My work explores what Filipino American art can be in a landscape that often demands categorical simplicity from identities that are anything but. Through a hybrid visual language that draws on Neo-Expressionism, diasporic symbolism, and what I refer to as cartoon brutalism—a mode that exaggerates pop-cultural figuration into grotesque critique—I construct a visual mythology rooted in contradiction. Creatures that bite and beg, national flags that fracture and tigers that grin through clenched teeth function as both personal surrogates and cultural signifiers.
As a Filipino American artist, I contend with the dual pressures of invisibility and essentialism—pressures that often flatten complex diasporic narratives into marketable aesthetics. My work resists this flattening by foregrounding the grotesque, the absurd, and the spiritual not as aesthetic flourishes but as conceptual tools. The recurring image of the tiger, for instance, operates as a surrogate for the brown body: feared and fetishized, ancestral and hybridized, suspended between hunger and performance. Each canvas is conceived as both shrine and scream- inviting the viewer to engage with the tension between inheritance and identity.
I work with materials that carry both emotional and institutional residue—academic notes, deconstructed flags, ashes and bones—to evoke the notion that the Filipino American archive is not merely incomplete but actively suppressed. In this context, painting becomes a ritual of reconstruction: a refusal to define Filipino American art as static or singular. Rather than participate in the logic of assimilation or cultural dilution, my work insists on multiplicity—loud. Haunted. Fractured. Sacred. This practice exists in dialog with a transnational genealogy of artists whose work interrogates identity through figuration, materiality, and myth-making.
From the Philippines, I am influenced by Pacita Abad’s trapunto paintings and Rodel Tapaya’s integration of folklore into contemporary visual language. The psychological intimacy of Geraldine Javier, the textile excavations of Marina Cruz, and the surreal populism of Dex Fernandez all inform my understanding of the Filipino body as both archive and apparition.
From Japan, artists like Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami offer frameworks for playful subversion and postmodern critique. Chiho Aoshima, Aya Takano, and Fuyuko Matsui complicate trauma through surreal, corporeal landscapes, while Izumi Kato and Tomokazu Matsuyama negotiate hybridity and myth across visual cultures. I also draw from the ritual aesthetics of HORITOMO’s irezumi practice, which anchors visual meaning in the body as a permanent, performative archive.
Within the American canon, I look to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s semiotic layering and cultural grief, George Condo’s grotesque psychologies, and Raymond Pettibon’s text-image destabilization. Artists like Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon interrogate erasure and historical memory through language and silhouette, while Nick Cave and Wangechi Mutu assemble new mythologies from the material detritus of identity. From abstract expressionism, I borrow the gestural language of figures like De Kooning and the symbolic Americana of Robert Indiana and Jim Dine, recontextualizing them through a diasporic lens.
Together, these influences form an intentional synthesis—a constellation of artists whose practices rupture dominant narratives and reframe identity as iterative, embodied, and politically charged. In this light, I do not seek to finalize a definition of Filipino American art. Rather, I argue that its power lies in its refusal to resolve. My work proposes that art is not a vessel for clarity, but for contradiction: a site where myth, memory and meaning are always in flux.