John
Yau remembers an inimitable artist who embraced his queerness, and wonders what
he might say about his acceptance into the mainstream today

John Yau

Martin Wong, the perennial outsider, answers back

‘Becoming an artist felt natural to me. Both of my parents are artists and my grandfather was an architect, so I was surrounded by conversations about creative practices from a young age. One of my favorite things to do growing up in Barbados was to sit with my grandfather and look at his designs and blueprints for houses. I also watched my parents work. They took my desire to create seriously and let me use their materials.

Isabel: Of course it was a challenge to balance our domestic life with our art practice. But we found a way to do that with objects we use every day, like baby sweaters, so life and art was never really separate. We have our strengths, we know where each other stands, and we support that. It’s about finding ways to connect and using materials to understand things, including situations and challenges that need to be addressed. As parents with five children, being artists was not easy but it had to work. 
Alfredo: Being married with children became an extension of our studio practice. Now we have a family collective. Working with our kids, we created Fruitjuice Factori Studio for ‘The National 4: Australian Art Now’ in Sydney. The installation is made entirely from cardboard houses, and extends our project for ‘Dreamhome’, the inaugural exhibition at Sydney Modern. As the children have started their own lives, and we were separated by the pandemic, we are always finding ways to come together by creating artworks, which makes space for us to reconnect. That’s the dynamic that Isabel and I have developed through the years.

Isabel: Our way of working also has a lot to do with growing up in the Philippines. There are festivals and feasts we have every year when the community decorates the streets and spends time outside. But this goes beyond Christianity. It goes back to the rituals of our ancestors. In that sense, we create objects for rituals and spaces for community. This kind of sharing is so important, and that energy is something that can be felt but not necessarily read in our work.
Alfredo: Our MACAN exhibition does open these dimensions. Director Aaron Seeto specifically selected works that explore cultural, political, and even topographical and geographical connections between the Philippines, Indonesia, and across Southeast Asia and beyond. One early work we are showing, Presences and Absences, was created for the Havana Biennial in 1997. We collected toothbrushes from people in the Philippines and Cuba and carpeted the floor of a former bishop's house with them. The idea was to create a space to share our histories. Philippines and Cuba were both colonized by the Spanish and shaped by global trade routes, and we connected that with the toothbrush as something personal. To get rid of your toothbrush would be like by losing part of your identity, which relates to the experience of colonization. 
Isabel: People always react differently when we ask for their toothbrushes! Some write their name on their brush, others even bring them to us in a box, most people are hesitant. These engagements are so important to our process because they are a tool to start a conversation. Wherever we go, we always try to understand what's happening around us; to immerse ourselves in places and connect with the communities we encounter with openness – to hear their stories through the objects we collect.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/69602/Dominic-Chambers?lang=en">Dominic Chambers</a>’s oil on linen Warm Morning (2023) likewise illuminates that boundlessness. A Black figure creates a silhouette along the window ledge they sit on, framing a magnificent orange cloudscape across which birds fly freely. In relation to a similar composition, Window Sitter (Daybreak) (2021), Chambers has described an aim ‘to provide a scene of a Black subject peering out of the window and into a space where one’s circumstances (political or environmental) cease to be a concern.’ This untethering of subjectivity transforms the subject and metamorphosizes its context, because external conditions lose the monopoly on defining what someone or something is. 'Windows gives us poetry and remind us that the world offers itself to our imagination,’ Chambers points out. ‘Peering into those transparent portals, the window becomes a site for meditative reflection – on a day, a concern, or idea.’

Alfredo: Our interest in understanding the connection between us, being Filipino, and the rest of the world, started when we began travelling. We discover things all the time. Like when we read about Cuba and learned that their national hero, José Martí, was best friends with our national hero, José Rizal. We talk about these connections through objects that can be read as universal, because people anywhere can relate to them. That strategy is very conscious for us. The artwork is the documentation of all the exchanges that transpired while making it, which remain invisible but for us compose the art form itself.
Isabel: That’s why we felt Presences and Absences
would be a good introduction to our practice in terms of how we work with materials. The installation is also site and space specific, so its form and context changes wherever we install it. At MACAN, the toothbrushes will surround a ramp that leads to the rest of the show. We’ll also be showing works from the ‘Left Wing Project’, which we started in Indonesia during a residency in Yogyakarta in 2015. We were invited by curator Alia Swastika and didn’t have the obligation to produce anything, so we spent time meeting people.

Here, beauty becomes an absurd pursuit dictated by external pressures. Jonny Negron distils that burden in two flame-toned paintings, each magnifying the intense emotional charge that unobtainable ideals can trigger when communicated through the representations of dominant cultures, whether in classical painting or commercial advertising. In Poison (2023), an orange hand holds an apple-shaped bottle of Dior’s eponymous perfume like a gemstone, its silver cap glinting like the North Star. In Vitriol (2023), a muscular body is accentuated by a rippling orange shirt burning at the arms, which shield the figure’s face save for an angry eye glaring from behind one hand. The work’s title is painted below in bright yellow caps, highlighting its double meaning as sulfuric acid and acidic fury, which circles back to the painting’s seething character.
Negron associates these paintings with the idea of anger calcifying into poisonous resentment, and the importance of redirecting wrath towards transformation. This alchemical call to convert rage into revolution strikes at the heart of ‘Public Private’. In this transcultural gathering of painters, the canvas transcends into an open-ended universe populated by autonomous beings rather than defined subjects.

AA: We’ve created a new wing work for the MACAN show. Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere combines 92 birdcages to make the shape of an airplane wing. We’ve been reading about songbirds in Indonesia, which poachers catch and bring to the island of Java for their songs, which is very ironic in a way. While the birds create this social space for humans who keep them to compete in bird singing contests, they are kept in this little cage alone.
IA: We always look at how social spaces are created through objects, but here it’s the birds creating social spaces. That’s why we are showing the empty cages in the shape of a wing together with a sound composition of songs by these birds. We always return to the wing as a form as it goes back to ideas of flight, freedom, migration, and refuge.
<hr>
<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15854/Alfredo-and-Isabel-Aquilizan">Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan</a> are represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1466/Yavuz-Gallery">Yavuz Gallery</a> (Singapore, Sydney)
Isabel and Alfredo 'Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere' Until October 8, 2023 Museum MACAN Jakarta 
Stephanie Bailey is Art Basel's Conversations Curator, Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as the Art Basel Content Advisor and Editor, Asia. 
Published on June 27, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan,&nbsp;Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country), 2018.&nbsp;Installation view of 'Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence,' Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Chengdu, China, 2018. 2.&nbsp;Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Here, There, and Everywhere (In-habit: Project Another Country), 2018. Installation view of 'Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence,' Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Chengdu, China, 2018. 3.&nbsp;Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan,&nbsp;Wings Baanan Series – Baby Wings, 2021.&nbsp;Courtesy of Yavuz Gallery. © Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan.

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How artists are redefining identity through painting in the 21st century

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