What comprises the uniqueness of form and feeling in Philippine Art? The long experience with Western colonialism, particularly the three century-long Spanish period, has ingrained a deep sense of fatalism and emotional aspiration for redemption from sufferance that is seen even in contemporary art, where the global concerns of youthful joie de vivre mixes with emotional angst and a constant sense of escape from a primal prison.

Then there is the longing for a sense of belonging mixed with an ambivalence of current place-ness, as if the pre-colonial mode of ambient seafaring collides with the dread of shorelines occupied by colonizers, a sense of spatial and socio-economic drift amplified by constant national crises, as well as the global exchange between capital and labor that has now separated millions of Filipinos from their families to involuntarily work outside the country as overseas contract workers.

This is reflected in the work of Galerie Joaquin’s current ensemble of young artists, where the visual sophistication of figurative rendering, done in the western tradition of photo-surrealism, collides with an emotional expressiveness and a gift for allegorical recoding that splits along lines of self-identification, cultural ambivalence, and personal traumas visited upon mind and body.