The Wall is two figures stand side by side yet divided by a stark white wall, embodying the quiet tension of shared origins fractured by unspoken distance.
The First Scar I Ever Drew
July 2023
I remember the exact brushstroke. It wasn’t a line — it was a scar.
By mid-2023, my work began leaning inward. I wasn’t just reacting to the outside world. I was resurfacing what I’d buried — grief, childhood, silence, the textures of rural Pangasinan.
My art became a kind of séance. I wasn’t illustrating memory. I was materializing it.
There were no literal forms, but the feelings were crystal clear: the heat of my lola’s stories, the dissonance of speaking English in a Filipino mind, the wounds that had no English word.
Scar became shape. Silence became pattern. And suddenly, I wasn’t painting with pixels anymore — I was painting with memory itself.
Family, a bond woven through time, connecting past, present, and future in shared memory and creation.
Digital Ancestors
September 2023
I never met most of my ancestors, but I feel them every time I make art.
In Western art, “the artist” is a singular genius. But in my world, creation is collective. A collaboration between the living, the dead, and those not yet born.
My works began to speak in textures: river shapes, amulet patterns, the rhythm of prayer in my mother’s voice. These were not references — they were returns.
Tech, for me, wasn’t alienating. It was ancestral. A way of communing.
I began to realize that even if I made my work in silence, I was never alone. I was painting with ghosts — and they remembered everything.
Magkasintahan are Aeta lovers which are Indigenous people of the Philippines, known for their deep ancestral connection to the land, resilience, and rich cultural traditions that have endured despite centuries of colonization.
Naming What Was Taken
November 2023
This phase wasn’t always beautiful. It was grieving. Naming.
I started confronting what colonization took from us — not just land, but ways of feeling, of knowing.
I found myself creating works that looked like maps, but with missing places. Like poems with redacted verses.
I wasn’t just remembering. I was pointing. Saying: Look what they tried to erase.
Decolonization, for me, wasn’t a theory. It was a process of creative mourning. A way of building a language from the pieces that remained.
These works were messy, layered, contradictory. Just like history.
But this was the moment I knew: something was forming. Not Western. Not nostalgic. Something new.
continue reading Phase 4: Decolonial Minimalism