5 Contemporary Filipino Artists You Need to Know

We’ve had a fruitful National Arts Month this year, filled with interesting projects that gave credence to our appreciation of art as a medium of communication. Now that it’s drawn to a close, it’s time to highlight some of the unique Filipino artists we covered in February. 

We extend our appreciation to the many gorgeous, grotesque, and gratifying art works in the country. And hopefully, the spotlight can create more love for the hard work and effort that these artists give their work. 

Jojo Austria

Held at the Alliance Française de Manille, Cross Currents was a collaboration between Qube Gallery and Eskinita Art Farm. Open from February 6 to March 9, the exhibition features Filipino artists merging Western art movements with “local themes and indigenous motifs.” The hope is that it creates a new artistic language for Filipinos to use to describe their experiences.

Among those featured was Jojo Austria, whose work focuses on contemporary topics like migration and the country’s urban sprawl. His painting “Inheritance” was featured during the exhibit, and it’s a work that uses abstraction as a way of discussing the plight of children in the Philippines as they try to study towards a better life. 

The painting makes the studying child fade into the background as the noise and rot of society surrounds and encompasses them. It’s a very provocative work, one that speaks to the current conditions of many individuals in the country. Many struggle to survive while following the blueprints of success from the past generation, and the painting highlights this well. 

Ianna Engaño

Another Filipino artist featured in the exhibit is Ianna Engaño. Her terracotta works have a playful ingenuity to them, creating interesting geometric shapes that tell stories about the everyday lives of the Filipino. 

The four-by-four terracotta works, in particular, showcase working class households without needing actual people in them. These pieces, like “Kaen, Tulog, Trabaho” and “Tabi-Tabi Po,” have an attention to detail where the atmosphere of chaos and haggardness is portrayed through small stone pieces with a strong sense of accuracy. 

It’s defiant, humorous, and honest about the lives of the working-class Filipino. It also helps Engaño stand out as a unique, socially-conscious artist working in the scene today. 

Mark Orozco Justiniani

Moving away to other exhibitions, we have Filipino artist Mark Justiniani. His recent exhibit in Ateneo Art Gallery, Void of Spectacles, wows its audience with its use of mirrors and glass to tell autobiographical stories from its author. 

It is truly as spectacular as its name suggests. The precise architecture, combined with the mirrors that create the voids, provides us with visions that feel dizzyingly eternal. The way it interrogates the country’s history and the author’s past adds to its bravado, and gives it a hint of personal resonance that bigger spectacles don’t have. 

You can read more about the exhibit in our coverage here.

Ryan Villamael

Ryan Villamael’s work in Return, My Gracious Hour! shows how art can continually move forward by interrogating the way art has portrayed the past. Villamael’s usage of cut-outs and collages tell a story of the way Filipinos have been maligned by colonialism. It tells of how colonial perspectives have informed the way we look at ourselves. And through that, it has warped how we tell our own stories. 

This Filipino artist’s work feels important because it creates the links between the artificiality of accepted norms and beliefs, and the need to puncture and curate narratives. The works are informed by history, and it informs the way we look at our history moving forward. 

You can read more about the exhibit in our coverage here.

Maria Pureza Escaño

Pintô Art Museum featured Escaño’s work during Art Fair Philippines 2024. This Filipino artist’s works have an ethereal quality to it that makes her work feel epic in scope. The detailed paintings featuring different natural landscapes and forestry feels breathtaking to witness. 

Her works “Inamorata” and “El soltero feliz” showed her mastery of making a natural landscape feel heavenly. There’s a magical quality to the work she has made, one distinctly Filipino in tone. In “Inamorata,” especially, the protagonist feels like a fairy tale with how she seems to float in the foreground of a fantastical setting.  

Filipino Artists To Watch

Art is a necessity for our day-to-day life. It brings us hope and inspiration, freedom to critique systems honestly, and interrogates our society and its approach to life. One needs to give their appreciation to the great artists working today. Their work builds the backbones of the culture of the Philippines today. However we show it, we must show it, as art doesn’t just exist beyond the artist but inside them—a part of them that reflects who we are and our society as a whole. 

Read more: Contemporary Arts in the Philippines: An Introduction