ETHOSMy work engages with Filipino American identity in a cultural landscape that demands categorical simplicity from lives 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. Growing up, I often felt both invisible and stereotyped. Painting became my way out of that box. In defiance of the pristine expectations imposed on how we’re supposed to look, act, and produce, my work foregrounds 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. The materials I use—old homework, academic scraps, and fragments of personal history—carry symbolic weight, making the surface itself feel like it has lived a life of its own. Lastly, cubist structure is used to fracture and reconstruct the body, mirroring the way identity is shaped, split and stitched together. Yet I contend with the discomfort that my ambitions—both artistic and professional—may inadvertently reinforce the system I seek to critique. In this context, painting becomes a ritual of deconstruction as much as reconstruction: a refusal to define the mythos of the “model minority” as static or singular. Rather than participate in the binary logic of assimilation or cultural dilution, my work insists on multiplicity—messy, unresolved, irreducible, filial, fractured, haunted, and at times, complicit. This practice emerges from the inheritance of a transnational genealogy of artists interrogating identity through figuration, materiality, and mythology. From the Philippines, I draw inspiration from Pacita Abad’s trapunto paintings and Rodel Tapaya’s integration of folklore into contemporary visual language. From Japan, I look to Chiho Aoshima, Aya Takano, and Fuyuko Matsui—artists who complicate trauma through surreal, corporeal landscapes—alongside Izumi Kato and Tomokazu Matsuyama, whose works explore hybridity and visual contradiction. Within the American canon, I am influenced by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s semiotic layering and cultural grief, George Condo’s grotesque psychologies, and Kara Walker’s interrogation of historical memory and erasure. Together, these influences form an intentional synthesis that represent the mixed inheritance of Filipino heritage and the melting pot within the Asian American diasporic lens— 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 a broken mirror that allows us to sit in the contradiction: a site where histories, memories and meaning are always in flux.