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).

Ata

Ata

Decolonial Minimalism Founding Work - Indigenous People

Size: 1400 x 1400 pixels

Medium: Digital Art

Artist: IJWBAA

Year: 2025

Description:

Two figures emerge from a bright blue field, their forms distilled into circles and stripes, yet resonant with ancestral weight. The larger figure wears a red-and-white striped hat—a chromatic echo of woven headgear, a mnemonic crest of ritual memory. Their torsos, rendered as bold red circles with horizontal bands, resist ornamentation while invoking textile rhythms and ceremonial attire. The smaller figure, slightly recessed, mirrors the larger one in form but not in scale, suggesting generational echo rather than hierarchy.

The white horizontal lines slicing through the blue background are not mere design—they are mnemonic thresholds, visual axes of inheritance and continuity. These lines intersect the figures like ancestral scaffolds, grounding them in a shared cosmology. Their beige limbs and heads, unmarked by facial features, assert presence without spectacle, resisting caricature and colonial gaze. Their stillness is not passive—it is a stance of witnessing, a quiet choreography of remembrance.

Ata is not abstraction—it is encoded ancestry. IJWBAA’s visual grammar refuses excess and reclaims essence, asking: what if geometry could carry ritual? What if chromatic restraint could amplify indigenous voice? This work does not depict—it performs. It offers a visual infrastructure for radical care, where every stripe, every silence, every shape becomes a vessel for collective legacy.

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