IJWBAA [eej-wah] is a Filipino digital artist and the first Filipino recognized in Techspressionism. He is a neologist and the originator of Decolonial Minimalism —an art movement that reclaims minimalism through ancestral memory and cultural reawakening. His work earned a spot on the shortlist for the Hiiibrand Design and Illustration Awards 2024. His papers were published on Academia.edu.He was selected by David Quiles Guilló, Director of The Wrong, to participate in the 7th Edition of The Wrong Biennale - described by The New York Times as the digital world's answer to Venice Biennale - with Prayers to Ai, further cementing his standing in the international digital art community. His collected works, compiled in two volumes of I Just Wannabe an Artist, have been recognized, officially archived, cataloged, and made available in the collections of the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Museo Reina Sofía, the National Museum of the Philippines, Getty Research Institute, and other prominent cultural institutions worldwide. The two volumes are cataloged in WorldCat under OCLC Numbers 1530632939(Book 1) and 1530636063(Book 2).

Alangan

Alangan

Decolonial Minimalism Founding Work - Indigenous People

Size: 1400 x 1400 pixels

Medium: Digital Art

Artist: IJWBAA

Year: 2025

Description:

Two figures stand in chromatic dialogue—one cloaked in ochre, the other in muted beige—each rendered in elemental geometry that resists erasure. Their forms echo ancestral silhouettes: circular heads, rectangular torsos, and limbs that recall bamboo scaffolds and woven kinship. The ochre figure’s vertical white band is not decorative—it’s a mnemonic stripe, a visual syllable of lineage, perhaps a ritual vestment, perhaps a scar of memory.

Their positioning suggests interdependence rather than hierarchy. The smaller figure leans subtly inward, as if listening across generations. The shared red accents—headbands, lower garments—invoke ceremonial continuity, while the absence of facial features resists voyeuristic gaze. Instead, presence is asserted through stillness, through the refusal to perform. The gradient background, shifting from black to gray, becomes a chromatic terrain of transition—mourning, memory, and movement.

Alangan does not seek to illustrate indigeneity—it encodes it. This is not a portrait but a protocol: a visual infrastructure where restraint becomes resistance, and minimalism becomes mnemonic. IJWBAA’s Alangan asks: what if abstraction could carry ancestry? What if silence could speak in ritual tongues? This is not absence—it is essence. A reclamation through quiet geometry, a choreography of radical care and collective inheritance.

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