The notion of quantum time does away with the classical understanding of Space-Time as a linearity, exploring the ideas of glitches in space-time, opening up the possibilities of parallel lives and turbulence. “The cosmos is constantly roiling like a tempestuous sea,” Sison writes. It ebbs and flows, following the shape of gravity, space, and time, all measured in extreme specificity, though eliciting changes that reverberate through time as we understand it.

In Time is a Restless Sea, Sison creates autobiographical paintings with fleeting moments captured and memorialised in pigment and canvas forever. Sison has been “recording” her family in paintings for over two decades. The paintings vary in scale and medium, though imbued with an earnestness and tenderness that is never cloying or overly sentimental, but with careful staging creates a tension between play and turbulence. The collection of work is almost entirely made up of source images taken during a family holiday at a privately-rented resort, after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020. Removed from the dangers that plagued everyone’s minds at the time, the chance to be a little bit freer, by the sea, surrounded by loved ones was a welcome reprieve.

Set against the sea, sky, and sand, nature becomes the foil to the protagonists in Sison’s paintings. These paintings are monuments to the weight of the world changing in unpredictable ways, and Sison changing along with it: a rueful acceptance of what is and always has been impermanent. Sison also invokes American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s ideas of life as a dream. She writes, “More simply, regard everything as a dream. Life is a dream. Death is also a dream. Waking is a dream and sleeping is a dream. Another way to put this is that every situation is a passing memory.” 

Almost three years after taking the photographs, Sison uncovers these saved memories and images and works through the most changes she had undergone since becoming a teenager by making these images into paintings. The process has been a little bit like growing up in reverse — thrown into the unpredictable and turbulent sea. However, some joy is anchored in qa perfect picture, somehow.

These portraits are deliberately unplaceable in time, with the environment just as anonymous as well. Under her direction, the children in the photographs were asked to dress up in anachronistic garb and to place their bodies in active poses, creating a tableau of freedom and playfulness, amidst the suggestion of a storm and a violent sea behind them. Her sitters are always in costumes, putting on different identities, and becoming embodiments of what is other than themselves, sometimes standing in as symbols for something else. Sison imagines the possibilities of parallel lives, drawn to the unpredictability of Space-Time, and the mystery of quantum space.

It is interesting to elect a very still and static medium to express ideas of change and mutability, but that is what Sison’s paintings embody. A product of contemplation of her own changes — beyond the body and within it — what this collection of paintings entreats is a sense of play amidst turbulence, an acceptance of the cyclic nature of things and the inevitability of change. These paintings serve as a reminder and as a recognition of the immutability of impermanence. 

Sison contemplates the sea as the signification of the own changes she is going through — “me changing, the world changing in different ways” — all taxing and difficult to come to terms with. Nothing is predictable like the straight path of an arrow, and everything like a turbulent sea. She battles with her body and her own emotions and hormones ebbing and flowing unpredictably. 

Scattered amongst the paintings are items Sison collected from the ocean, creating a bigger picture both of the environment they inhabited as well as the ideas she ruminates on. Some are transformed by the ebbs and flows of the ocean, gradually taking the shape according to what has affected them. Driftwood, sea glass, broken tiles and pottery all assume a form dictated by what has touched them. None are an echo or ghost of what they had been; they are all their own entities, taking the shape of whatever form has emerged from all these changes.

Sison sets before the sea (in this case, herself) a playfulness — embodied by her subjects, in their dress, poses, and demeanour — that is often hard to practice, especially when everything seems to fall apart around you. The acceptance of one’s fate, in face of restlessness and turbulence, and even going towards it with “lighthearted acceptance”: again invokes Chödrön’s suggestion of approaching life — and even death beyond it — as though it were a dream.

Sison’s hope is to emulate the children and the people she populates her works with: an acceptance of these changes with a sense of play and lightheartedness. “My wish,” Sison says, “like a stone skipped on a turbulent sea.”

- Words by Carina Santos

With degrees in both Humanities and Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines, it is no wonder Yasmin Sison has a conceptual approach to her art. Sison is also a founding member of the art collective Surrounded by Water. Before becoming a full-time artist, she took several teaching jobs, the last and longest of which was as a pre-school teacher. Her interest in children also reflects in the way elements of childhood recur in her art. Her works have been exhibited across the Southeast Asian region.

In 2006, she became a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Thirteen Artists Award and in the following year she was shortlisted in the Ateneo Art Awards.