Revisiting The Landscape
Various Artists
23 November to 31 December
Curated by
Gerardo Tan
23 November to 31 December

What does it mean today to produce art under the criteria of‘landscape’?
Landscape as a genre has been one of the most enduring andstaple forms in art. In Filipino art,
it has never lost its appeal, primarily due to thearchipelago’s inherent beauty—its terrain, land
formations, and other breathtaking scenery that have servedas subjects since colonial times,
either by virtue of the exotic, the nostalgic, or thepastoral.
However, the significant shifts away from these traditionshave also compelled artists to
reimagine and re-evaluate the concepts behind creatinglandscape art. Contemporary art
practices have explored various methods for revisiting theidea of landscape as a genre: To
what extent, to what degree, and under what conditions doesthe concept of landscape as art
begin—and ultimately end? Legend has it that, in the past,the first Filipinos were endowed with
land based on the distance they could cover while walkingfrom sunrise to sundown. Land was
claimed as far as the eye could see. In art, it could besaid, landscape can be depicted as far as
the imagination can go.
In Revisiting The Landscape, 17 Filipino artists havebeen invited by curator Gerardo Tan to
survey this field once again—so to speak—and to do exactlythat: to revisit the genre in their
own unique ways while applying their individual artisticprocesses. From treating landscape as
picture, landscape as text, landscape as history, toconsidering landscape as place or event,
these artists offer diverse approaches to the meanings andcriteria of ‘landscape.’ Drawn from a
series of exploratory exhibitions by Mo_Space, which beganwith Portrait, this latest group show
puts contemporary Filipino art practice to the test onceagain, redefining an old concept.
In arguing for landscape’s possibilities, one can begin withRoberto Chabet’s untitled work
using an inflatable globe that hangs on a clipboard with aset of paintings that are aligned
horizontally while mimicking the color palette of the map’sgeographical representation. It
transforms landscape into pure object—stating its dependenceon artificial representations, like
maps, spherical globes, and color charts. Landscape is inessence how we see the world, and
the only way to see the world is through other manufacturedconstructs.
This philosophical and phenomenological view of landscaperings true with most of the works
shown here, supporting the idea that contemporary art isprone to unearth secluded and
underlying truths and issues about a certain subject. In PoklongAnading’s work, ‘fallen map,’
he turns his attention to urbanity’s state and the contrivedmeanings of progress, especially in
the local setting where infrastructure repairs in the citygoes through a seemingly endless loop,
due to lack of foresight or worse–an abundance of corruptdevelopment schemes. In Pope
Bacay’s painting ‘Summer Isn’t Silent,’ heexplores a different aspect of landscape that involves
the motion of the onlooker, as someone who is travelingwhile experiencing the view. This
depiction of motion turns into abstraction. And this motionand the fast-paced registers are also
symptoms of innovation and modernity. In Jan Balquin’sseries of paintings called ‘Fleeting
Giants,’ the view becomes a matter of scale: what iflandscape is reduced to miniature paintings
to counter its usual association with grandeur? It refers tothe uniqueness of each moment when
we perceive landscape, according to Balquin. And to overcomeits sometimes overwhelming
power.
Mariano Ching’s paintings on the other hand try tocapture some peculiar ecosystems that
sprout in abandoned places. As a kind of dystopian landscape,he paints them in his own
inimitable style and manner to highlight the detritus. Lesley-AnnCao’s steel box adorned with
magnets and other metallic pieces meanwhile zeroes in on thesubstratum of
landscape—gravity and the core’s magnetic properties inparticular. The whole composition of
the work ‘three and a half billion years’ is definedby this unseen yet essential force of nature, a
demonstration of a ‘magnet-painting.’ Another unseen andsubterranean condition of a
landscape is discussed through the work of Cian Dayrit titled‘Body Geopolitics Capital (or Outline
for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress).’Here, he plows through the political landscape of
a place—particularly BGC and its contentious history of landfortification and the many establishments
and corporations it accommodates who also exploited landresources. While in Celine Lee’s
needlework and fabric, ‘Forced Landscape,’ landmanipulation is depicted through the
technology-borne topographic model of data culled fromterrain elevations. It presents a system
that is also mutable through the hands of those who controlradars and other military
surveillance.
Within the same military clandestine operations done onland, Miguel Lorenzo Uy reconstructs
an archival photo of napalm bombs exploding into the fieldsof war-torn Vietnam. He shrouds
the landscape in darkness, turning the scenery into a night,doomsday scenario, with only the
flares of burning gas visible. It turns the landscape intoan ominous atmosphere as a product of
man’s violent history. In Lui Medina’s untitleddigital print, she depicts the opposite of this
tropical nightmare to turn the view into lush and arcadianscenery with layers of photographs of
trees and mountains. Treating the picture as painting, sheplaces her attention on the blending
of hues, on superimposed images, and juxtaposition. Theplaces overlap–Davao Oriental and
Northern Italy, creating a distinct atmosphere and illusion.Veronica Peralejo’s framing of the
land zooms away further to capture place in its relation tothe cosmos and the universe. In her
series of small sculptures, she constructs worlds into ballsas if part of child’s play, with each
sphere bearing a distinct characteristic of earth asimagined beginnings of its existence.
Meanwhile, using found synthetic plywood, Isabel Santos cutsout parts of landscape depicted
in comic books and arranges them in a grid. The focus on‘shape’ puts forward the idea that
landscape might be nothing more but the sum and combinationof various patterns and shapes,
either when represented through art or navigated in reallife.
Derek Tumala’s Kaput (Landscape) alsoemphasizes the use of the grid. In this drawing,
endurance and consistency offer the possibility of a formarriving at its visceral truth. For
Tumala, landscape becomes a study of a technical skill, onethat is rooted in the pragmatic and
the imaginary. In ‘Territories,’ MM Yu’sdual-video piece, she records and documents through
photographs makeshift barricades, markers, and poles in thestreets of Manila to show how
ordinary folk claim their own territories within a givenspace. Through this slideshow, we can get
a sense on how urban landscape is primarily formed throughad hoc constructions out of
necessity. Eric Zamuco also presents dual-works: onein video and a sculptural floor piece. In
‘Relational Field,’ Zamuco’s video, he also showsseveral photographs of a pastoral scene with
a vast field that includes bales of hay. We see him running,walking and interacting with the
bales: pushing, jumping over or lying on top of them. Forhim, it is about a foreign land and the
body desiring to belong in it. In his other work ‘Cerement’,he uses dog chips arranged and tied
together by crimp beads as reference to the Filipino’s‘dogeater’ status when first described as
an exotic figure in a foreign land.
The Weather Bureau, which is made up of artists LenaCobangbang and Mike Crisostomo,
presents a microcosm of utopia as landscape. Theirexplorations in world-building through
composite or synthetic constructions of various objects andmaterials provide a different
approach to scenery and landscape–as deep fakes in the formof photographing plastic
tableaus to incite a dream-like vastness. When it comes to IssayRodriguez’s treatment of
landscape in ‘Crimson Eden,’ she uses sound in theform of FM radio transmissions throughout
the gallery. With old radio units anchored in lava rocks,she stages her own broadcast of Filipino
& scientific names of emergency food plants fromMerill's 1943 War Time Technical manual, as
an instruction to cultivating one’s own sustainable garden.
In navigating the space, it could be said that we go throughanother form of landscape made up
of the different works with different meanings and differentapproaches to their own relations
with the area, place, and even universe they chose to bepart of. In the final analysis,
landscape–as an idea, a construct, a text, a historicalevent or political aspiration–when placed
within the context as one of art’s genres, is still a verypowerful source of both discourse and
meditation against one’s surroundings.
/CLJ
Exhibition Documentation
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Collection of the Artist
- fallen map (no. 208 - 219)
Poklong Anading
acrylic paint on concrete rubble
variable sizes
2024 - Summer Isn’t Silent
Pope Bacay
oil on canvas
6 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 1
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 2
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 3
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 4
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 5
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 6
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 7
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 8
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 9
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 10
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 11
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Fleeting giants 12
Jan Balquin
oil on canvas
4 x 4 ft.
2024 - Stray
Mariano Ching
oil on canvas
30 x 30 ft.
2019 - And All the World Was Mine
Mariano Ching
oil on canvas
30 x 30 ft.
2019 - UNTITLED
Roberto Chabet
globe, clipboard, 9 pieces of 12 x 48 in paintings
size variable
2005 - Three and a half billion years (No. 1)
Lesley-Anne Cao
Stainless steel, galvanized steel, neodymium magnets, metal tester keyrings, metal ball chains, machine embroidery on gazar fabric, inkjet on kozo conservation paper
30 x 20 x 4 in
2024 - Body Geopolitics Capital(Outline for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress)
Cian Dayrit
Collaboration with Cathy Manalo and Mang Pedring
A4 printed documents on clipboard attached to oil on canvas
18 x 24 in
2024 - Forced Landscape
Celine Lee
Thread on Aida Cloth
50 x 80 in
2024 - Untitled (Mati-Alpi)
Lui Medina
Digital C-print
95 x 181 cm
2024
- how the world was imagined 01
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 02
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 03
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 04
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 05
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 06
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 07
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 08
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - how the world was imagined 09
Veronica Peralejo
concrete, epoxy clay, and UV gel
variable sizes
2024 - Crimson Eden
Issay Rodriguez
DIY FM radio transmitters and stations reciting emergency food plant names in Filipino and Latin, old FM radios and red lava rocks; audio spoken by artist masked as male Filipino voice via ElevenLabs
variable sizes
2024 - Our Lands
Isabel Santos
acrylic on assorted plastic wastes
4 x 3 ft.
2024 - Fermented Tableaus 1
The Weather Bureau
Fujichrome print
30 x 24 in
2013-2024 - Fermented Tableaus 2
The Weather Bureau
Fujichrome print
30 x 24 in
2013-2024 - Fermented Tableaus 3
The Weather Bureau
Fujichrome print
30 x 24 in
2013-2024 - Kaput (Landscape)
Derek Tumala
Graphite on Acid-Free Paper
150 x 90 cm
2024 - Fire no. 3 (Napalm)
Miguel Lorenzo Uy
oil on linen
77 x 94 in
2013-2024 - space and two points
MM Yu
two-channel video
Edition of 3
2005-2024 - Cerement
Eric Zamuco
Dog treats, monofilament, crimp beads
101 x 70 in
2011 - Relational Field
Eric Zamuco
Video of documentation stills of a performance
6:36 min. duration (no sound)
2008-2024
Exhibition View
360° View
Video Catalogue
About the Artist
About the Artists

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.

Poklong Anading’s (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines) practice utilizes a wide range of media from drawing, painting, video, installation, photography and object-making. Taking a more process-oriented and conceptual approach, his continuing inquiry takes off from issues on self-reflexivity, both of himself and others, and site-specificity in an ongoing discussion about society, time and territory.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines (1999). He completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila, Philippines (2003 to 2004), Common Room, Bandung, Indonesia (2008), Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2013), Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2013), Philippine Art Residency Program - Alliance Francaise de Manille in Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle in France (2014) and das weisse haus, Vienna Austria (2018). He had solo exhibitions in Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria (2010, 2012 and 2020), Taro Nasu in Japan and Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2016), 1335MABINI in Manila, Philippines (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019). He has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012), No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore (2013 to 2014), 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015), The Shadow Never Lies, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and in the Architecture Biennale for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Philippine Pavilion: Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), disco nap, ‘We Didn’t Mean To Break It (But It’s Ok, We Can Fix It), Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (2019), Far Away But Strangely Familiar’, Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Normal scheduling will resume shortly, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2019) and Arts in Common Artjog MMXIX, Jogya Nationa Museum, Jogyakarta, Indonesia (2019),
Anading lives and works in Manila.

Pope Bacay (b. 1994) articulates understandings of place in his oil and acrylic paintings of architectural structures and landscape views. His fascination for places seems to be firmly rooted in his childhood home in Oriental Mindoro. He fragments representations of this house in Roxas town by painting its various elements, paying keen attention to architectural details, all minutiae that make the firmaments of home. Once fragmented, he gathers them once more into painted replicas cloaked in stillness, against a backdrop that seems nowhere.
Bacay expands his quest for belonging by grounding reality in architectural form and chronicles his search for places by assembling a visual geography in the form of shaped canvases. His 2015 piece “My Third Home” is a striking example. The work takes on the semblance of a map yet is also understood as records of places the artist has seen, passed through or lived in. In this piece as well as his abstract landscapes in oil, one intuits he searches for locations where the self could belong, albeit temporarily. His first solo exhibition (t)here at Tin-aw Art Gallery in 2016 captures this journey in the immobile yet voluble vessel of architectural form.
Pope Bacay was born and raised in Oriental Mindoro, the Philippines. He graduated Cum laude, studio arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman.

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.
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.

Mariano Ching (b. 1971) graduated from the Fine Arts Program of University of the Philippines (UP) and studied at the Kyoto Arts University, Japan as a Research Student, Major in Printmaking. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and institutions worldwide, such as the Singapore Art Museum, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Art Taipei, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Owen James Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, the Voice Gallery, Kyoto, Silverlens Manila and Singapore, as well as Finale Art File, among others.

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.

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.

Celine Lee (b. 1993, Philippines) is a visual artist currently based in Manila, Philippines. Lee’s body of work revolves around fundamental scientific and mathematical concepts and principles in an attempt to understand the present.
Since the beginning of her artistic career, Lee has been producing works with the use of different materials and media; often focusing on process and materiality. Whether in the form of a painting, a sculpture, an embroidery piece, or multimedia work, Lee explores the ability of visual perception and spatial recognition to invoke concepts that extend beyond form.
Celine Lee graduated with honors from The University of Santo Tomas in 2015 with a BFA degree Major in Painting. Lee’s fourth solo exhibition entitled, The Length and Breadth of Depth held at Underground Gallery in 2020, was shortlisted in the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art. She has also recently won an award of merit in the 2020 Philippine Art Awards. She has held four solo exhibitions to date, and is actively participating in group exhibitions within and outside of Metro Manila.

Lui Medina (b. 1981) is born in Manila, Philippines, who continues to interrogate form and figure using landscapes as framework. She finished her BFA in Fine Arts, Major in Painting at the University of the Philippines, and later on took up MFA in Fine Arts – Painting at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK.
From geologic to geographical forms, this interest in shapes and the organic has in turn also shaped the canvases and materials that she uses for her drawings and paintings.
Medina has had numerous exhibitions at Associazione Quasi Quadro, Turin, Italy, Finale Art Finale, Mag:net Art Gallery, and Silverlens gallery. She also has been part of group exhibitions at the Langgeng Art Foundation in Yogyakarta (2017), Mind Set Art Center in Taipei (2016), and Equator Art Projects in Singapore (2015). She was also shortlisted for her shows Lui Medina and Metamorphic Histories at the Ateneo Art Awards - Fernando Zobel Prizes for Visual Art.

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.

Issay Rodriguez’ (b. 1991, Philippines) current art practice revolves around projects that deal with themes on humanism and ecology. Through archival research and community engagements enabled by artist residencies and interdisciplinary collaborations, she works on projects that allow oneself to think about how thoughts, emotions, and values can be explained or expressed through art and technology.
Recent projects and residencies include: Fête De la Science - “MOI COMME MER: Hybrid Open Studio and VR Painting Workshop with Lycée René-Josué Valin and Centre Intermondes, France (2022); AQUARIUM Poetry Workshop with Association of Visual Arts Taiwan (2022); SACRED BEE Open Studio with Gasworks, London Artist Residency Program (2022); DOON AR/VR Project, art n/23 AFP incubator space, (2020); B+ Open Studio and Workshops with Zhuwei Elementary School and Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei (2019); VANISHING IN THE PROCESS: Exploration of Dream States and Symbolism, between LIR Space, Yogyakarta, and 98B Manila; Bellas Artes Projects in Bataan (both 2017-18); and a collaborative project for Viva Arte Viva! 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Her works were shortlisted for Fernando Zobel Visual Arts Prize (2018); awarded Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan for Visual Arts (2017); First Grantee: Portfolio Art Prize | 10 Artists Supporting Artists (2020); and was chosen as the 7th Filipino to participate in PARP 2022 artist residency in La Rochelle, France (2022).
She has recently joined the Department of Studio Arts faculty as Lecturer for Electronic Arts I & II and Civic Welfare & Training Service (CWTS I & II) for the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts.

Isabel Santos (b. 1991) is an artist and illustrator based in Manila, Philippines. She graduated at Ateneo de Manila University and Carls Duisberg Centruim, Germany. Santos had various group and solo exhibitions at Silverlens Gallery, West Gallery, Univers, Secret Fresh Gallery, and also participated in Art Fair Philippines. She also had artist residencies in New York, France, and Germany in 2016.
The Weather Bureau is a social architecture and engineering conglomerate that designs propositionary structures and conditions in the idealized state of utopia. They build from seemingly failed plans of defunct totalitarian states and re-adapts and rehabilitates them in their ideal settings or rather in nowherelands in timeless stasis.
Founded in 2010 by Lena Cobangbang and Mike Crisostomo, who started collaborating as production designers and product stylists for ad virals, print, packaging designs and stage sceneries. Their vision as The Weather Bureau is to picture essences of the ideal as inherently dictated by the constraints of the form, illustrating perhaps an ideology in plasticity.
The Weather Bureau’s initial project “Experiments in Degree Zero” had been exhibited in the previous space of Blanc at Makati and at Manila Contemporary. They had also been part of The Complete and Unabridged Part 2, one of such exhibits organized by King Kong Art Projects to commemorate Roberto
Chabet’s 50 years of his art practice. This was held at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong in 2011.
The Weather Bureau had also been featured in the July / August issue of Pipeline magazine, a HK-based art magazine. In November 2013, they were selected for an art residency under San Art in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

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.
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.

MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila) is a multimedia artist who graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Fine Arts program in 1991 and took up a masters degree of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009.
Zamuco's body of work has been about filtering his own displaced experience. His body of work has been about filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. It has persisted to be about responding to objects, materials and circumstance, in a particular time and place. His themes run the gamut from views about dislocation, identity, post-colonial narratives, spirituality, geopolitics to the need for reclamation of space. His works, which are of a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video and performance, serve not only as social commentary but also as self-critique. The intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial and possibly find knowledge for some kind of human order.
He received awards such as the Ateneo Art Award and he’s one of the recipients in the Thirteen Artists Award at Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Derek Tumala (b. 1986, Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist orchestrating
intricate systems and structures by staging various media and subjects in
the pursuit of ecological world-making. This can be in a form of
knowledge, schematics, object orientation, staged performance or event.
His art practice revolves around the realms of science and nature
meditating on the idea of interconnectedness. By forming ecologies and
systems of thought, Tumala’s practice traces mutuality between human
and its built and natural environments. Tumala’s impulse is to examine and
understand how the world operates and be able to approach visceral
truths as material for his work.
Tumala’s notable artistic projects were presented in Museum of
Contemporary Art and Design - Manila, World Weather Network, Sainsbury
Centre UK, Jogjakarta Biennale, ASEAN Exhibition, South Korea, Art Basel
Hong Kong, Formosa Art Fair Taiwan, Cultural Center of the Philippines,
UP Vargas Museum and Art Fair Philippines. He attended the Manila
Observatory Artist-in-Residency, Delfina Foundation in London, UK,
Apexart Fellowship in New York City, USA, Salzburg Global Seminar in
Austria and 10x10 Korea Research Fellow. He received grants from British
Council’s Connecting through Culture and International Rice Research
Institute’s Art/Science Seed Grant. He received recognitions such as
ArtReview Magazine’s Future Greats 2024, Asia Art Awards Tokyo and
Ateneo Art Awards. He also initiated STEAM/ Projects, a collective of
artists working on the intersection of art and science in Manila.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
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.

Poklong Anading’s (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines) practice utilizes a wide range of media from drawing, painting, video, installation, photography and object-making. Taking a more process-oriented and conceptual approach, his continuing inquiry takes off from issues on self-reflexivity, both of himself and others, and site-specificity in an ongoing discussion about society, time and territory.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines (1999). He completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila, Philippines (2003 to 2004), Common Room, Bandung, Indonesia (2008), Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2013), Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2013), Philippine Art Residency Program - Alliance Francaise de Manille in Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle in France (2014) and das weisse haus, Vienna Austria (2018). He had solo exhibitions in Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria (2010, 2012 and 2020), Taro Nasu in Japan and Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2016), 1335MABINI in Manila, Philippines (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019). He has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012), No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore (2013 to 2014), 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015), The Shadow Never Lies, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and in the Architecture Biennale for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Philippine Pavilion: Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), disco nap, ‘We Didn’t Mean To Break It (But It’s Ok, We Can Fix It), Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (2019), Far Away But Strangely Familiar’, Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Normal scheduling will resume shortly, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2019) and Arts in Common Artjog MMXIX, Jogya Nationa Museum, Jogyakarta, Indonesia (2019),
Anading lives and works in Manila.

Pope Bacay (b. 1994) articulates understandings of place in his oil and acrylic paintings of architectural structures and landscape views. His fascination for places seems to be firmly rooted in his childhood home in Oriental Mindoro. He fragments representations of this house in Roxas town by painting its various elements, paying keen attention to architectural details, all minutiae that make the firmaments of home. Once fragmented, he gathers them once more into painted replicas cloaked in stillness, against a backdrop that seems nowhere.
Bacay expands his quest for belonging by grounding reality in architectural form and chronicles his search for places by assembling a visual geography in the form of shaped canvases. His 2015 piece “My Third Home” is a striking example. The work takes on the semblance of a map yet is also understood as records of places the artist has seen, passed through or lived in. In this piece as well as his abstract landscapes in oil, one intuits he searches for locations where the self could belong, albeit temporarily. His first solo exhibition (t)here at Tin-aw Art Gallery in 2016 captures this journey in the immobile yet voluble vessel of architectural form.
Pope Bacay was born and raised in Oriental Mindoro, the Philippines. He graduated Cum laude, studio arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman.

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.
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.

Mariano Ching (b. 1971) graduated from the Fine Arts Program of University of the Philippines (UP) and studied at the Kyoto Arts University, Japan as a Research Student, Major in Printmaking. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and institutions worldwide, such as the Singapore Art Museum, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Art Taipei, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Owen James Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, the Voice Gallery, Kyoto, Silverlens Manila and Singapore, as well as Finale Art File, among others.

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.

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.

Celine Lee (b. 1993, Philippines) is a visual artist currently based in Manila, Philippines. Lee’s body of work revolves around fundamental scientific and mathematical concepts and principles in an attempt to understand the present.
Since the beginning of her artistic career, Lee has been producing works with the use of different materials and media; often focusing on process and materiality. Whether in the form of a painting, a sculpture, an embroidery piece, or multimedia work, Lee explores the ability of visual perception and spatial recognition to invoke concepts that extend beyond form.
Celine Lee graduated with honors from The University of Santo Tomas in 2015 with a BFA degree Major in Painting. Lee’s fourth solo exhibition entitled, The Length and Breadth of Depth held at Underground Gallery in 2020, was shortlisted in the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art. She has also recently won an award of merit in the 2020 Philippine Art Awards. She has held four solo exhibitions to date, and is actively participating in group exhibitions within and outside of Metro Manila.

Lui Medina (b. 1981) is born in Manila, Philippines, who continues to interrogate form and figure using landscapes as framework. She finished her BFA in Fine Arts, Major in Painting at the University of the Philippines, and later on took up MFA in Fine Arts – Painting at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK.
From geologic to geographical forms, this interest in shapes and the organic has in turn also shaped the canvases and materials that she uses for her drawings and paintings.
Medina has had numerous exhibitions at Associazione Quasi Quadro, Turin, Italy, Finale Art Finale, Mag:net Art Gallery, and Silverlens gallery. She also has been part of group exhibitions at the Langgeng Art Foundation in Yogyakarta (2017), Mind Set Art Center in Taipei (2016), and Equator Art Projects in Singapore (2015). She was also shortlisted for her shows Lui Medina and Metamorphic Histories at the Ateneo Art Awards - Fernando Zobel Prizes for Visual Art.

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.

Issay Rodriguez’ (b. 1991, Philippines) current art practice revolves around projects that deal with themes on humanism and ecology. Through archival research and community engagements enabled by artist residencies and interdisciplinary collaborations, she works on projects that allow oneself to think about how thoughts, emotions, and values can be explained or expressed through art and technology.
Recent projects and residencies include: Fête De la Science - “MOI COMME MER: Hybrid Open Studio and VR Painting Workshop with Lycée René-Josué Valin and Centre Intermondes, France (2022); AQUARIUM Poetry Workshop with Association of Visual Arts Taiwan (2022); SACRED BEE Open Studio with Gasworks, London Artist Residency Program (2022); DOON AR/VR Project, art n/23 AFP incubator space, (2020); B+ Open Studio and Workshops with Zhuwei Elementary School and Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei (2019); VANISHING IN THE PROCESS: Exploration of Dream States and Symbolism, between LIR Space, Yogyakarta, and 98B Manila; Bellas Artes Projects in Bataan (both 2017-18); and a collaborative project for Viva Arte Viva! 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Her works were shortlisted for Fernando Zobel Visual Arts Prize (2018); awarded Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan for Visual Arts (2017); First Grantee: Portfolio Art Prize | 10 Artists Supporting Artists (2020); and was chosen as the 7th Filipino to participate in PARP 2022 artist residency in La Rochelle, France (2022).
She has recently joined the Department of Studio Arts faculty as Lecturer for Electronic Arts I & II and Civic Welfare & Training Service (CWTS I & II) for the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts.

Isabel Santos (b. 1991) is an artist and illustrator based in Manila, Philippines. She graduated at Ateneo de Manila University and Carls Duisberg Centruim, Germany. Santos had various group and solo exhibitions at Silverlens Gallery, West Gallery, Univers, Secret Fresh Gallery, and also participated in Art Fair Philippines. She also had artist residencies in New York, France, and Germany in 2016.

The Weather Bureau is a social architecture and engineering conglomerate that designs propositionary structures and conditions in the idealized state of utopia. They build from seemingly failed plans of defunct totalitarian states and re-adapts and rehabilitates them in their ideal settings or rather in nowherelands in timeless stasis.
Founded in 2010 by Lena Cobangbang and Mike Crisostomo, who started collaborating as production designers and product stylists for ad virals, print, packaging designs and stage sceneries. Their vision as The Weather Bureau is to picture essences of the ideal as inherently dictated by the constraints of the form, illustrating perhaps an ideology in plasticity.
The Weather Bureau’s initial project “Experiments in Degree Zero” had been exhibited in the previous space of Blanc at Makati and at Manila Contemporary. They had also been part of The Complete and Unabridged Part 2, one of such exhibits organized by King Kong Art Projects to commemorate Roberto
Chabet’s 50 years of his art practice. This was held at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong in 2011.
The Weather Bureau had also been featured in the July / August issue of Pipeline magazine, a HK-based art magazine. In November 2013, they were selected for an art residency under San Art in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
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.
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.

MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila) is a multimedia artist who graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Fine Arts program in 1991 and took up a masters degree of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009.
Zamuco's body of work has been about filtering his own displaced experience. His body of work has been about filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. It has persisted to be about responding to objects, materials and circumstance, in a particular time and place. His themes run the gamut from views about dislocation, identity, post-colonial narratives, spirituality, geopolitics to the need for reclamation of space. His works, which are of a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video and performance, serve not only as social commentary but also as self-critique. The intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial and possibly find knowledge for some kind of human order.
He received awards such as the Ateneo Art Award and he’s one of the recipients in the Thirteen Artists Award at Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Derek Tumala (b. 1986, Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist orchestrating
intricate systems and structures by staging various media and subjects in
the pursuit of ecological world-making. This can be in a form of
knowledge, schematics, object orientation, staged performance or event.
His art practice revolves around the realms of science and nature
meditating on the idea of interconnectedness. By forming ecologies and
systems of thought, Tumala’s practice traces mutuality between human
and its built and natural environments. Tumala’s impulse is to examine and
understand how the world operates and be able to approach visceral
truths as material for his work.
Tumala’s notable artistic projects were presented in Museum of
Contemporary Art and Design - Manila, World Weather Network, Sainsbury
Centre UK, Jogjakarta Biennale, ASEAN Exhibition, South Korea, Art Basel
Hong Kong, Formosa Art Fair Taiwan, Cultural Center of the Philippines,
UP Vargas Museum and Art Fair Philippines. He attended the Manila
Observatory Artist-in-Residency, Delfina Foundation in London, UK,
Apexart Fellowship in New York City, USA, Salzburg Global Seminar in
Austria and 10x10 Korea Research Fellow. He received grants from British
Council’s Connecting through Culture and International Rice Research
Institute’s Art/Science Seed Grant. He received recognitions such as
ArtReview Magazine’s Future Greats 2024, Asia Art Awards Tokyo and
Ateneo Art Awards. He also initiated STEAM/ Projects, a collective of
artists working on the intersection of art and science in Manila.
