Artists and Curator Profiles

Samak Kosem investigates transnational sexuality frameworks that circulate and connect them to sexual discourse, practices, and subjectivities as well as migration and religiosity. His first project on “nonhuman ethnography” (2017–ongoing) in Southern Thailand considers how queerness is inhabited in Muslim culture through the contexts of nonhuman relations. Samak’s work questions the mobile forms of sexual citation and assemblage as persuasion to undo stories and allow for new meanings of sexuality. Samak was born in Bangkok and raised in Rayong and Nonthaburi. He relocated to Chiang Mai in 2004 for his undergraduate studies and received his BS and MA in anthropology and continued his doctoral study at Chiang Mai University in Social Sciences. Samak’s first group show The Enmeshed (2017) and his first solo show Otherwise Inside (2018) were held in Bangkok. His artworks have been presented in galleries in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. Samak’s writing has recently been published by Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s art has been one of the most persistent in terms of combining concepts with objects. Pastrana received his Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines in 2000, where he was awarded the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. In 2006, Pastrana received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award. He has shown at the Singapore Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and was part of the 2019 The Art Encounters Biennial in Romania, 2019 Singapore Biennale, 2012 New Museum Triennale in New York, 2010 Aichi Triennale, and 2008 Busan Biennale. In 2004, he co-founded Future Prospects art space. In addition to his artistic career, Pastrana curates and organizes exhibitions in Manila and abroad.

Pam Quinto graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, major in Studio Arts (Painting) in 2014 from the University of the Philippines, from which she received the Outstanding Thesis and the Gawad Tanglaw awards for her undergraduate thesis. She is the founder and curator of Parcel Exhibitions, a portable exhibition modality developed in response to the arts immobility caused by pandemic lockdowns. Quinto has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Manila and elsewhere, including Figure-proof (2020) at A+ Works of Art; A will for prolific disclosures (2020) at The Drawing Room; Double Double, Moore in Trouble (2019) at Tin-Aw Gallery; For Every Atom Belonging to Me (2019) at the Sampaguita Art Projects; and Kabit at Sabit (2019), a one-day simultaneous presentation of multi-site site-specific projects all-over the archipelago organized by Load na Dito Projects; to name the most recent. She is set to hold her first solo exhibition at Mo_Space in October this year.

Mark Salvatus is a contemporary artist living and working in Manila, Philippines. He studied Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila and since 2006 has produced his artistic project as “Salvage Projects,” working across various disciplines and media. Most recently, his works have been presented in different exhibitions and venues including the 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); Kyoto Art Center (2020); Motions of this Kind at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London; Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Biennale 2019; Unfolding: Fabric of our Life, Mill6 CHAT, Hong Kong (2019); Hothouse, PCAN Pavilion, Gwangju Biennale (2018), among others. He is part of the traveling exhibition, Notes for Tomorrow organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). Together with Mayumi Hirano, they founded Load na Dito Projects in 2016, an artistic and research initiative that explores various modes of producing and presenting contemporary art by organizing and coorganizing a wide range of programs.

Seekersinternational (or SKRSINTL) is a predominantly Filipino artist collective based in British Columbia, Canada with roots in Quezon City, Metro Manila. Consisting of music producers, DJs, visual artists, and various personnel, all of whom have chosen to keep their identities concealed, SKRSINTL produces experimental electronic music influenced by Jamaican dub and sound system culture. Their covert sound art experiments revolve around themes of manufactured landscapes and identities, invisible minorities, twisted timelines, oblique realities, and codified cosmology. Previously known only in their own circles, peerto-peer networks and Usenet newsgroups, SKRSINTL debuted their work to a wider global audience in 2012 and have since then continued to release works on notable labels such as Bokeh Versions, Berceuse Heroique, No Corner and Warp Records in the UK; Future Times and Boomarm Nation in the US; Diskotopia in Japan; as well as their own imprint, ICS Library Records; subversively establishing their unique voice and unmistakable presence in contemporary electronic music.

Jao San Pedro (b. 1998) is a visual artist and interdisciplinary designer based in Manila, Philippines. Her work is an inquiry into the body within the context of space, identity, form, and structure. In her entwined process of meditation and making, she attempts to disrupt the binary that limits and informs our preconceptions of physicality and being. She interweaves bodily material, fiber, and textile to form a systematized language and concretize the abstract.

Tan Zi Hao (b. 1989, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist, writer, and researcher. His idea has taken shape across a diverse range of works involving soil ecology, language politics, interpretive etymology, mythical chimeras, and organic assemblages from carrier shells (the Xenophoridae family) to household casebearers (Phereoeca spp). Most of his artworks are conceived with an ideological intention to challenge essentialism by privileging the assemblage. Tan has recently completed his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He also holds an MA degree in International Relations and a BA degree in International Communications Studies from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. His recent exhibitions include What’s Left for Gathering, Mutual Aid Projects, Kuala Lumpur, 2021; Wawasan 2020: Townhall, Tun Perak Co-Op, Kuala Lumpur, 2020; Rasa Sayang, A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, 2019; The Horizon is Just an Illusion: New Thoughts on Landscape, OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur, 2018, among others.

Isola Tong (Pasay City, Libra Fire Rabbit) is an artist, architect and babaylan, interested in queer and trans theories that cut across ethnography, biology, architecture, urbanism, history and technobiopolitics. She explores the interdependencies and intimacies of holobionts and their entanglement with history and the built environment. Her work spans across a variety of media portraying a divergence from anthropocentrism towards interconnected multiscalar agencies. She graduated cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. She also studied and worked in Osaka, Japan for four years. She has shown in Korea, Slovenia, Serbia and the United Kingdom. She currently teaches architectural design, theory, philosophy and history at the De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde School of Design and the Arts in Manila.

Yim Yen Sum (b. 1987, Malaysia) received a diploma in Fine Art from Dasein Academy of Art (2008), where she began her practice of stitching together her work. She predominantly works with textiles when creating her ever-evolving installations and explores the concepts of relationships and interconnectivity between us as a society, and our practices and interactions with our environment. Yen Sum’s works reflect hours of incredibly delicate, worked through units of gauze that has undergone a process of manipulation, including screen printing and appliqué. Yen Sum has participated in exhibitions locally (National Art Gallery, 2017) and internationally (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, 2017; The Pier-2 Art Center, Taiwan, 2016). Yen Sum is the recipient of United Overseas Bank (UOB)’s Painting of The Year Award, 2016 and recently participated in Biennale Jogja XV Equator, 2019.

Carlos Quijon, Jr. (b. 1989) is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Manila. He is a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum and Frieze. His research is part of the book From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making (Sternberg Press, 2019). He has published in MoMA’s post (US), Queer Southeast Asia, ArtReview Asia (Singapore), Art Monthly (UK), Asia Art Archive’s Ideas (HK), and Trans Asia Photography Review (US), among others. He is an alumnus of the Ateneo National Writers Workshop in Manila and the inaugural Para Site Workshops for Emerging Professionals in Hong Kong in 2015 and was a scholar participant of the symposium “How Institutions Think” hosted by LUMA Foundation in Arles, France in 2016. In 2017, he was a research resident in MMCA Seoul and a fellow of the Transcuratorial Academy both in Berlin and Mumbai. He curated Courses of Action in Hong Kong in 2019, A will for prolific disclosures in Manila, Figure-proof in Kuala Lumpur, and co-curated Minor Infelicities in Seoul in 2020. Most recently, he co-curated the exhibition In Our Best Interests: AfroSoutheast Asia Affinities during a Cold War (afrosoutheastasia.com) in Singapore in 2021.