The artist, MM Yu, in her recent show landpaintings, continues to explore the mind’s recapitulation of the world: the framing of reality. There is a question that lingers with each attempt to acquire reality—what can we really take from it? Having worked on both photography and painting, MM Yu has been susceptible to the problematic conditions of representation in each medium and, to a greater extent, of how the two can overlap and provide further difficulties to the narrowing down of reality’s essence.

Her paintings, since her early experiments of letting paint drip freely onto the canvas, have always took on a kind of anti-pictorial stance, which can be said is very much in opposition with her practice as a photographer. But her painting, as an ‘allover’ design of a process, adheres more to the conscious aspirations of image-making, rather than say, the rhythmic antecedents of a Pollock modeled through chance or the decorative, precariously balanced motifs of Pattern Painters during the ‘80s. Yu’s, with her more pre-determined approach, maintains the vital role that memory plays in her art: “the colors are swatches of pigment recorded from a specific space in an environment, and the process of making the painting is a gesture of framing what was a previously unframed reality.”

The captured moment, in MM Yu’s art portray more than mere recording, more than mere custody of the thing It even goes beyond memory and its extraction of the image’s essence through colors and perceived correlations. More than possession, it acts as a kind of fulfillment—of both the painting and the picture’s self-realization through color, of both photographer and painter yielding to the perfection of such event.

MM Yu is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009) and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She received her BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines and was mentored by the late Roberto Chabet. MM Yu works with photography and painting.

-Cocoy Lumbao

Image: © MM Yu
landpaintings
2013