On Two Varieties of Contemporary Philippine Shit Art, or Why the Emperor’s New Clothes Still Fit So Well in the Tropics
On Two Varieties of Contemporary Philippine Shit Art, or Why the Emperor's New Clothes Still Fit So Well in the Tropics
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
August 2, 2026
Let us begin, as all honest criticism must, with a confession of weariness. The contemporary Philippine art scene in these overheated, over-documented years has perfected a peculiar alchemy: it can turn genuine talent, genuine struggle, and genuine historical wound into two equally fragrant but differently packaged varieties of shit. One is the solemn, theory-soaked shit that arrives with footnotes and a solemn face. The other is the glossy, market-ready shit that arrives with an Instagram caption and a price list. Both claim to speak for the Filipino condition. Both, in their purest forms, speak mostly for themselves.
Consider first the high-minded variety. You know the type. An installation of salvaged colonial-era debris—rusted cans, faded prayer cards, bits of American soft-drink signage—arranged with the solemnity of a wake. The wall text invokes “postcolonial ambivalence,” “counter-archives,” and the spectral return of the repressed. The artist has read Spivak, or at least the Instagram version of Spivak. The work performs grief as spectacle. It is careful never to risk actual ugliness or actual humor; instead it offers a curated melancholy that flatters the viewer's progressive credentials. Look how deeply we feel the weight of history, it whispers, while the actual laborers who might have lived with those objects remain safely offstage. This is shit art of the elevated kind: it mistakes citation for insight and trauma-as-décor for confrontation. Its greatest achievement is to make the colonial wound look tasteful enough for a Makati living room or a biennial catalog.
Now the other pile. This one is brighter, more photogenic, and far more efficient at monetizing attention. It is the slick figurative painting or the high-finish abstract that looks as if it were designed by a committee of collectors and algorithms. Surfaces gleam. Colors pop under gallery lights. The subject is often a stylized Filipino face or body rendered with just enough "local flavor" to signal authenticity without the inconvenience of specificity. Or it is pure formal play—drips, grids, digital glitches—presented as radical when it is merely competent. This variety does not bother with theory; it bothers with visibility. Process videos, studio livestreams, carefully staged "failures" that somehow still look marketable. Here the shit is transactional. It understands that in the attention economy, narrative liquidity is the real medium. The work does not need to mean much; it needs to circulate. And circulate it does, from fair booth to online viewing room to secondary market, trailing hashtags like a bridal train.
What makes the comparison instructive is not that one is worse than the other. Both are failures of nerve dressed up as strategy. The solemn variety fails by substituting inherited critical language for lived observation. It treats the Filipino present as a museum of unfinished colonial business, forgetting that the present is also traffic, heat, opportunistic politics, and the quiet daily inventiveness of people who do not have the luxury of ambivalence. The glossy variety fails by treating the same present as raw material for brand-building. It flattens complexity into shareable affect. One performs depth; the other performs accessibility. Neither risks the harder labor of looking long enough at something ordinary until it becomes strange again.
There is a philosophical sting here that goes beyond taste. Art, at its least embarrassing, is a form of attention that refuses to be fully instrumentalized. It is a way of staying with difficulty without converting it immediately into either moral capital or market capital. Both varieties of shit art we have been discussing are, in their different ways, allergic to that refusal. The theoretical installation converts difficulty into discourse that can be cited. The market painting converts it into imagery that can be sold. In both cases the thing itself—whatever stubborn, uncooperative reality the artist began with—is processed into something safer and more useful. The result is an art ecology that rewards the appearance of seriousness or the appearance of relevance while quietly punishing the slower, less photogenic work of simply making something that does not already know how to explain itself.
And yet one must remain humane about this. Artists are not abstract moral agents floating above the economy. They live in a country where institutional support is uneven, where collectors still hold disproportionate power, and where the pressure to be visible has become a professional survival skill. Silence, as some of us have noted elsewhere, is no longer neutral. The quiet painter who waits for the knock on the studio door risks being permanently overlooked. The earnest conceptualist who refuses to package trauma as content risks being dismissed as naive. The system itself produces these two shit arts as adaptive strategies. To mock them without acknowledging the conditions that make them rational is merely another form of bad faith—the critic’s version of the same self-regard.
Still, acknowledgment is not absolution. The fact that a strategy is understandable does not make the work less shitty. We can feel sympathy for the artist while still saying, with as much precision and humor as we can muster, that the installation of colonial debris has become a tired genre, and that the high-finish figurative painting with just the right amount of “Filipino soul” has become another. Both have long since exhausted their capacity to surprise. Both have become, in their purest market and biennial forms, exercises in professional positioning rather than acts of attention.
Perhaps the real philosophical question is whether a culture can continue to produce art that matters when the dominant incentives reward only the most legible forms of seriousness and the most legible forms of desirability. The answer, of course, is yes—somewhere, in studios that are not livestreaming, in practices that do not announce their decolonial credentials in the wall text, in works that still risk looking incomplete or unfashionable. Those works exist. They simply do not always know how to shout. And in a scene that has learned to monetize the shout, their silence is easily mistaken for absence.
So we are left with the usual critical task: to keep distinguishing, without cruelty but also without false kindness, between the work that uses the available languages of the moment and the work that is used by them. One kind of shit art drapes itself in theory and calls it resistance. The other drapes itself in finish and calls it relevance. Both are, in the end, forms of accommodation. The better art—rare, stubborn, sometimes ungainly—still tries, however imperfectly, to refuse the accommodation. It is not always successful. But at least it has not yet learned to smile for the camera while it fails.
Specific Filipino artists who quietly (or not so quietly) refuse the two dominant flavors of contemporary Philippine shit art—the solemn, theory-draped postcolonial installation that packages trauma as legible discourse, and the glossy, narrative-liquid market painting designed for circulation and collectors—tend to share a few stubborn traits. They prioritize process over packaging, material stubbornness over conceptual fluency, community entanglement over professional branding, and a willingness to remain slightly illegible or inconvenient. They do not entirely escape the market or the biennial circuit (few can), but their practices repeatedly choose the longer, less photogenic route.
Leslie de Chavez and the Lucban Alternative
Leslie de Chavez stands as one of the clearest counter-examples. Based in Lucban, Quezon, he founded and has sustained **Project Space Pilipinas** (PSP) since 2007 as an independent, non-profit artist-run initiative that relocated from Manila to his hometown precisely to escape the gravitational pull of the capital's fair-and-gallery economy. PSP functions less as a white-cube showcase and more as a porous laboratory: residencies, community workshops, collaborations with local weavers, farmers, and festival participants, and programming that treats the townspeople as co-authors rather than audience.
His own work draws on Lucban's rituals—Pahiyas harvest decorations, Holy Week processions, Higantes—yet refuses the easy postcolonial citation game. Materials are local and often unglamorous (rice, dried pig intestines, festival remnants). The resulting installations and paintings interrogate faith, power, and colonial residue through lived participation rather than wall-text theory. De Chavez has spoken of giving locals agency in the making—letting them apply gold paint, reshape symbols—so that the work remains entangled with the place instead of being extracted from it for export. This is not the solemn installation that flatters progressive viewers with curated ambivalence; nor is it the sleek object optimized for Instagram or auction. It is slower, messier, and deliberately provincial in the best sense: rooted without being folkloric.
Poklong Anading: Process as Resistance
Poklong Anading's practice is a sustained argument against both varieties of shit. Trained as a painter but working across photography, video, sculpture, and installation, he approaches materials with an Arte Povera sensibility—found objects, discarded fishing nets (“ghost nets”), construction debris, marine waste—and lets them dictate the form rather than imposing a pre-packaged narrative. Recent work recovered from Davao Gulf waters turns abandoned nets into sculptures and videos that register environmental damage without converting it into either moral capital or market spectacle. He has described himself as thinking *with* the materials as they transform, not driving an overt agenda.
This method resists the theoretical installation's demand for legible postcolonial framing and the commercial painting's demand for finish and shareability. Anading's “Anonymity” series (people holding mirrors that reflect sunlight into the camera) and process-based installations treat observation and collection as the real work. Value itself becomes the subject: what is discarded, what circulates, what remains stubbornly local. The results are often uncooperative—difficult to summarize in a caption, resistant to easy consumption—yet they reward prolonged attention. In a scene that rewards narrative liquidity, Anading's insistence on material and temporal duration functions as a quiet form of refusal.
Nona Garcia: The Quiet of Looking
Nona Garcia, who relocated from Manila to Baguio, offers another model of resistance through sheer attentiveness. Her large-scale realist paintings of Cordillera landscapes, ordinary objects, and, in series such as "After Artists," the backs of fellow artists refuse both spectacle and theoretical packaging. The X-ray works—bones, relics, indigenous artifacts rendered luminous and flawed—make the hidden visible without turning revelation into drama or marketable pathos. Faces are often turned away; the ordinary is given a monumental scale without being romanticized.
Garcia's practice is process-heavy (long studio hours, meticulous rendering) and geographically decentered. By living and working in Baguio, she steps outside the Manila fair circuit's tempo. The work does not announce its decolonial credentials; it simply looks hard at what is in front of it—rubble, landscape, the anonymous back of a peer—and trusts that sustained attention can still produce meaning that does not need to be pre-explained or pre-sold. This is the opposite of both the solemn installation that arrives with footnotes and the glossy painting that arrives with a caption ready for sharing.
Broader Patterns and the Artist-Run Ecosystem
These artists do not operate in isolation. They are supported by (and help sustain) a network of artist-run and independent spaces that deliberately slow the tempo: Gravity Art Space’s two-month exhibitions and anonymous year-enders; Kalawakan Spacetime’s multidisciplinary, anti-centralized programming; the lingering spirit of Green Papaya Art Projects (founded by Norberto Roldan and Donna Miranda), which for years prioritized experimental, cross-disciplinary exchange over sales. Spaces like 98B COLLABoratory and others continue the older tradition of Shop 6 and Big Sky Mind—venues that treat the studio and the conversation as more important than the transaction.
What unites these practices is a shared skepticism toward the two dominant accommodations of the current scene. They do not pretend that the market or institutions can be ignored—de Chavez still shows internationally, Anading works with galleries, Garcia has institutional recognition—but they refuse to let those systems dictate the primary logic of the work. Process is allowed to remain visible and incomplete. Community is treated as collaborator rather than content. Materials are allowed to stay awkward. Looking is valued over announcing.
In the end, their resistance is less a heroic stance than a sustained preference for the unglamorous labor of attention. In a Philippine art ecology that has learned to monetize both solemnity and visibility with impressive efficiency, that preference remains rare, fragile, and necessary.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art. Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philanthropy while working for institutions simultaneously early on.
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