11 November 2013 - Philippine artists have continuously managed to carve a place in Singapore’s cultural landscape, helping to enliven the local arts scene and deepen cultural understanding between Singaporeans and Filipinos. This has been the overriding goal behind the annual Philippine Art Trek which the Philippine Embassy started in 2007, and is now entering its seventh year.
Art Trek is a month-long series of exhibits by established and emerging Filipino artists spread across some of Singapore’s top art galleries and spaces. Since 2007, it has featured over 200 Filipino artists in 20 art galleries and venues throughout Singapore. This year’s Art Trek also coincides with the signature event of the Singapore art scene, the Singapore Biennale 2013, which focuses on Southeast Asian art, which has also allowed our very own Filipino artists to shine as well. Truly, with the combination of these two events, we have made a significant imprint on the Singapore art scene.
This November, Art Trek VII will take art lovers through seven art galleries, with a diverse and exciting lineup of exhibits.
The trek kicked off on November 1 with a group exhibition of Josue Mangrobang, Malyn Bonayog, Nelson Bosito and Rene Cuvos at One East Asia Gallery entitled Senses and Beyond. In this exhibit, these four up-and- coming artists from the University of the Philippines exhibited works that go beyond the superficial reality of the everyday world and explores the meanings of the material surface each particular artist has personally chosen.
The idea of nature is the theme of the second exhibit, this time by Mr. Pierre Patricio at the Old Parliament House. Tribute to Nature, draws inspiration from the artists own experience as an expatriate artist in Singapore, exploring man-made environmental tragedies on everyday society and human life such as the recent haze situation from Indonesia in the middle of 2013.
On November 6, Forest Rain Gallery in collaboration with Qube Gallery in Cebu will showcase the work of nine artists from the Visayas and Mindanao in a show called TAO. GINOO. PAGTUO. (Man. God.Belief/Convictions/Faith.). The thesis of this art caravan exhibit revolves on the idea that artists exist and thrive on the premise that they affirm life, they challenge problems, they accept responsibilities, they exercise their beliefs and they live today. The triumvirate relationship of a person, his or her convictions, beliefs & faith and the God s/he worships or ascribes life to can be treated with mutual interdependency and perhaps to a certain extent with a deliberate autonomy. This will be the motivation that the featured artists from the Visayan regions would work out in their masterpieces.
On November 7, Utterly Art will present a show by Ronald Caringal entitled COMIC ReLEAF. In this show, the artist will be presenting very personal situations in a pronounced humorous way. Ronald Caringal believes that everyone can be his or her own super hero and that we can have the uncanny and amazing ability to survive and surprise not only ourselves but the world that surrounds us by taking all the hits life gives us and still have the strength to fight back. He asserts that we write the stories that make up our lives, outline and color each page, compile them in our hearts and minds and someday reliving these pages.
Ronald Caringal studied Advertising Arts in the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines, and has participated in several group and solo shows in Manila, Singapore,
New York and Milan. Comic ReLeaf is his ninth solo show and second with Utterly Art.
On November 8, Artesan Gallery + Studio, one of Art Trek’s mainstay galleries, will open a duo exhibition entitled Movement in Bloom featuring leading artists Araceli Limcaco Dans, and Janice Liuson-Young. Dans founded the Arts Education Program of the Ateneo de Manila Grade School and established the College of Fine Arts of the Philippine Women's University. The extraordinary artist achieved all these while raising 10 children with her husband, who all became successful in their chosen careers. Liuson-Young graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines, Diliman with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Visual Communications. With over 40 solo and groups shows to date spanning the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Holland and Belgium, Janice is acknowledged as an accomplished artist. She brings her subjects to life with her keen eye and depth of emotion. Janice is now both an artist and art educator. From 2005, she has been the Associate Dean of FEATI University School of the Fine Arts. She too feels a passion to give back, by mentoring the next wave of Filipino talent. When Araceli Dans and Janice Liuson-Young met in 2001, a strong and dynamic bond between the two female artists was formed and which continues to this day as we shall witness in their joint exhibition.
Contemporary Filipino artist Poklong Anading meanwhile will have a solo exhibition at Silverlens Gallery opening on November 22 titled Untitled (Gate). In this exhibit, he trains his camera on the structures, buildings and other vertical elements of the built city, not to showcase architecture but to re-appropriate what is left of nature in the spaces between them-- slivers of light, cropped visions of the sky framed in the contours and outlines of the buildings themselves.
Art Trek VII’s closing exhibit will open on November 28 at Galerie Sogan in collaboration with Tin Aw Gallery entitled Childhood Games People Play and will feature the works of Carlo Aranton, Lee Paje and Ioannis Sicuya as they focus on the crucial years of childhood, exploring that which are kept hidden, subsumed or substituted with toys and storybooks because families and institutions believe that children must be protected from ideas and habits that signify alterity and deviation from the norm. While the show looks back at childhood with nostalgia, it does so in circumspection of the cautionary tales that come with it through the heretofore unnoticeable aspects of its objects.
To close our Art Trek this year, the Philippine Embassy and Silverlens Gallery have invited the curator of the UP Vargas Museum to give a talk on art from the 19th Century Philippine colonial era to the modern era, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Andres Bonifacio. This event will be held on November 30, at Silverlens Gallery.
Amidst the proliferation of arts events in Singapore in recent years, the Philippine Embassy over the years, endeavours to find ways to ensure an exciting lineup of participating artists, exhibits and galleries for Art Trek. This month-long event has so far grown into one of the biggest annual expositions of Philippine art abroad. END