Silverlens presents Nicole Coson, Dina Gadia, Pow Martinez, and Yee I-Lann in a show of force of contemporary artists from the Asia Pacific. In southeast Asia, where all are from originally, artists often come together through informal networks, establishing communities and collectives that become long-term structures of artistic collaboration and exchange.

Nicole Coson is a London-based Filipino artist, who has completed an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. Coson’s work operates between the anonymous and deeply personal, between a specific place in her personal history and anywhere at all. Her latest works function as architectural interventions of physical space, each work serving as a doorway into a dimension between worlds and beyond time. She has been selected as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020. Recent exhibitions: Exoskeleton (Silverlens, Manila), Windows (The Artist Room, London), Picture House (Brigade, Copenhagen), How To Cook a Wolf (Center for Book Arts, NYC), and in OVR: Basel in 2021.

Dina Gadia is an artist based in Manila with a cult following. Known for satire, she makes paintings and prints sourced from comics, schoolbooks, and magazines from the American post-war period. She slices, then reconstructs narratives of a tricky relationship that was troubled from the moment it began. She has exhibited extensively since 2005, leading solo presentations both locally and internationally in New York, Taipei, Singapore, and Tokyo. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious national Thirteen Artists Awards by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In 2019, Gadia participated in City Prince/sses at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. 

Pow Martinez’s paintings belie their grotesque subject matter with the indelibly beautiful surfaces and a wide-ranging, daring use of color. Mutants, monsters, demons, deviants, and freaks lurch, sit, and appear to transform amidst weirdly lit landscapes or disintegrating urban scenarios, or emerge from a painterly graffito mess, but, as his more abstracted works insist, Martinez’ ability to render intriguing relationships between forms and surfaces ensure his works are endlessly compelling—an experience akin to a beautiful nightmare. Martinez exhibits internationally and has worked with different media, including sound. Recent exhibitions include Aesthetic Police (ROH Projects, Jakarta), City Prince/sses (Palais de Tokyo, Paris), Sustainable Anxiety (Silverlens, Manila), and his latest solo exhibition, Underground Spiritual Unit (Galería Yusto/Giner, Madrid).

Yee I-Lann is a mid-career artist who grabbed the moment of the pandemic to stay home and make work with her communities. I-Lann currently lives and works in Kota Kinabalu in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah. Always making waves across southeast Asia, she is presenting new chapters from her ongoing Tukad Kad Sequence of bamboo weaves with post-colonial imagery. Recent exhibitions: Borneo Heart (SICC, Kota Kinabalu), Until We Hug Again (CHAT Mill6, Hong Kong), and the ongoing APT (Brisbane).

Yee I-Lann is also part of the upcoming Feature & Unlimited sections of this year’s Art Basel in Basel.