the interplay of materiality, exhibition making, and fiction. Her work makes use of recognizable materials — books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money — towards the actualization and presentation of fictional objects and environments.

Cao holds a BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts - Diliman. Recent exhibitions include Hard and soft prayers at The Drawing Room Gallery (2021) and Cast But One Shadow at the U.P. Vargas Museum (2021). She has been granted artist residencies in Taiwan and Finland and has also presented work in Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.

Jed Gregorio (b. 1990) is a Filipino artist who lives and works in Manila, Philippines. His broad artistic practice encompasses photography, filmmaking, installation, and performance. Often informed by themes of politics of religiosity, masculinity, and post-Internet art histories, Gregorio’s free-ranging poetics manifest as serial and anthological projects that span multiple platforms, exhibitions, and diffusions, each operating in a hermeneutical cosmology developed through hyperfictional and multimedia strategies — from discrete works in assemblage and sculptural installation, to spatially expansive milieu constructed with images, objects, sound, and light. Gregorio graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Major in Communication, from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2011.

Lou Lim (b. 1989) invests in the connection between the corporeal and the spiritual, between materiality and notions of permanence, between objects and visual imagery, and in what these relations articulate. Her works examine and appropriate the processes of different art forms to further investigate sculpture, creating new contexts for the familiar by exploring ideas and potentialities of surface and touch.

Lim earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and has been actively exhibiting work since 2011. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations “For the Land that Laments” at Silverlens Galleries and “Rest” at CCP in 2022. She was resident at Palais de Tokyo in Paris under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC 2015-2016 program. This participation resulted in a collaborative performance at the Opera Garnier and in group exhibitions at ICA Singapore and the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, as well as in a publication with INA [Institut National Audiovisuel]. She was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards 2021.

Veronica Peralejo (b. 1989) majored in painting and graduated with honors from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2010. But she quickly shifted to 3D creations, as seen in her installation pieces for her first solo exhibit in 2015 at Art Informal—Pocket Universe, which was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards. She created sculptures of the microscopic images of parasites, cells, and other miniscule details. Peralejo also uses other materials, such as yarn, plastic tubes, speaker wires, and clotheslines for her works.

Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.

Images occupy new topographies. Compositions are densely populated by slices of color and texture—forms hinting at histories yet decidedly hovering outside time. Their contours similarly evoke nature’s harder relics such as stones and marbles baring their jagged edge. Suarez approaches collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting and responding to a visual phenomenon by restating images as open codes and new texts in the process of becoming.

Suarez has been exhibiting her works since 2014, and has participated in art fairs in Manila (ALT Philippines 2020; Art Fair PH 2016-19), Hong Kong (Art Central HK 2017), and Singapore (AAF SG 2014). She was an artist-in-residence of Larga (Negros Occ, PH) in 2019, and at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017.

Her solo exhibitions with West Gallery (2018) and MO_Space Gallery (2019) were shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.

As society continues to rapidly evolve, his artistic practice follows the phenomena that go with it as well, currently exploring the role and paradoxes of technology, media, and globalization within the struggles of individuality, identity, and independence. The themes found in his work stem from the society in which he lives in, forming questions that address immediate concerns with regard to (religious) beliefs and conventions, (media) consumption and production, and the volatile possibilities in the future that have yet to unfold.

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His works shift between different mediums: from painting to photography, sculpture to video, and digital to installation. His 2021 solo exhibition ‘I Am That I Am’ was shortlisted in the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Art.