Exhibitions
Silverlens Galleries, Manila
Apr 20 - May 20, 2023
All images by courtesy of Silverlens Galleries
Silverlens presents Spirited Traces, the third installment in the sequence of exhibitions on Santiago Bose conceived by Filipino art historian, curator, and critic Dr. Patrick Flores in 2019. As a conclusion to the series, Spirited Traces closely reads the artist’s form and language. It stems from the effort of the earlier initiations to stage, first, the impulse of the intelligence (Bare Necessities, 2019), and second, the sites that specified his endeavor (Striking Affinities, 2021).
Le Peril Jaune
Both the internal syntax and the potency of the surface create the means by which Bose articulates his practice, alongside his significant engagements with communities across geographies and within vicinities. Discernible in his creative instinct is the quickness to mix materials, cite references across histories, subject his visual space to the stress and plenitude of codes, and thus render the enterprise highly mediated: dense, lively, hectic, even impish. These gestures eventually translate to palimpsest, textual inscription, collage, and later, installation. In many ways, Bose was an exemplar of the mixed-media repertoire, which may well be productively inflected as intermedia, the better to cast it as a cognate of his translocal sympathies. This exhibition proposes an attentive study of Bose’s fecund artistic acumen, following through the previous presentations on his resources as an aesthetic agent as well as the different ecologies that enhanced their conviction and generosity.
Santiago Bose (July 25, 1949 – December 3, 2002, Baguio City, Philippines) was a mixed-media artist from the Philippines. Bose co-founded the Baguio Arts Guild, and was also an educator, community organizer and art theorist.
Santiago Bose
He co-founded the Baguio Arts Guild and often used indigenous media in his work. Bose aimed to raise awareness of cultural concerns in the Philippines and focused on the resilience of indigenous cultures in the face of colonialism. He was the founding president of the Baguio Arts Guild and played a key role in establishing the Baguio International Arts Festival. Bose addressed social and political issues with criticality, gravity, and irreverent humor.
Bose received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1976 and exhibited his work internationally in events such as the Third Asian Art Show in Fukuoka, Japan, the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia. He was also included in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s exhibition, At Home & Abroad, 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists in 2000. In 2002, the City of Manila awarded him the "Gawad ng Maynila: Patnubay ng Sining at Makabagong Pamamaraan" (Cultural Award for New Media presented to outstanding Filipino Artist). Bose was also honored posthumously with the “Gawad CCP Para sa Sining” Award for Visual Arts in 2004. In 2006, he was shortlisted for the National Artist award, also posthumously.
Dr. Patrick Flores is the Deputy Director for Curatorial and Exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore. He is a distinguished Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, where he previously chaired the Department of Art Studies from 1997 to 2003. He also served as the Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila and is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Flores has been involved in several significant exhibitions, such as his roles as a curator for Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008.
Additionally, he has been recognized as a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and as an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Flores is a prolific writer and has authored various publications, including Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council in 2010 and co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011). Flores organized the conference Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia in Manila in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. Flores curated South by Southeast, an exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, and the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He served as the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2022.
