The world is but colliding forces, an amalgam of signals, objects, inherited stories, and gestures. Everything we encounter bears a charge, an essence. Kawayan de Guia’s instinctual approach to art-making dialogues with those broader gravitational forces in continuous expansion and contraction.

Born and based in Baguio, Philippines, de Guia was raised in the Cordillera, surrounded by artists, makers, secular leaders, and ancestral knowledge systems attuned to interdependence. In his world, the human is not perceived as a center but rather as a singular element in a complex cosmology.

De Guia creates as he feels, adding, subtracting, and merging mediums, narratives, tropes, and symbols gleaned and accumulated throughout years of research into mind maps, expansions of a wider reality in which colonialism confronts its ghosts and humans their inherent contradictions.

His large-scale assemblage paintings include inset sculptural elements, antique imagery, and sourced trinkets, which, far from being decorative, become quintessential to his vernacular. Through these layered materials, at once narrative and didactic, geopolitical and intimate, de Guia dissects the uneasy and uncanny with elegance, offering to hold space for fragments of overlooked iconographies, erased histories, and cultural memories.

De Guia’s practice is earnest, embodied, and haunted. It positions creation as a porous territory in which lived experience, historical markers, inner life, and scholar knowledge can intersect and coalesce. His work defines the contours of systems that go beyond the preceptive alone and calls on the spirit that inhabits us and all that surrounds us.

Words by Anne-Laure Lemaitre

Kawayan de Guia (b. 1979 Baguio City, Philippines; lives and works in Baguio City) is an artist and curator whose practice spans painting, installation, and sculpture. His artworks use indigenous and colonial artifacts, playfully transforming them into lavish and often ironic critiques of consumerism, global trade and the impact of the American occupation of the Philippines.

De Guia draws upon a wide array of Filipino material culture including Jeepneys, Dangwa buses, jukeboxes, torpedoes, and Ifugao rice gods. By juxtaposing rem- nants of differing periods, meanings and methods of production, de Guia unfolds the precarious narratives in which these objects come into being, and how they shape the complex social and political.

In 2007, he received the prestigious Ateneo Art Award for his exhibition Incubator, which paid homage to his many artistic forebears. In 2012, the artist initiated AX(iS) Art Project, a biannual festival that engages curators and contemporary artists with local com- munities and artisans. Across five days, participants travel by bus along the Halsema highway between Baguio and Bontoc in northern Luzon, creating site- specific works that responded to the changing cultural fabric of the region. In 2014, he participated in Markets of Resistance, a collaborative art project that allowed members of the public to barter for artworks. De Guia’s De Liberating a Fall (2014) consisted of a large-scale Statue of Liberty mounted above Baguio City Public Market. The work interrogates the ‘liberating’ force of capitalism and the economic impacts of globalization on domestic workers and regional trade.