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.

inabal

inabal

Decolonial Minimalism Founding Work (Culture - Habi)

Size: 1400 x 1400 pixels

Medium: Digital Art

Artist: IJWBAA

Year: 2025

Description:

Vibrant yet measured, this inabal textile unfurls in rhythmic sequences of geometry—zigzags, chevrons, and lozenges—woven with ancestral intent and ceremonial precision. Each band pulses with chromatic command: red, ochre, black, and earth-toned whites converge as a woven cosmogram. Repetition here is not mere pattern; it is invocation—each motif a vessel of memory, each hue a passage through ancestral time.

Inabal is not simply woven material; it is ceremony in fiber, sovereignty in thread. Crafted by Bagobo artisans on backstrap looms, its structure holds more than form—it holds worldview. The palette is not decorative whim but cosmological compass: it mirrors terrain, ritual, warfare, and kinship. This cloth doesn’t speak—it chants, encoded with spiritual and social order, surviving dispossession through intricate devotion.

Through the lens of decolonial minimalism, inabal emerges not as embellishment but as epistemology. Ornament becomes philosophy. In its visual strictness lies a generosity of meaning—mapping belief systems, land stewardship, and embodied time across the warp and weft. What may appear as abstraction is, in truth, sovereignty made visible.

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