Art Fair PH Projects 2024: Meet the artists

With the ultimate goal of supporting artists, Gryn admits that what Daata can do is finite. However, he does not stop there. “I’m just a small voice. I have very little power and very little influence. While I often have few resources, I try to find other ways to promote them—whether that’s by introducing them to other people who might be able to do something bigger or by being a strong advocate,” says Gryn. 

Those wishing to be commissioned by Daata will find that it’s as easy as sending an email. Many artists featured on their website start with a conversation. “Most of the time, artists approach me, I approach them, or someone mentions somebody and I look deeper into their work online. Usually, it’s word of mouth,” shares Gryn. 

For their entry to ArtFairPH/Digital, Daata presents a selection of digital video artworks from their archive roster. Following the themes of vanity, ego, and choice, these animations seek to invoke a sense of clarity in the viewer. Titled Best Dressed Chicken In Manila—after the 1970s reggae song by Jamaican singer and DJ, Doctor Alimantado—Gryn wants to bring a sense of humour, fun, and engagement to the event. “Everyone wants to be the best-dressed chicken at the Art Fair, including me,” he exclaims. 

Multidisciplinary visual artist David “Mr StarCity” White took us on a visual journey when he presented his Loverboy series at the Art Fair PH. His series, enhanced by a space drenched in blue colour, drew inspiration from his memory of a bar.

The artist’s works were presented in New York and Los Angeles. White was also involved in several solo and group exhibitions with well-respected galleries and institutions in Miami, Seattle, London, and Stockholm. Art magazines and institutions like Juxtapoz, Instyle, New American Paintings, and Hyperallergic have featured his works.

Related: Editor’s Picks: Over 100 artworks worth collecting at Art Fair Philippines 2024

Andreea Medar paid homage to her family's 150-year-old gardening tradition in Racoti. The artist's works depicted their garden's prime under the care of her grandfather. Titled Leftovers From the Future, the work was a brief follow-up on Solarium: The Forever Garden, which she showcased in May 2023. 

“It was interesting to see how the garden survived alone without a gardener. And in my imagination, those plants will survive and travel through time and space to a post-apocalyptic future in which they will connect the viewers and my family members from the past,” she said about her Art Fair PH 2024 work.

The artist is known for using objects and environments, sculptures, media installations, and video.

Filipino artist Jigger Cruz is well-respected among his peers in the local and international contemporary art scene. Known for his tactile and sensorial paintings, the creative uses techniques such as impasto, cutting, burning, and spraying paint on canvas and frames. 

For his Art Fair PH 2024 installation, Cruz focused on a series of collage aesthetic and organic compositions for Dialectic Disruptions. 

See also: Art Fair PH 2024/Residencies: 5 artist-residencies to look out for

Growing up in a Chinese Buddhist household attending a Catholic school, Manila-based artist Jonathan Ching explores his peculiar relationship with religion through discarded flowers and transforms them into paintings. Through this, he sees the remains of an encounter between humans and the divine. Given his Buddhist and Catholic background, Ching noticed intersecting points between the two. For instance, the act of offering in Buddhism is to relieve ourselves of our worldly desires to transcend. In Christianity, the act centres on God sacrificing his son for humanity's sins. He explores the ideas of desire as a human disposition and generosity as a divine act.

His new works presented at Art Fair 2024 portrayed flowers placed against plastic tablecloths used in carinderias—putting religion and the secular world side-by-side. "The paintings depict real flowers placed on top of paintings of flowers—the divine was placed on a mundane setting—the sacred on top of kitsch," Ching shared.

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