Silverlens is thrilled to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong for the 11th year from 26 to 30 March 2024. The participating artists represent a wide breadth of the gallery’s program from its Manila and New York City locations. This year’s highlights include Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia), Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland, California), and Pow Martinez (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines). Showing for the first time in Art Basel Hong Kong are artist-activists and community leaders Imelda Cajipe Endaya (b. 1949, Manila, Philippines) and Carlos Villa (1936–2013, San Francisco, California). Rounding out the Silverlens booth are works by Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines; d. 2004, Singapore), Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in London, England), and Michael Joo (b. 1966, New York, USA), who will be exhibiting with the gallery for the first time.

Silverlens, in collaboration with Ames Yavuz, will present Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s (b. 1977, Cebu, Philippines) new hybrid tapestry of digital and Filipino native weaves for the fair’s Encounters section.

PACITA ABAD

Pacita Abad’s work for Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, Tarhata sa Cortada (1983), depicts one of the many that migrated to Manila from the provinces of the Philippines. This work is part of Abad’s Immigrant Experience series of mixed-media trapunto paintings that features people she encountered in her travels around the world, particularly people of color from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A true peripatetic, Abad lived in 11 countries and traveled to 62, getting to know the locals and their rich cultures and histories.

Abad’s work is currently on view at Silverlens Manila in the solo exhibition Love is Like a Heat Wave, and at the Barbican London in the group exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. Her traveling retrospective, curated by Victoria Sung, will be on view at MoMA PS1, New York from 28 March to 2 September 2024.

NICOLE COSON

Tracing her history using a vessel of commerce, London-based artist Nicole Coson transforms produce transport crates–an object common in global trade–from a means to an end to an end in itself. Coson prints with these crates, forming labyrinthian networks that become circuitry.

Coson will open her US solo debut at Silverlens New York on 7 March.

IMELDA CAJIPE ENDAYA

Imelda Cajipe Endaya is presenting works that center on women empowerment and sisterhood rooted in the Filipino context. An artist-activist, cultural worker, and community leader, Endaya co-founded the feminist organization Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan (KASIBULAN). From her community work to her studio practice, she places women’s issues at the forefront. Both of Endaya’s works at Art Basel Hong Kong center on women, albeit with different approaches. The seminal piece Nudes and Foliage considers the female form in its subtleties, the curves of fauna blending with vignettes of women in various emotional states. Alongside it is Ang Sulat, part of her important Ventana series from the 1980s, depicting a woman and her spirit in front of a window, a common leitmotif in her work symbolizing the constraints of patriarchy.

Endaya will have her first solo exhibition at Silverlens Manila in April.

PATRICIA PEREZ EUSTAQUIO

Patricia Perez Eustaquio will present new tapestries, part of her ongoing series featuring historical images reworked and reinterpreted via photography and digital loom.

The new works, titled White Lies, are based on 20th century photographs taken by Americans when the Philippines was an American territory (1898 – 1946). The images show the incongruity of the subjects’ posture and dress as they are cast into character by the colonial gaze, as if the disguise would allow the subject to be finally seen. Rendered in a tapestry, the images are recast and woven into the language of costume and dress and urges the viewer to further examine the implications of what were once thought to be benign, superficial interventions. In the monumental work for Encounters, White Lies (Balanced on A Ball), the artist extended the borders of the image with a quilt of Philippine native weaves that have had a rich history way before the Philippines was colonized by either the USA or Spain. 

Eustaquio will have her first solo exhibition at Silverlens New York in September.

MICHAEL JOO

Employing diverse media and materials, Korean-American artist Michael Joo draws together creative and scientific modes in innovative conceptual work that reflects on the intersection between technology, perception, and the natural environment. Joo’s materials are as diverse as his body of research, ranging from human sweat, silver nitrate, and bamboo.

For Art Basel Hong Kong, Joo is presenting three works from his Various Low Mass Stars series of silver-nitrate paintings, created onsite in Shanghai’s Kangding community, an area in the midst of urban renewal and development. Through a unique process similar to silver gelatin photographic printmaking, Joo explores the interaction between the artwork and the physical properties of space, relating his work to the cultural and social structure of the place where he created it.

POW MARTINEZ

Known for his expressionist paintings, Pow Martinez presents all-new works for Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. Cartoonish, the paintings depict characters in a range of human actions, from the passive to the aggressive–having a cigarette to a boxing match. Drawing inspiration from 21st century pop culture, the internet, and classical Renaissance paintings, Martinez explores societal roles and consumption in contemporary culture. 

His first artist monograph, written by curator and art historian Tony Godfrey, will be published by ArtAsiaPacific in June.

STEPHANIE SYJUCO

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations.

Her Cargo Cults series (2013/2023) reinterprets historical ethnographic studio portraiture by using mass-manufactured goods from American shopping malls, restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterns and costumes. As a preview to her upcoming Silverlens Manila solo exhibition, her first in her heritage country, Syjuco is also presenting her new series Force Majeure (2023), which culls from the Manila Chronicle’s archives from 1960’s. The newspaper, distributed in the Philippines, was shut down by the Marcos dictatorship at the onset of martial law in 1972. 

Syjuco’s work is currently on view in the group exhibitions Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at The Edge of Visibility at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her first artist monograph will be published in April by Radius Books, and her first solo exhibition at Silverlens Manila will open in August. 

CARLOS VILLA

Carlos Villa was a much loved and key artist, activist, and educator in San Francisco’s diasporic community. For the artist estate’s first time to show at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, Silverlens presents Untitled (Face Prints with Wig and Photograph) (c.1979). Using his body as a brush, his face is serially imprinted on canvas, the canvas is cut, and collaged. Situated in the lower right corner is a photograph of Villa’s mother and at the opposite corner is a black wig, both evoking her memory. As an American artist of Filipino descent, Carlos embraced multiculturalism through his community work within the creative communities of the Bay Area for over thirty years, until his passing in 2013.

YEE I-LANN

It is urgent to situate the work of Sabahan-Malaysian-New Zealander Yee I-Lann within a contemporary conversation of art and craft. I-Lann works with Sulu Sea Bajaos and Sabah Keningau interior weavers, reworking the humble tikar (woven mat) into a practice that has become a platform for circular economies and community preservation. A familiar object to those in the Southeast Asian region, the mat is a portal to story-telling and a way to discover and unroll other knowledges.

As part of Art Basel Hong Kong’s programming, I-Lann will take part in the panel discussion Social Fabrics: Weaving as Sculpture, Painting, Performance, and Collaboration on 30 March 2024. The discussion will center on the art of weaving as a tradition of community building and social cohesion, featuring artists that utilize textiles in their works.

A continuation of I-Lann’s ongoing TIKAR/MEJA series (2020–) is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s Art Wall. Excerpts of TIKAR/MEJA are also part of Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican London before traveling to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in September.

Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines – d. 2004, Singapore) is known for her large-scale quilted trapunto paintings characterized by vibrant color and accumulated materials. Marked by vivid colors and intricate materials, her expansive paintings span a broad spectrum of themes, drawn in form and concept from a number of ethnic traditions of craft and thought. From portraying tribal masks and social scenes to intricate underwater landscapes and abstract forms, Abad's work transcended borders. 

In 2023, Abad was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at The Walker Art Center, which traveled later to SFMOMA. The exhibition will then travel to MoMA PS1 and Art Gallery Ontario in 2024–2025. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the National Museum, Jakarta, Indonesia; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, The Museum of Philippine Art, Manila; Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila; Bhirasri Museum of Modern Art, Bangkok, Thailand; Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore; The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrant, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, a traveling exhibition organized by the Asia Society, New York; Olympiad of Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea; 2nd Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan; and La Bienal de Habana, Havana, Cuba.

Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila) is a Filipino artist based in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art London. Working in printmaking, painting and sculpture, Coson’s work explores the process of image-making as it pertains to personal memory, history, and material culture. Coson’s printed canvases oscillate delicately between surface and depth: by integrating symbolically-loaded found objects into the etching press, concrete material culture transforms into analog, indexical images through their negative imprint. This imagistic oscillation between pattern, image, and object is embraced by Coson to tell stories of family, society, and coloniality, but never in straight-forward ways: rather, the artist is deeply committed to the aesthetic politics of opacity and by extension, privacy, secrecy, and intimacy. Rather than alluding to a hidden meaning behind her barrier motifs (camouflage patterns, window blinds, woven baskets, food crates), Coson invites us to study them as such—barriers—and the critical potential of visual obfuscation. 

Coson’s work on canvas is supplemented by occasional culinary and publishing projects, such as the ongoing Food Stories: The Silkroad (2018), where food is explored as a palimpsest of migration histories—of people, spices, and recipes. Coson was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2020, and has since held solo exhibitions at Silverlens Galleries in Manila, Philippines and Ben Hunter Gallery in London, UK.

Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s (b. 1949, Manila, Philippines) art and advocacy focus on people’s culture and women empowerment. She has gained recognition in the Asia-Pacific contemporary art world for the distinct Filipino and womanly visual language in her paintings, prints and installation art. She co-founded the feminist artists organization Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan (KASIBULAN). She recently held Pagtutol at Pag-asa, a 50-year retrospective exhibition of her life work at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Her works are in the collections of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Philippine National Art Gallery, National Gallery of Singapore, Metropolitan Museum Manila, Okinawa Prefectural Museum, and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Among her awards are Ani ng Dangal from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in 2009, Republic of the Philippines CCP Centennial Honors in 1999, Araw ng Maynila Award in 1998, and the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1991. She is also an author and independent curator.

Patricia Perez Eustaquio (b. 1977, Cebu, Philippines; lives and works in Benguet Province, Philippines) is known for works that span different mediums and disciplines—from paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to the fields of fashion, décor, and craft. She reconciles these intermediary forms through her constant exploration of notions that surround the integrity of appearances and the vanity of objects. Images of detritus, carcasses, and decay are embedded into the handiwork of design, craft, and fashion, while merging the disparate qualities of the maligned and marginalized with the celebrated and desired. From her ornately shaped canvases to sculptures shrouded by fabric, their arrival as fragments, shadows, or memories, according to Eustaquio, underline their aspirations, their vanity, this ‘desire to be desired.’ Her wrought objects (ranging from furniture, textile, brass, and glasswork in manufactured environments) demonstrate these contrasting sensibilities and provide commentary on the mutability of perception, as well as on the constructs of desirability and how it influences life and culture. 

Perez Eustaquio has 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, such as The Vexed Contemporary in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; That Mountain is Coming at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; and An Atlas of Mirrors in the 2016 Singapore Biennale. She is a recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards.

Michael Joo (b. 1966, Ithaca, New York) studied at the Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven and Washington University, St. Louis. He currently lives and works in New York, USA.

The work of Michael Joo explores ideas concerning identity and knowledge in a contemporary hybrid world. Joo’s rhizomatic, non-linear approach to his work in conjunction with his use of scientific vocabulary and research, results in work that documents a process. Joo’s work is a combination of a diverse range of disciplines which includes paintings, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. His practice confuses the boundary between art and science by investigating ontology, epistemology, and entropy, which as a result creates trans and multi-disciplinary work that provokes questions and dialogue about our rigidly categorized world. His materials are as diverse as his body of research ranging from human sweat, silver nitrate, and bamboo. It could be argued that Joo’s prerogative is to
achieve the impossible, to construct an object that is barely conceivable even in thought–much like the quest of speculative physics to think the unthinkable and articulate that which might possibly exist.

Pow Martinez (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) is a Filipino artist known for his expressionistic style of painting, blending bold colors with demonic, mutant-like characters to create compelling canvases. Often resembling a beautiful nightmare, Martinez combines the mundanities of everyday life with elements of pop culture, resulting in darkly humorous works depicting society’s overconsumption.

Martinez is a recipient of the 2010 Ateneo Art Award for his exhibition 1 Billion Years at West Gallery, Philippines. He exhibits internationally and has worked with different media, from painting to sound. His recent exhibitions include State of Flux (2023) at Silverlens New York; City Prince/sses (2019) at Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Art Jakarta 2019 with Silverlens and ROH Projects; 50 Years in Hollywood (2019) at Pinto Art Museum in New York; Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 with Silverlens; WXXX (2019), West Gallery, Manila. Martinez has also held a number of solo shows in major galleries in Manila, the most recent of which is Clunker (2022) at Silverlens Manila. Early in 2022, Martinez had his first solo exhibition in Madrid entitled Underground Spiritual Unit at Galeria Yusto/Giner. In 2018, he had a solo exhibition in Indonesia. Titled Aesthetic Police, the exhibition is an outcome of his month-long residency program at OPQRStudio in Bandung.

Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland, California) is known for her investigative, research-based practice encompassing photography, sculpture, and installation. Progressing from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations, her work employs open-source systems, shareware logic, and capital flows to scrutinize issues related to economies and empire. Initially exploring image-based processes and their implications in constructing racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship, she has shifted her focus to the history-building and myth-making undertaken by Filipinos in their newfound independence. From critiquing images of American colonial anthropology in the Philippines, to investigating historical museum collections and shuttered newspaper archives, her projects attempt to reframe and “talk back” to the archive.

Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum,  The Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, and The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Carlos Villa (b. 1936 – d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) was a San Francisco-born visual artist, grass-roots activist, curator, author, and educator for over 40 years at the San Francisco Art Institute, among other Bay Area institutions.

In 2022, Villa received the first-ever major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, which toured from the Newark Museum of Art to the San Francisco Art Institute and Asian Art Museum. Villa’s works were also included in the 2011 solo retrospective Manongs, Some Doors and a Bouquet of Crates at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and Other Sources: An American Essay, a multidisciplinary, multiethnic exhibition centered around women and artists of color, curated by Villa and presented in conjunction with the 1976 American Bicentennial.

Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia; lives and works in Kota Kinabalu) is a leading contemporary artist recognized for her predominantly photomedia-based practice. With acuity and wit, her digital photo collages delve into the evolving intersection of power, colonialism, and neo-colonialism in Southeast Asia, shedding light on the influence of historical memory in social experiences. Often centering on counter-narratives or 'histories from below,' she has recently begun collaborative work with sea-based and land-based communities, as well as indigenous mediums in Sabah, Malaysia.

Yee has exhibited widely in museums in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States, with notable retrospectives including Fluid World, a 2011 survey of her major works at Adelaide’s Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia; and Yee I-Lann: 2005-2016 in 2016 at the Ayala Museum in Manila, the Philippines. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: ZIGAZIG ah!, Silverlens, Manila, Philippines (2019); Yee I-Lann & Collaborators: Borneo Heart, Sabah International Convention Centre, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia (2021) and Yee I-Lann: Until We Hug Again, CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile), Hong Kong (2021), and At the Roof of the Mouth, Silverlens New York (2022). In 2023, she worked with RogueArt and six spaces in the city to mount the project Borneo Heart in Kuala Lumpur, with support from Silverlens.

Among her selected group exhibitions are the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (1999, 2021); Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia (2015); Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan, China (2016); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, The National Art Center and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung City, Taiwan (2019); STILL ALIVE: Aichi Triennale, Aichi, Japan (2022); the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2022); and Soft and Weak Like Water: The 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2023).