Nothing can make the weight of data more valuable than a global crisis. We have all been led to witness this during the past couple of years as we relied heavily on information and statistics to modify routines and decisions in an almost life-altering fashion. There were moments when one lump of data meant everything, and it was easy to see how it turned into a kind of universal language, quickly placing itself at the center of signs and symbols—into an almost sacred iconography depicting fluctuations and trends, revealing the critical casts of positives and negatives.

The language used in displaying data and statistics, as with other universal languages, quickly assumes a visual manifestation to convey its significance. In the world of numbers and rates, we have grown accustomed to their image-transformations that now have become staple, contemporary icons such as bars, graphs, and charts.

In MM Yu’s latest exhibition, she redirects our attention into these concepts while merging them with some of the essential traits found in painting. As an artist who has mastered the indissoluble combination of process and form throughout the years, her ‘drip’ paintings have established themselves as one of the more recognizable in contemporary Philippine art. In Measures, she explores yet another turn in incorporating some of the basic, albeit irreducible elements in painting: color, form, dimension, and most significantly—gravity. Following the visual motif of bars and graphs, Yu unveils a concept show, through striking display and arrangement, examining the rigidity of data against the pleasures of chance. In incredible fashion, Measures presents a wholeness where each work corresponds to the symbolic, and now more contestable ideas of information and art.

This coupling—the objectivity of data and the arbitrariness of chance, through process and through sets of arranged structures, touches on the kind of faith that we place on information and truth—and to anything that may come in between and could dangerously fall into categories of ‘untruth,’ fakery, or speculation. In this case, measure becomes judgment. One that has taken the form of visual phenomena; one that has taken the form of art and painting—to which we can measure the desire for obtaining hard facts, against the quest for faith and one’s openness to chance.