Buen CALUBAYAN (b.1980) investigates the mechanisms of world-making and the techniques of perception—of what happens in-between the self and the world in terms of mediation, image-making, and the production of devices that enable such operations. In art history through landscape painting, picturing of nature and of the world around us is skillfully employed with the renaissance technique of linear perspective. He took as an entry point this diagrammatic approach in reading 19th century colonial paintings in the Philippines to plot the coordinates of a specific regional context within what was becoming the broader art world. The method involves the rethinking of the notions of the horizon, the vanishing point, and grounding as well as the mechanisms that make it visible such as framing, archiving historiography, and accessibility.
Read MoreBased in Manila, Philippines, Buen CALUBAYAN majored in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Santo Tomas. He worked as a preservation assistant at UST Museum of Arts and Sciences from 2002 to 2006, then at the National Museum of the Philippines from 2010 to 2013. Meanwhile, from 2008 to 2018, he took part in a number of residency programs in Australia, Japan, and Singapore. He has held 12 solo exhibitions since 2007 and has exhibited his work in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila, Philippines); Gwangju Museum of Art (Gwangju, Korea); and Arario Gallery Shanghai (Shanghai, China).
Text courtesy Arario Gallery.
