SILVERLENS is pleased to be present a selection of works at the first iteration of the Art Basel Online Viewing Room.

In the current zeitgeist focused on virtual reality and the cloud, SILVERLENS leans hard towards the tactile, the tangible, and the man-made with regards to art making. For the Art Basel Online Viewing Room, we present works of artists who were globally conversant in a pre-internet era, such as Santiago Bose and Yee I-Lann. We also look at an artist who straddles this transition, Mit Jai Inn; and three artists who are using digital ideas in their defiantly analogue works of art, Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Gary-Ross Pastrana and Maria Taniguchi. Digital technology has transformed the world, things have become different since the internet. We present this reflection on the virtual, showing pieces from the past, in
transition, and pieces reflecting on now into the beyond.

Santiago Bose (b. July 25, 1949, Baguio City, Philippines; d. December 3, 2002, Baguio City, Philippines) was a mixed-media artist from the Philippines. He co-founded the Baguio Arts Guild, and was also an educator, community organizer, and art theorist.

Bose often used indigenous media in his work, ranging from bamboo and volcanic ash, to the cast-offs and debris (found objects, bottles, “trash”). His assemblages communicated a strong sense of folk consciousness and religiosity, and the strength of traditional cultures in a culture inundated with foreign cultural influences.

He worked toward raising an awareness of cultural concerns in the Philippines. After studying at the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines between 1967 and 1972, Bose continued his studies in the United States, at the West 17th Print Workshop in New York. He returned to Baguio in 1986 and began his explorations into the effects of colonialism on the Philippine national identity.

Bose was granted the Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1976. He has exhibited in major international events such as the Third Asian Art Show in Fukuoka, Japan and the Havana Biennial held in Cuba, both in 1989. In 1993, he was invited to the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art held at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia. In 2000 Bose’s work was included in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s exhibition At Home & Abroad, 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists. In June 2002, he was presented the Gawad ng Maynila: Patnubay ng Sining at Makabagong Pamamaraan (Cultural Award for New Media presented to outstanding Filipino Artist) by the City of Manila. In 2006, he was posthumously shortlisted for the National Artist award. In 2019, Bare Necessities curated by Patrick D. Flores, the first of a series of exhibitions of and on Santiago Bose was shown in Silverlens, Manila.

Mit Jai Inn’s (b. 1960, Chiang Mai, Thailand) several early experiences remain influential to him, including the communal and aesthetic aspects of being raised in an Indigenous Yong weaving village, a meditation and political practice drawn from six years as a Theravada Buddhist monk, and the labor and endurance of training two years as a professional Muay Thai boxer. Mit then studied art at Silpakorn University, Bangkok (1982-1986) and continued studies at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (1987-1992), during which time he worked as assistant to artist Franz West. Returning to Chiang Mai in 1992, Mit initiated social and politically focused art initiatives, including as co-founder of Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992 -), as well as involvement with Midnight University and The Land Foundation – three non-institutional projects central to Thai contemporary art practice and discourse. In 2015, Mit also founded Cartel Artspace in Bangkok, a gallery offering space to artists reflecting on Thailand and Southeast Asia’s historical and current context.

Mit’s recent exhibitions and projects include: Color in Cave, Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2019); Actants, Silverlens, Philippines (2019); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia from 1980s to Now, Mori Art Museum, Japan (2017) and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2019); Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong (2019); and SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium and Engagement, The 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018).

Maria Taniguchi’s (b.1981, Dumaguete City, Philippines) works encompass painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practices investigate space and time along with social and historical contexts. Her series of “Untitled” brick paintings is an ongoing series that had been initiated in 2008. Each painting consists of seemingly countless rectangular cells, each one outlined by hand with graphite and filled with gray and black tones. The painstaking process creates a subtle yet complex pattern on the surface. These paintings develop in various extents, most of them reaching meters in size.

Taniguchi won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015 and was a LUX Associate Artist in 2009. She has had several solo exhibitions in SILVERLENS, the third and latest of which was in 2017. Recent exhibitions include Who Writes?, Galería OMR, Mexico (2019), the 5th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg, Russia (2019); 12th Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Borders, South Korea (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney, SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (2018); History of a vanishing present: A prologue, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2016) Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Globale: New sensorium, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2016); The Vexed Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2015). Her work is held in a number of collections including the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, and the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai.

Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia) currently lives and works in Kota Kinabalu in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah. Her primarily photomedia-based practice engages with archipelagic Southeast Asia’s turbulent history with works addressing issues of colonialism and neo-colonialism, power, and the impact of historic memory in social experience, often with particular focus on counter-narrative “histories from below”. She employs a complex, multi-layered visual vocabulary drawn from historical references, popular culture, archives, and everyday objects. She has in recent years started working collaboratively with sea-based and land-based communities and indigenous mediums in Sabah. She is a co-founding associate of The Ricecooker Archives: Southeast Asian Rock ‘n’ Roll Treasury with her partner Joe Kidd and has worked as a production designer in the Malaysian film industry. She is currently a Board member for Forever Sabah and Tamparuli Living Arts Center (TaLAC), both based in Sabah.

Recent exhibitions include ZIGAZIG ah!, Silverlens, Manila (2019); Tikar-A-Gagah: OUTBOUND Initiative, National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore (2019); Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2019); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2019); An Opera for Animals, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2019) and Para Site, Hong Kong (2019).

Gary-Ross Pastrana‘s (b. 1977, Manila, Philippines) practice has been one of the most persistent in terms of investigating the real relationship between ideas and objects. His conceptual pieces, although loaded with poetic intensity, remain unobtrusively subtle and even almost quaint in their appearance. Coiled photographs, woven tales from found pictures in the internet, sawed off parts of a boat shipped to another country, his shirt tied into a pole to commensurate a flag, these are the slightest of turns Pastrana has his objects make to create a new text within.

Born in 1977 in Manila, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the Univervsity of the Philippines where he was awarded the Dominador Castaneda Award for Best Thesis. He has gained considerable experience and exposure within the region, with residency programs in Bandung, Kyoto and Bangkok and most recently at the Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore. Pastrana is a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 2006. He has shown at the Singapore Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and was part of the 2012 New Museum Triennale and 2008 Busan Biennale. In 2004, he co-founded Future Prospects art space and has since continually organized exhibitions in Manila and abroad.

Recent exhibitions include Everything in the Right Direction, Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2019); An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong (2019) and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2019); Utopia Hasn’t Failed Me Yet, Silverlens, Manila (2018, solo); The Extra, Extra Ordinary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2018); The Other Face of the Moon, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2017); Clock, Map, Knife, Mirror, ROH Projects, Jakarta, (2016, solo); Summa, Vargas Museum, Manila (2014, solo).

Patricia Perez Eustaquio (1977, Cebu, Philippines) is one of the leading artists of her generation. Known for her works that span across different mediums and disciplines–from paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to the fields of fashion, décor, and craft, Eustaquio reconciles these intermediary forms through her constant exploration of notions that surround the integrity of appearances and the vanity of objects.

A recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Eustaquio has also gained recognition through several residencies abroad, including Art Omi in New York and Stichting Id11 of the Netherlands. She has also been part of several notable exhibitions locally and abroad, such as The Vexed Contemporary in Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Volta Basel in Basel, Switzerland; and Credit Suisse’s Chimera in Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. She has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and was part of the 2016 Singapore Biennale. Her recent exhibitions include Everywhere West, Everything East in Yavuz Gallery, Sydney (2019) and West Bund Art and Design, Shanghai (2018). In March 2020, she will be having her sixth solo exhibition in Silverlens, Manila.