MANILA, Philippines – For its 12th year, Art Fair Philippines moved into its new home at the Ayala Triangle, away from its usual spot at The Link. The five-level carpark had made way for many of Art Fair’s past iterations, and perhaps contributed to its reputation as one of the country’s most anticipated art events over the years.
For many Art Fair regulars, The Link may have been hard to let go of, but the fair’s movement to this new location has allowed it to put a spotlight on numerous new displays and exhibitions worth checking out, and this year’s edition can attest to that.
Paintings in motion
While walking through the halls of this year’s Art Fair, it didn’t take long before a big crowd formed at the Lopez Museum and Library, one of the three-day event’s first few booths.
Currently under renovation, the Lopez Museum and Library put on display select oil paintings by legendary painters Juan Luna, Fabian Dela Rosa, and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo — for Art Fair goers to see up close.
Merely viewing these paintings as they are was already an experience in itself. But you would quickly begin to notice that people began pulling their phones out, presumably to snap some photos of the iconic painters’ art in front of them.
When you take a peek at everyone’s screens, though, you’d quickly realize that the paintings they were taking photos of were moving and had music playing along with it, with the help of an app called Artivive.
Attendants at the booth would tell newcomers to scan a QR code to download the app, and if you pointed it at any painting there, it would come to life through augmented reality (AR). This is the Lopez Museum’s first time hosting an attraction like this at Art Fair, where even the boy in Luna’s 1883 painting El Flautista began to blink, breathe, and play a captivating tune (that you could hear, too) with his flute.
The same was done for the works of Carlos “Botong” Francisco and Mauro “Malang” Santos, whose murals and paintings were given motion and music.
Childhood nostalgia
Several turns away from the Lopez Museum and Library’s spot, there was another exhibit that many attendees flocked to: Carlo Tanseco’s “Sari-Sari Sabi-Sabi.” In this solo setup, Tanseco puts a new spin on staple Filipino snacks you can find at any sari-sari store by integrating positive messages into the parts of their packaging that contain text.
Asked why he chose childhood snacks as a subject for this solo exhibition, Tanseco explained that they reminded him of happier times.
“These represent a time when everything was carefree and these represented the rewards [we were given]. If we did a good job in school, they’d give you candy or treats. If you were hungry, you would cross with your friend to the neighborhood sari-sari store, go to the tindera (vendor), and ask her for snacks. These are markers for every significant moment of my life,” he told Rappler.
Tanseco shared that it was important for him to maintain the general visual structure of these snacks’ packaging, which meant that conceptualization took even longer than finishing the pieces themselves.
He maintains the general visual structure of these snacks — like Chocnut, Chippy, Cloud9, and Nagaraya — but makes a slight yet impactful tweak with the integration of positive messages into the parts of the packaging that contain text. In the world of “Sari-Sari Sabi-Sabi,” Haw Flakes are “Heaven Blessed,” while Jack ‘n Jill’s Chippy are “Just Be Happy.”
“I want them to smile when they see it. I want them to remember a time that was simpler and less hectic, when a sari-sari store was the center of your world,” Tanseco says as he talks about what he wants people to take away from viewing the exhibit.
Internet culture and all things interactive
The bigger space at Art Fair meant that there was also more room for even more immersive installations — and one of those was “KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN,” a digital exhibition by 21 Filipino artists.
Staying true to its name, the digital art exhibition’s individual works are viewable through Pisonet computers. Like any comp shop experience, you take a seat on a plastic stool, put on a pair headphones, and click around the websites shown on the screen yourself.
“I’ve always been interested in art and technology, and I’ve been making websites for a very long time. I think I was just like a kid left alone with the internet, and that was the thing I wanted to do. I wanted to make a space for myself on the internet I spent so much of my time on,” said exhibit curator Chia Amisola, who shared that it was their Computer Science and art study that led them to internet art.
Amisola also said that while internet art has a rich history from the ’90s, it’s rarely seen as an artistic medium nowadays.
“There’s digital art, but then to think of the websites we encounter every day as art, it’s kind of strange. I think about it almost like architecture. I want to think about the things we spend all our time in as an artistic medium,” they told Rappler.
This is not the first time “KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN” has been mounted. It made its debut in June 2024 in New York, where there’s an entirely different audience being exposed to a setup that comes almost naturally to Filipinos.
“They knew how to navigate it, but the makeup of it in the form of a karaoke machine was interesting to them. It was new. It’s for one, not a very common technology, and it challenged their views of intimacy because for Filipinos it’s such a common thing. Bringing it to Comuna, it was such a natural thing for people to pick up and watch each other over the shoulders and just enjoy it,” Amisola said.
The entire exhibit was distinctly Filipino. At the entrance, there was a wooden TV stand with a doily table runner over it. It had an old TV, a Pisonet LED sign, and arguably most strikingly, a small photo of KapKek, the YouTuber behind the iconic Jhepoy Dizon rant that remains a huge part of Filipino meme culture.
Filipinos seem to be suckers for interactive exhibits, as the switches on Roan Alvarez’s Homo Novus transmedia piece didn’t go untouched. Here, you turn the yellow switches up and down for certain colors to appear.
It’s safe to say, then, that at this year’s Art Fair, there was something that catered to every generation and every type of art enthusiast in one way or another. As more individuals of different age groups are drawn in by these different offerings, there becomes an even larger (and most welcome) interest in contemporary Filipino art. – Rappler.com