Multidisciplinary artist Joshua Serafin on exploring how the body is a living archive of diasporic history

These geographical shifts from Bacolod to Manila, Hong Kong to Belgium did not fracture Serafin’s identity; rather, they provided a sprawling canvas for it.

“I view my existence as standing in a room with multiple doors,” Serafin reflects, polishing a metaphor that perfectly encapsulates their cosmopolitan fluidity. “I step inside one and allow myself to experience the absolute fullness of that world, merging with its locality, its religion, its food. It is an act of shapeshifting and camouflaging, a deep adaptation that eventually informs my choreographic vocabulary.”

However, the sheer physical toll of dance eventually prompted another pivot. Wishing to create work beyond the limitations of their own embodied state, Serafin pursued both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts. This transition allowed them to synthesise their experiences of displacement into broader, more abstract narratives, questioning what it means to carry the psychology of a Filipino body through the corridors of Europe.

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Serafin’s early foray into solo performance was Miss, a piece unpacking the strict, performative regimes of the Philippine transgender beauty pageant industry, which became more globally resonant at the time, given Pia Wurtzbach’s win as Miss Universe. Developed over five years and premiering post-pandemic, the work focused Serafin to confront the complexities of the Western gaze. As global art institutions were eager to programme “queerness” more than ever, Serafin experienced a crisis of conscience.

“I found myself as a brown body, six-inch heels, performing this hyperfemininity for a predominantly white audience,” they note, reflecting on the institutional hunger for marginalised trauma. “I had to ask myself: am I recreating the very violence that this piece is desperately trying to liberate itself from?”

This existential questioning collided with the global lockdown of March 2020. Forced to stay in the Philippines with their visa for Belgium just waiting for flights to be allowed, Serafin was inadvertently granted something they had not experienced since they were eleven years old: uninterrupted time with their family. Grounded in Antipolo, surrounded by their brother, nephew and cousins, Serafin experienced a profound healing of diasporic wounds with this forced pause.

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Yet, the return to Europe brought delayed emotional turbulence. In 2021, battling severe depression and confronting unaddressed traumas, Serafin nearly took their own life. This harrowing breaking point forced a radical reckoning. They began intensive therapy, turning inward to face their demons. From this crucible of pain and recovery, their magnum opus was born: the Cosmological Gangbang trilogy.

The trilogy was initially sparked by a commission from Patrick Flores for the Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon) biennale in Bacolod City. Confined to a small apartment desk, Serafin began drawing, reconnecting with the stories of their mother, who has always been exposed to folklore and syncretic belief.

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The first iteration, Timawo, laid the visual groundwork for new pre-colonial deities. The second, VOID, became an international sensation. Conceived as a dance of pure grief, VOID featured an alter-ego emerging from primordial mud, absorbing the accumulated violence experienced by the queer body. The performance documentation exploded online, amassing over 80 million views. Suddenly, a recently graduated artist in Brussels was fielding inquiries from Hollywood blockbusters like Dune and Stranger Things, to name a few.

Serafin’s response? They ignored them all.

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“I could have gone fully commercial, sold the concept to anyone and done all these massive global things,” Serafin admits with a quiet laugh. “But I had this overwhelming feeling that you lose the absolute integrity of the piece. I was not interested in what the work would become in those spaces.”

Instead, they channelled that energy into PEARLS, the triumphant final chapter of the cosmology. Premiering to the rapturous acclaim at the 2024 Venice Biennale, PEARLS shifted from a solitary struggle to a collective healing, co-created with their “sisters” Lukresia Quismundo and Bunny Cadag. The Biennale was a life-altering experience, cementing Serafin’s institutional reputation while allowing them to propose a radically kinder collective futurity for queer bodies opposing oppressive systems.

After completing 30 exhausting shows across the globe in 2024, a burnt-out Serafin declared a season of rest for 2025. They stepped away from designing speculative futures to interrogate a very literal, historical past. Thus began their current multiyear project: Lost Ancestors.

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Growing up, Serafin’s family vaguely mentioned having Japanese blood—a common, often unverified trope in the Philippines. Armed with little more than oral tradition in the family, Serafin travelled to Davao to verify the claim from their grandfather, who was trying to petition their citizenship through the Nikkei-Jin. Rummaging through their baul [chest], they found the Koseki of their great-great-grandfather, Shentaro Esaki, a Japanese carpenter who migrated to Negros in 1909 during the American occupation to work for the Insular Lumber Mill Company.

Supported by arts subsidies from Belgium, Serafin travelled to Yame, Fukuoka, Japan, in late 2025. They expected a dead end. Instead, the local city hall provided genealogical records stretching back to 1840. Accompanied by a translator, Serafin literally knocked on doors around the city, eventually finding themselves sitting in the living room of their grandfather’s cousin.

The trip culminated in a visit to a breathtaking Buddhist temple carved out of a mountain, the final resting place of their Esaki ancestors. It was here that the weight of a century of displacement found its homecoming.

“Upon returning to my hotel, I literally collapsed,” Serafin recalls. “There was this visceral sensation of something finally leaving my body; it felt as though I had become the vessel to bring Shentaro’s spirit back home to a land he was never able to return to.”

This pilgrimage profoundly shifted Serafin’s understanding of their own bloodline. The toughness of their grandparents and the restless migration of their family were suddenly contextualised by the trauma of a fractured diaspora. “My art making is my personal history,” Serafin states with absolute clarity. “I cannot create something that is not a true, lived experience. I am trying to understand how our bodies can become vessels to fulfil the earthly desires that our ancestors could not.”

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Today, Serafin is channelling this ancestral excavation into Relics, a solo performance that they are purposefully keeping lean and mobile. While works like VOID required massive theatrical machinery, Relics demands only Serafin, a musician, a strip of light and a costume, allowing it to adapt to commercial spaces and even hotel lobbies in Singapore or gallery spaces in Hong Kong.

It is also an admission of their evolving physicality. “I want to understand where I am now physically. The body I had seven years ago is not the body I have today,” they muse. “It is not as virtuosic as it once was, but it has become so much more intelligent. You experience its fragility, but also its immense capacity for different ways of moving.”

To sustain this, Serafin is fiercely protective of their peace. They work out, eat properly, practice yoga and spend time surfing. As they field inquiries from private collectors and major museums, they are slowly warming to the idea of allowing their artworks to live lives beyond their immediate control.

Serafin has spent their twenties acting as a lightning rod for history, trauma and divine queer rage. Now, standing at the threshold of a new decade, they are no longer just designing entities for the future. They are finally making time to be human in the present.

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