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).

Batak

Batak

Decolonial Minimalism Founding Work - Indigenous People

Size: 1400 x 1400 pixels

Medium: Digital Art

Artist: IJWBAA

Year: 2025

Description:

Batak presents two figures in elemental geometry—circular heads, elongated limbs, and chromatic restraint—yet each shape pulses with ancestral resonance. The red headbands worn by both figures are not mere adornments; they are ritual signals, mnemonic threads linking generations. The smaller figure’s white beaded necklace punctuates the composition like a syllable of lineage, a quiet invocation of memory and identity.

The background gradient, shifting from black to golden yellow, evokes a temporal field—mourning to illumination, dusk to dawn. A white horizontal line bisects the canvas, not as a divider but as a horizon of inheritance, anchoring the figures in shared cosmology. Their stillness is deliberate, a refusal to perform, a stance of witnessing that honors presence without spectacle.

Batak is not abstraction—it is encoded ancestry. IJWBAA’s visual grammar resists ornamental excess and reclaims essence, asking: what if geometry could carry ritual? What if silence could speak in indigenous tongues? This work offers a visual infrastructure for radical care, where every line and absence becomes a vessel for collective legacy.

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