IJWBAA [eej-wah] is a Filipino digital artist and the first Filipino recognized in the Techspressionism movement. He is a neologist and the originator of Decolonial Minimalism—an art movement that reclaims minimalism through ancestral memory and cultural reawakening. His 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.

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Becoming Decolonial

The Living Journal of IJWBAA

PHASE IV: DECOLONIAL MINIMALISM


To Reduce Is to Reclaim

“I wasn’t simplifying. I was stripping away the lies. Minimalism, in my hands, became a form of protest — and possibility.” - pao

Aeta Family

Aeta Family A tribute to resilience and continuity, where ancestral ties endure through time, whispering stories of identity, survival, and quiet strength.

I Finally Gave It a Name

Feb 2024


It took two years, but I finally named what I was making:

Decolonial Minimalism

The words came quietly, after a storm of practice. They came not from theory, but from survival.

My works were never just minimal. They carried weight — of memory, violence, resistance. But they didn’t shout. They whispered.

I realized I wasn’t reducing to beautify. I was removing to reveal. Erasing what was imposed. Leaving what was true.

This wasn’t Rothko. This was mine.

I named it because I needed language. Not for the art world. For myself. To mark a line in the sand and say: This is where I begin again.

Figures

Figures is a visual testament to fragmented memory and resistance, where abstract forms reconstruct lost histories and defy imposed erasure.

Kizumeizukaka: The Archive That Couldn’t Be Colonized

April 2022


When The Flux Review invited me to present a solo exhibition, I didn’t want to showcase — I wanted to exorcise.

The show was called Kizumeizukaka (I-J-W-B-A-A). The word doesn’t exist. I made it up. Like a memory we lost the words for.

It was a virtual archive of fractured culture, rewritten myths, and symbols that refused to behave.

The digital gallery looked like a shrine, a fracture, and a wound all at once.

But it was also a promise: that even if we’ve been colonized, digitized, and silenced — our stories still glitch their way through.

Kizumeizukaka wasn’t a show. It was a survival file.

The Screen

The Screen is a fractured lens through which history, memory, and identity glitch into visibility, resisting erasure and shaping a future beyond imposed narratives.

The Future Is in Fragments

May 2024


I no longer fear fragmentation. I work inside it.

I don’t want to reconstruct a perfect past. I want to live in the rupture.

Decolonial Minimalism is not clean. It’s not tidy. It’s not a neat ending.

It’s an invitation: to look at the broken and see a map.

I still don’t have full answers. But I’ve built a practice that lets me ask the right questions.

Who decides what is valuable?

Who taught us what beauty looks like?

Who told us silence was safe?

My art is not an escape. It is an entrance — into a Filipino future we haven’t fully imagined yet.

go back to Phase I: Inception