Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
JONATHAN CHING
Sometimes We Even See Miracles
A still life painting normally contains an arrangement of a table and objects, like fruits, flowers, and household items. Still Life had its origins from Egyptian and Roman art but gained prominence during the 16th century. In the Middle Ages, still life was adapted for religious purposes, using them to depict Biblical scenes and to decorate illuminated manuscripts. The term still life is derived from the Dutch word stilleven. Still Life’s portrayal of everyday objects tells the narrative of human beings across history. It is a silent story of the time it was made.
Jonathan Ching’s present exhibit is a continuation of his Art Fair Philippines 2024 show, entitled “They Still Believe We Grant Wishes.” In the show, he explored images of decay and their relation to the unchanging images of fruits and flowers illustrated on plastic table covers. Jonathan’s present exhibition is a still life show, which depicts offertory flowers on his canvases and fruits as his installation. His fascination with offertory flowers began with observing his mother’s devotions. As a devout Buddhist, she kept an altar at home, where she would offer flowers with the belief that these gestures would give blessings in return. Intrigued by the beauty of these offerings, Jonathan captured their transformation, from their vibrant freshness to their moment of decay. He even photographs the flowers before they are discarded, finding an expected beauty in their putrefaction.
In Jonathan’s eyes, fresh flowers are more than just offerings but symbols of devotions and moments of spiritual connection. In Buddhist belief, offerings transcend other kinds of generosity. It is giving a gift to those higher than ourselves like deities or gods. In giving gifts, the person sacrifices their belongings. Such action gives them merit which accumulates for a higher rebirth and eventually release from cyclic existence. These offerings represent the remnants of prayers to the gods.
When the flowers’ time on the altar ends, Jonathan wishes to give them new life. He takes photographs and then paints them. Immortalizing them. Jonathan’s vision transcends them from their original purpose. These artworks of offerings are like a perpetual prayer. Each offertory flower holds a specific prayer by a devotee to the gods. By painting it, such offering is forever kept on the canvas. These paintings of offerings last longer than the object that was painted.
In Jonathan’s current show, he makes an installation consisting of wax sculptures, like fruits. They are associated with candles and fruits offered on altars. They symbolize the offerings that are believed to sustain ancestors in the afterlife. From afar, Jonathan’s paintings appear to simply depict flowers, but up close they become abstract. They invite personal interpretation. Once these flowers and photographs are transformed into paintings, they belong to the viewer. For Jonathan, the viewer can take their own experience and feelings, and reinterpret his work, or even redefine what these flowers represent. It is up to them to decide what they are and probably what they can become. (Mica Sarenas)
YASMIN SISON, NICOLE TEE
Pattern Play
Pattern Play begins with a book of patterns. More precisely, a book of patterns for 18-inch dolls’ clothes. In this two-man show by Yasmin Sison and Nicole Tee, the two interrogate the role of “play” in art, as well as within a broader experience in their own lives and beyond them.
The concept of “play” has often factored into both artists’ bodies of work as a form of resistance to the status quo. Sison focuses on perceiving joy as resistance to the ills of the world. Her work often has an undercurrent of playfulness, more visually obvious in some than in others, as is the case with her collages and miniatures, which are often rendered in vibrant colour and playful shapes and compositions. For Tee, her inclusion of craft in her pieces — or, rather, paying reverence to it as a primary aspect of her practice — is a dedicated move towards slow living. It becomes a direct rejection of the fast pace of life today, with the constant need to move and keep up with trends that change faster than one could adopt the latest one. Tee’s approach to art-making is an extension of her interior life, where she goes indoor rock-climbing, sews her own clothes, and walks among more nature-filled environments, effectively slowing down her own consumption of both the physical and digital, and offering respite from responsibilities that come with adulthood.
Based on doll part patterns in old books, Sison’s series of collages for this exhibition are all in the stage of “becoming”. Cut and printed using a variety of printing techniques, these elements are collaged together with cut-outs from other children’s books. Rather than viewing this exercise as being stunted in one’s past state as a child playing with dolls, the joy derived from the act, in spite of all else wrong in the world, is what is at play here.
Sison invited Tee to the two-man show, led by her curiosity at how the other artist would utilise these patterns, as Tee is an avid sewer and Sison is not. Another act of subversion: Tee’s diptychs, entitled, “I want to be _____” is a rejection of the phrase children often use to dream up a future career, a glimpse into a future that seems inevitably linked to being a part of the machinery of everyday capitalism. Instead, Tee selects characters, rather than occupations, that characterised childhood and girlhood. Each diptych is composed of illustrations of the clothes pattern, each one sewn by Tee using scrap fabric and off-cuts from her own sewing projects, and used as a reference for the painting of the finished garment paired with the illustration. The combination calls to mind the way these patterns are represented in these instructional diagrams.
Ultimately, both artists’ works are their own responses to a variety of issues of modern life: looking for joy in the face of chaos, rejecting participation in the machination of capitalism, insisting on living slowly and carefully, and finding fulfillment and satisfaction in these small, rebellious acts. (Carina Santos)
MARIANO CHING
Wandering Days
With a very specific and particular visual lexicon, Mariano Ching populates the worlds depicted in Wandering Days with strange creatures in otherworldly environments. In a series of paintings called “Forgotten Title”, Ching creates cinematic scenes with oil on canvas, on identical canvases of 18 x 24 inches. The effect is akin to watching a film unfold, where a 2-Headed Person with Boy and Dog traverse the jungle of alien foliage, the boy looking back at the place they just left, or where an unidentified humanoid creature is embraced by a snake, watches a Pyre with televisions, emitting smoke, and a collection of photographs and memories look on from a pile beside him.
Ching’s narratives are never quite as straightforward as the titles of these pieces may lead one to believe. Although these titles are void of any enigmatic suggestions, the scenes that are inevitably named by these titles are. “Visitor” is complete in its description of the subject of the painting — a creature that looks like a cross between a deer and a wild dog — but the painting itself opens up a myriad of questions. What is this strange creature visiting? And as for the ever-present piles of wreckage in debris in his otherwise nature-filled images (also present in “Public Service Announcement” in the form of a loudspeaker nestled in a tree’s branches): how did they get there?
Alongside these paintings are sculptures. “Brick by Brick” shows two rabbit-like figures building a ziggurat of sorts, both encased in what appears to be wax, and yet fall in line with the style of painting Ching is known for. “Dog and Bunnies” hold monuments with imagery reminiscent of St. Sebastian and creation myths atop their heads.
Wandering Days is a collection of new-old paintings and sculptures by Mariano Ching. Although most of the pieces were completed in 2016, none of them have been exhibited in the Philippines, as they were previously shown in the United States in 2018. The newest additions to this collection of work are the sculptures from Ching’s “Relic” series, massive in comparison to the other sculptures, and resembling archaeological discoveries, from the worlds Ching has just created, unearthed in the present day, six years after these worlds came into being. (Carina Santos)