Cover Inside the pages of ‘Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician’ (Photo: courtesy of Silverlens Galleries)
Inside the pages of ‘Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician’ (Photo: courtesy of Silverlens Galleries)
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Written by Lilledeshan Bose and esteemed curator Patrick Flores in 2024, ArtAsiaPacific in Hong Kong’s book ‘Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician’ is now available for purchase at Silverlens Manila and Silverlens New York
In celebration of the legacy of Santiago Bose, the phenomenal artist who catapulted Baguio’s contemporary art scene to wider renown, Silverlens is mounting a Baguio book launch of Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician in time for the artist’s birth anniversary. Happening on July 24 from 4.30pm to 6pm at Balanghai ni Ikeng Independent Cinema, Ili-Likha, Baguio City, the book launch will feature a conversation between authors Lilledeshan Bose and Patrick Flores.
Published in 2024 by ArtAsiaPacific in Hong Kong, the monograph provides a glimpse into the life and artistic practice of the celebrated artist, educator, and community organiser.
Above The cover of ArtAsiaPacific’s monograph about the late artist Santiago Bose (Photo: courtesy of Silverlens Galleries)
The cover of ArtAsiaPacific’s monograph about the late artist Santiago Bose (Photo: courtesy of Silverlens Galleries)
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The late Bose grew up amid the physical manifestations of the benevolent assimilation of the United States of America. Born just after the Second World War, in 1949 in Baguio City, Bose grew up in a city that was built from scratch in the early 1900s by the US occupation, originally as a summer retreat for the white colonisers. American historian Daniel Immerwahr noted in his book How to Hide an Empire that the city was then complete with “large government buildings, commanding views, a grand axis cutting through the Baguio meadow.” Growing up in this built environment in the 1960s, Bose was first exposed to rock ‘n’ roll as well as American and European art through the nearby American military bases. Though as his biographer Jonathan Best relates, Bose’s memories of his youth “soured as he grew older and came to feel Filipinos were being treated like second-class citizens in their own country when they visited the American bases.”
Read more: Silverlens’ exhibition of Santiago Bose’s ‘Spirited Traces’
“It is hard to put together a book on an artist whose work is basically about disarticulation and reassembly,” writes Flores. “Emerging from an archipelago so textured in its cultural relations and a country that was successively colonised three times, his practice confronts strata of citations that can only be dense, teeming, and layered. Santiago Bose renders this density with whimsy and urgency as he disfigured painting, mixes media, stains surfaces, claims everyday objects, purloins images, and ventures into installations and performances that are at once heady and practical in their activation of local materials and historical references. At the same time, he sheds light on the depth of the complexity through juxtapositions across various visual stimuli that only a trickster-bricoleur can. Amid intense mixture and migration, the lush lifeworld of nature and culture, Bose performs the role of the exemplary makeshift artist and community firebrand, bearing fragments from inveterate memories, and anticipating new forms and the inventive ways of making them in contemporary art.”
Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician is available for purchase at Silverlens Manila and Silverlens New York.
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About
Before assuming the Art and Culture Editor position, Franz has always had a penchant for visual and performing arts. He is passionate about exploring and writing about the local cultural scene and rediscovering the country’s storied past and rich heritage. Besides working on this luxury lifestyle magazine, Franz is an avid book reader, local traveller, museum-goer, chorister, and community theatre playwright.
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Franz earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Santo Tomas. He writes about local visual and performing artists and their craft; drinks wines, liquors, and spirits and talks about the creativity of their respective winemakers and master blenders; tries to learn more about business and investments; respects the tradition and artistry that go behind the making of watches and jewellery; and appreciates the genius of architecture and creative design.
As head of Tatler Philippines’ pool of writers, he helps them bring impactful and socially relevant stories to light.
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