Street Mining

STREET MINING

STREET MINING

CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE PHILIPPINES SUNDARAM TAGORE SINGAPORE JANUARY 20–MARCH 2, 2018

GALLERY MISSION Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

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HUNTER, GATHERER, URBAN DWELLER COCOY LUMBAO There is a lot to be said about moving to “the city” with various implications on whether it means progression from the idyllic or, on the contrary, a slip into the retrograde. Think about Thoreau and his Walden or his treks up Saddleback Mountain. His so-called retreats are relative acts of sublime cityshaming compared to today’s trolling exercises, and his prescriptions for sucking the “marrow of life” are tightly centered on visions of landscape that artists from the time of the Renaissance until Impressionism have embraced as the ultimate source of inspiration when it comes to examining the soul through one’s environment. Landscape, from a visual standpoint, is central to Thoreau’s analysis of life, as he grapples with his worldview, his grounds for living within what is real.

Although there is nothing new about tying philosophical perspectives with one’s actual environment, or to a broader extent, the actual space in which one has chosen to thrive, there is still something worth discussing about landscape

and how it can be interpreted. Theorizing about landscape in art has earned its right to become the theory “that must account for everything,” considering how almost all of the necessary conditions fall under its great canopy: the natural, the social, the political, as well as the mythic, symbolic, or even spiritual. Landscape, which is neither the foreground nor background of things, and is neither style nor genre in art, serves more as a kind of medium, one that surpasses the mere imprint of vision; one that transcends mere fixations on subject matter—an encounter.

What if this encounter for some individuals runs opposite to Thoreau’s longings for the backwoods, one that, instead of retreating to a secluded forest, seeks to navigate the narrow alleys and convoluted side streets of a forlorn city? The late British critic Mark Fisher once wrote on his blog that whenever someone defends the integrity of rural life, it could also work the other way around. “Part of embracing the future is always rejecting the past;

Landpainting (Valencia), 2017, inkjet on Hanemühle paper, 11 x 15 inches/27.9 x 38.1 cm 7

in fact this applies to people who move from the ‘provinces’ to the ‘center’ as well,” he writes. In his post, Fisher acknowledges the contrarian point of view, which in turn makes the idea of reflections across landscapes interchangeable: there is the rural as much as there is the urban.

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Gary-Ross Pastrana, who is a curator and artist from Manila, recognizes the dynamic in this interchangeability. The city, as a situation that presents its own means for reflection, being landscape just the same, has its own field to be mined. Whereas the mountains and forests can amplify natural phenomena— sunrise, the rustling of leaves, fog, organisms that move about, the cityscape instead has the ability to draw us closer to the minuteness of artificial things, which have become naturally occurring phenomena just the same. Whereas the rural landscape boasts of a panorama, the cityscape pleads for magnification.

It is as if the essence of urbanity lies in its minutest details, always accumulating instead of looming large.

to not only dwell in but actively seek form through the city. In gathering artists that exemplify this condition for this exhibition, Pastrana offers the idea of city not just as stage or source of inspiration, but as material that presents itself actively to become part and parcel of the work. There is a vast difference between art that tackles place and art that is built through place—place, being what essayist and eco-critic Lawrence Buell described as “perceived or felt space; space humanized.”

This particular place—the cities of Manila—are sprawling with contradictions manifested in actual space, whether they be atmospheric conditions such as geniality versus danger, order versus chaos, or material conditions such as the affluent versus the deprived, the private versus public.

These cities present immense raw data that the artists feel and contemplate, which one could argue are ever-present philosophical concerns rather than the more antiquated musings inside solitary cabins in the middle of forests.

The influence of environment on the artist is always imminent, and will always reveal itself even in the tiniest of details. But there are artists who seem

But for the artist, the city injects a different kind of inspiration, one that becomes embedded in either the processes involved in doing work or in their

material outcome. For Pastrana, the cityscape is more akin to a palette rather than mere view. The convoluted streets of Manila are repositories of social, material and abstract phenomena that are waiting to be unearthed and utilized. Here, the city is neither a place for contemplation nor a stage to conduct maneuvers that deal with urbanity (graffiti, street art, public art)—which relegate the space to a kind of platform, although with its own significance could also be seen as dormant, passive, only acted upon instead of being activated. Here, the city becomes the inventory; the stock. The city becomes more necessary as the source of thinking, as an encounter, as a filament to complete a patchwork, as medium that can take on different forms—painting, collage, sculpture, video. It becomes a city that is put to work, her concepts galvanized and immortalized through other entities—one of which is art.

Looking at the works of artists such as Poklong Anading who scavenge and mine the streets, we can see how form can be derived from byproducts of cities. His installation Bandilang Basahan (Vol. IV), which includes a video work, is constructed

from a long process of accumulating makeshift rags (usually circular), sewn from discarded cloth of different sorts. Usually sold in the streets, Anading hunts the material down, finding the cloths in what can only be described as their final resting places—sprawled flat on the pavement, repeatedly stepped upon or run over like road kill.

He then constructs a shelter out of them. These rags are somehow endemic to the city, and symbolic, too. The word bandila, which Anading uses in his title, means flag, and illustrates how these makeshift rags, which sprang from necessity and people’s resourcefulness, reflect the conditions of the city that seem to have accumulated only through ad hoc conditions.

The same goes for MM Yu’s series Landpaintings, in which visual patterns the city streets generate are ingrained. These drip paintings are situated in real streets and locations that give rise to emblematic colors that correspond to the actual view. The photographs MM Yu takes are also about detecting patterns that the city generates.

Be it colour or composition, Yu scouts for these little accidents that evolve within the city, as it

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accumulates its own life forms akin to natural phenomena. The city becomes the wild, which MM Yu tries to tame—at least, through documentation and through the lens of her camera.

Nona Garcia, on the other hand, has a more indirect involvement with the streets, though some of her works are irrefutably informed by their phenomena. Known for staging selfreflexive concepts through photorealistic and tromp l’oeil paintings, Garcia’s method revolves around selection—picking out details she finds conceptually amusing from within the mundane, and wagering it against our notions of the grand.

Take for instance her painting of what appears to be a volcano, which is actually a mound of cement shaped for the mixing process. This sight is rampant in streets where construction seems to go on forever, in roads being repaired, in houses undergoing renovation, in slums where makeshift walls are being raised in a hurry—it could almost serve as a symbol for the modern city’s origin.

If the aforementioned artists have found form through street phenomena, Victor Balanon on the other hand utilizes the cityscape to reconstruct the city

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itself. In Chimera, a three-channel video installation, he depicts the city through stop-motion technique and reconstructs the resulting footage through digital manipulation and mirroring effects. The city, engulfed in symmetry, becomes part utopic and part mythic. The place becomes only recognizable as a city, or as part of a street but nothing more, as the three-part imagery seems to melt into abstraction, descend into pure form—devoid of time, treating space not as place but as an illusion.

Louie Cordero and Kawayan de Guia, who work in different cities—Cordero in Malabon and de Guia in the northern city of Baguio—treat their works as hodgepodges of imagery, which are direct tributes to the situation of cities in the Philippines. Malabon, being one of the oldest cities, is a mix of circumstances, ranging from Spanish and Catholicism’s influences to the fishing industry, and its unusual geographical conditions marked by low-lying terrain prone to flooding. Baguio City on the other hand is situated in the mountain ranges of the Cordilleras where Americans used to have a base, thus mixing Western influence with the old ways of the Ifugao, the mountain’s indigenous tribe. Their works,

which include painting, assemblage and sculpture, serve as commentary on the idea of city as melting pot—in Cordero’s as a stimulant for an unclassified visual culture, and for de Guia, as a clash between assimilation and resistance to invasive forces.

Broke, which is an art collective led by Gary-Ross Pastrana, reads the city as design. The direct correspondences between the objects they build and the city’s own conditions demonstrate a kind of integration which is more entrenched than mere inspiration. Again, the city is activated here, and not merely depicted. Functional objects are conceived through exploring dilemmas that sprout from the density and convolutions of the city, the overcrowding of streets and roads and the systems that are devised by authorities in attempts to restructure a city that has long been broken.

Mining the streets, for some artists, is equivalent to researching nature. The city is recognized as a place where its own complexities can mirror and even outdo the rest of complexities that beset life.

The city is their immediate environment, one that they cannot escape from. The streets are their library, their palette, their mound of clay. It is the

equivalent of Thoreau’s backwoods, if Thoreau decided to decipher complexity head-on. Whereas one has to retreat to nature to understand the universal, and brood at the panorama of a distant landscape, sometimes it can also be useful and even significant to walk the concrete path and savor the details of what made this city, the landscape we’re all in, in the first place.

Cocoy Lumbao is a visual artist and writer based in Manila. His artworks have been shown locally and internationally in exhibitions including Futura Manila at Osage Gallery, Hong Kong; the traveling show Move on Asia in Korea and Europe; and at Art Stage Singapore’s Video Art Stage. His essays have appeared in art magazines, catalogs, monographs and books on contemporary Filipino artists. Most recently, he has been working as curator for the video program of the first Manila Biennale and was an artist-in-residence at Gasworks, London, in 2017. He is currently a faculty member at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts.

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POKLONG ANADING Internationally recognized artist Poklong Anading explores issues of identity through subjective investigations into social occurrences. Formally trained as a painter, the Manila-based artist’s practice has expanded to include sculpture, installation, video and photography. Anading’s work is often interactive, engaging with both subject and viewer. For his ongoing series Anonymity (begun in 2004), Anading photographs people in various urban locales, with his subjects holding round mirrors in front of their faces to reflect the sunlight against the artist’s camera lens. Counter Acts (2004), the first photograph of this series, was included in the landmark 2013 Guggenheim exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia and was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.

Poklong Anading graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines, in 1999 with a BFA in painting. He has exhibited widely across the Philippines and abroad, including at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Asia Society Museum, New York; Yokahama Museum of Art, Japan; the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Para Site, Hong Kong; the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the National Art Gallery and Metropolitan Museum, Manila. His work was included in the Philippine Pavilion of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia and the Sharjah Biennal 11, United Arab Emirates.

Poklong Anading’s works are included in the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum, Japan.

Born in 1975 in Manila | Lives and works in Manila

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Bandilang Basahan (Vol. IV), 2016–2017, single-channel seven-minute video installation, found rags, net, hooks, fastener, aluminum, 74.8 x 74.8 x 37.4 inches/190 x 190 x 95 cm, edition of 3 13

VICTOR BALANON Victor Balanon is a self-taught artist based in Quezon City. After dropping out of dental school to pursue a career in art, Balanon attended the Mowelfund Film Institute in Manila to study film and animation. Balanon worked as an illustrator, creating storyboards and cover art for films, independent comics and music labels, as well as Japanese animation, before deciding to pursue art full time.

In the late 1990s, Balanon was involved in a number of local, artist-run initiatives, including the noted collective Surrounded by Water, which offered space for emerging artists to create and show their work.

Balanon employs a variety of mediums, including pen and ink on canvas, painting and video. He finds inspiration in photography, film, literature and critical theory, as well as forms of popular media, such as graphic novels and punk music. His work often examines the nature of man’s personal and collective memory by reimagining moments from old newsreels and iconic movies—especially those by filmmakers who challenged conventional norms of storytelling, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Victor Balanon has participated in group and solo shows throughout the Philippians and abroad, including at the Jewish Museum, New York; the Singapore Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; the University of the Philippines’ Vargas Museum; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; and the 14th Jakarta Biennale (2011).

Born in 1972 in Manila | Lives and works in Quezon City

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Untitled (Divisible Cities No. 6), 2017, ink on canvas, 48 x 64 inches/122 x 162.5 cm 15

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Chimera, 2016, three-channel video projection with sound, edition of 5 17

BROKE COLLECTIVE The design cooperative known as Broke explores the nature of both object and artist.

Led by Jeremy Guiab and Gary Ross Pastrana, the collective examines the process of producing art with a playful approach, from investigating how objects come to be, to looking into the artist’s psyche for insight into the creative process.

In addition to producing its own work, which is often constructed from reclaimed materials found in and around Manila, Broke functions as an ideas laboratory that brings together artists, designers and fabricators. The collaborative serves as a uniquely conceptual feature of their Manila-based furniture-fabrication company Bespoke, which takes an integrated approach to design and art.

Since 2010, Broke has exhibited in galleries and contemporary art spaces throughout the Philippines and in Singapore.

Established in Manila in 2010

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Signals II, 2012–2017, metal, paint, fabric, LED lights, 23.6 x 19.7 x 11.8 inches/60 x 50 x 30 cm 19

Signals III, 2012–2017, metal, paint, fabric, LED lights, 27.5 x 23.6 x 15.75 inches/70 x 60 x 40 cm

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LOUIE CORDERO Louie Cordero explores imagery and narratives inspired by the history, religion, politics and popular culture of the Philippines.

Articulated in a riot of color and infused with elements of kitsch and abject absurdity, Cordero’s work is populated with detached body parts, mutated creatures of unknown origin, graphic scenes of violence that border on the grotesque, juxtaposed alongside vivid imagery of Indian advertisements, American B-movies, symbols of Catholicism and relics of Filipino folklore.

The Manila-based artist’s aesthetic has evolved over time, from purely figurative renderings to more abstract compositions—a fusion of primitivism and formalism that forms a unique visual language reflecting Cordero’s offbeat take on contemporary Filipino society.

Cordero holds a BFA from the University of the Philippines. He was awarded the grand prize in painting at the 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2003 and the Ateneo Art Award in 2004. Corderro has exhibited extensively, including at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; the Singapore Art Museum and the Earl Lu gallery, La Salle-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore; the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Sydney; the Metropolitan Museum of Manila; the Jose B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, Quezon City; the Lopez Museum, Pasig, Philippines; and the Ayala Museum, Makati City, Philippines.

In 2012, Cordero’s work was shown at Art Basel. He also participated in the Jakarta Biennale XIV in 2011 at the National Gallery of Indonesia and the Singapore Biennale at the Singapore Museum in the same year.

Born in 1978 in Manila | Lives and works in Malabon 22

Primordial Germination (when the world lost its balls), 2017, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches/183 x 183 cm 23

KAWAYAN DE GUIA Baguio City-based artist Kawayan de Guia produces drawings, paintings, sculpture and installations that explore sociopolitical issues in contemporary Filipino society.

The artist fuses seemingly opposing ideas, such as consumerism and spiritualism, into collages and assembled installations made from found objects that embody local character. Although broken and discarded, these miscellaneous items are imbued with personal significance—something de Guia perceives as part of a cultural collective memory, which he aims to galvanize and reactivate through his work Kawayan de Guia has exhibited work in the Philippians and abroad, including at the Singapore Art Museum; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Musee International des Artes Modestes, Sete, France; Para Site, Hong Kong; the Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya; the Visual Art Center, La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia; the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Quezon City; the Ayala Museum, Makati; and the Lopez Memorial Museum, Pasig.

De Guia has completed several residencies, including at the Art Omi International Center in Ghent, New York. He received the Philip Morris Asian Art Award in 2003 and the Ateneo Art Award for Visual Art, Manila, in 2011.

Born in 1979 in Baguio, Luzon, Philippines | Lives and works in Baguio City

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Fuck You City, Philippines, 2017, wood and metal, 42 x 18 x 18 inches/109.2 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm 25

Nature of Currency, 2017, mixed media, 54 x 84 inches/137.2 x 213.4 cm diptych

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NONA GARCIA One of the most influential young artists working in the Filipino art scene, Nona Garcia is perhaps best known for her elaborate, large-scale paintings characterized by an intense, photo-realistic approach and for her series of X-ray installations.

Garcia began creating her illuminated films of found objects encased in light-boxes in 1999. The daughter of doctors, Garcia spent much of her childhood in her parent’s small hospital in Marikina, part of Metro Manila, which may explain her interest in X-rays as a medium for self-expression.

In her painting practice, Garcia explores traditional genres, such as landscape, portraiture and still life, and although representation plays a strong role in her work, at its core, her images spring from purely imaginative abstraction.

Nona Garcia holds a BFA in painting from the University of the Philippines. She has participated in exhibitions around the world, including at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; the Singapore Art Museum; the Bencab Museum, Baguio City; and the Lopez Museum, Mandaluyong City, Philippines. In 2003 she received the 13 Artists Award and she was the grand prize winner of the Philip Morris ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Art Award in Singapore in 2000.

Born in 1978 in Manila | Lives and works in Baguio City

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Crater, 2017, oil on cement, 48 x 60 inches/122 x 152.4 cm 29

MM YU Manila-based artist MM Yu produces semi-autobiographical photography and paintings that offer a kind of contemporary mapping of the world she inhabits.

In her paintings, Yu explores themes of structure and organization through abstractions of color, experimenting with the effects of gravity through both deliberate and random applications of pigment, where she carefully drips paint onto the canvas in sinewy lines, then lets the pigments drip down, creating a sense of dynamism and movement from the loss of definition.

In her photography, Yu’s subjects are often people and objects she comes across locally, from a mountain of discarded shopping carts abandoned along the roadside, to makeshift street shelters fashioned from dirty mattresses. Such seedy vignettes might result in a bleak characterization of the urban experience, but through the artist’s lens, these isolated moments are transformed into colorful and capricious odes to Manila.

MM Yu holds a BFA in painting from the University of the Philippines, Diliman Q.C. College of Fine Arts. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Philippians and abroad, including at the Queens Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Musee International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Yu was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2010 and recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards in 2007 for her contribution to contemporary art.

Born in 1978 in Manila | Lives and works in Manila

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Tree Grid, 2017, print on wood, 40 x 60 inches/101.6 x 152.4 cm 31

Landpainting (N. Domingo Street), 2017, inkjet on HanemĂźhle paper, 16.5 x 11 inches/41.9 x 27.9 cm 32

Landpainting (Valencia), 2017, inkjet on HanemĂźhle paper, 11 x 15 inches/27.9 x 38.1 cm 33

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ABOUT THE CURATOR Based in Manila, Gary-Ross Pastrana is a conceptual artist and curator known for his poetic sculptural installations. Pastrana is one of the co-founders of the artist-run collectives Broke and the Future Prospects Art Space in Cubao. He has curated and participated in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, including at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Quezon City; the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, Manila; and the Singapore Art Museum. Pastrana was also the Philippines’ representative for the New Museum’s 2012 Triennial in New York City.

He holds a BFA in painting from the University of the Philippines and received the 13 Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006.

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SUNDAR AM TAGOR E GALLER IES new york 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 tel 212 677 4520 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com new york 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 tel 212 288 2889 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com hong kong 4/F, 57–59 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong tel 852 2581 9678 • hongkong@sundaramtagore.com singapore 5 Lock Road 01–05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 tel 65 6694 3378 • singapore@sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Sales director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Exhibition coordinator/registrar: Emma Battaglene Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Kieran Doherty

W W W. SUNDA R A M TAGOR E .C OM Photographs © 2017 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Text © 2018 Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: Nature of Currency (detail), 2017, mixed media, 54 x 84 inches/137.2 x 213.4 cm diptych