I am an assistant professor at the Department of Art Studies in the College of Arts and Letters of the University of the Philippines Diliman, where I teach courses in art histories and arts management. My academic experience is grounded in my longstanding interest in modernism in the visual arts, which has evolved into a sustained exploration of how art relates with the myriad ways the promise of newness can be construed in my country, with its conditions as a post-colony as my core orientation.
I completed my MA in Art Studies (Art History) at the University of the Philippines, with a thesis that explored the persistence of local abstraction in painting in the 1970s, a period when the mode of making was widely regarded as having lost its critical potential due to the cooptation of both the market and the state. In doing so, I examined various practitioners of what some have called “second-hand abstraction” and analyzed how they pointed toward discourses on the notion of nation, the primary yardstick of modernity among post-colonies. While minutiae of past writings judged abstraction by how it ‘makes’ the nation through essentialist and aspirational (re)presentations of identity, the study surfaces the complexity, if not unsettling or unmaking, of the postcolonial nation. It underscored the nation’s tentativeness and the hybridity within it, the perilous relationships it holds within and outside its territorial boundaries, and the replicative logics of empire it continues to perpetuate.
Taking off from this graduate work, I have written for academic journals on practices of abstraction in the Philippines in relation to spirituality, ecological eschatology, and the violences of colonial modernity, deploying postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives. I also curated a retrospective exhibition of one such artist, underscoring the bankruptcy of the views that conflate all of abstraction with what we call “art for art’s sake.” I also performed editorial work on the revival volume of the department journal after a three-decade hiatus, centering on the arts and the broad concept of modernity.
I have also been interested in heritage studies and how it lends a lens to the understanding of the visual arts. I have spearheaded and contributed to initiatives that dwell on "UP Diliman heritage"—from those that preoccupy themselves with objects of creative expressions to the kinds that present narratives that emanate from the voices of various members of the university community. From 2018 to 2020, I was involved in the University Collection Mapping Project where I was part of on-ground documentation of collections within the university and the development and publication of a book on the contours of the collections and the 35-volume digital catalog of objects within the project's scope. Later, I am tapped to head and be part of efforts to formulate and operationalize collections governance policies and guidelines within the university.
Contributing to the expansion of the notion of university heritage beyond the tangible, I have been part of exhibitions that presented stories of placemaking and connectedness of various individuals and groups that comprise this community. In 2019 and 2024, exhibitions that commemorate the 70th and 75th anniversary of the university campus marked by the transfer of its most enduring icon, the Oblation statue, attempted to surface the perspectives from marginalized communities that complicate a unitary view of the university's history, amid—if not because of—the institutional role of the university heritage museum that hosted it.
As part of my extension service, I conduct ad-hoc consultancy to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and deliver workshops on heritage mapping, art and object handling, and exhibition making across the regions.