Mabini Art Project: 100 Paintings

Artists Statement

Mabini art is a genre of conservative Filipino landscape painting associated with lowbrow commercial galleries that cater to the tourist market. It is named after the street in Manila where these artists established themselves in the 1950s, having broken with the Art Association of the Philippines, which they believed favored modernist styles over traditional approaches.

As tourists in our own homeland, we now see the Philippines in a different way, with a sense of displacement. We wanted to use Mabini paintings in our work, as objects of nostalgia and as reflections on the state of Philippine art. We began to converse with Antonio Calma, a Mabini artist, and soon persuaded our art dealer – whose gallery caters to the 'high art' market – to commission him to make thousands of these landscape paintings.

We later learned that Calma subcontracted the paintings to other painters and merely signed his name. As our dealer peddles the paintings in art fairs and auctions around the world, Mabini landscape paintings are re-contextualized and revalued. The project thus questions ideas of high and low, modes of production and consumption, and the roles of various audiences.

In collaboration with Antonio Calma.

2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11