There’s a new artist to watch out for. Teeming with talent and imagination, he didn’t let financial challenges stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a full-fledged artist while also devoting time to people and causes that are dear to his heart.
Before receiving the 2023 Ateneo Art Awards, Vien Valencia kept a relatively low profile in the gallery circuit. According to him, he didn’t have the funds to mount a show having devoted much of his time as a volunteer art teacher to children in both urban and rural areas before launching his own community-based initiative, Nomad Projects.
Nomad Projects came about after the artist thought of expanding the communities’ involvement in the art-making process. “Eventually, na-reinvent ko yung idea ng outreach into collaboration,” Valencia explains, “ with community participants na hindi lang sumusunod sa instructions. Kasama sila as directors ng final output.”
Organic progression best defines Valencia’s approach, where circumstances direct him to a path of ideological and material exploration. While still a painting major at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts, for example, Valencia didn’t have the funds to purchase the materials for his projects. So he scoured junk yards, and picked up objects from his surroundings, including those he found while walking from school to the Valencia family home in Marikina when he didn’t have enough money for the fare.
His outreach work exposed him to the complex realities of various communities, such as the itinerant Badjaos that he encountered in Manila. That led him to explore the idea of the nomadic existence, which he could relate to, having experienced countless moves from one house to another due to his parents’ unstable finances.
Valencia also became concerned with notions of space and its boundaries, and how it is manipulated by its inhabitants who, in in turn, are shaped by their surroundings. Most of all, he realized the precarious existence of communities who’ve been, or are about to be displaced by developments.
A detail from Vien Valencia’s large-scale mixed-media work
Valencia’s most recent outputs illuminate those realities, expressed in a span of mediums. Nomad Project’s untitled installation shown at Underground Gallery is a multi-channel video work with footages taken of the Badjaos. Old wooden paddles are the central focus in his West Gallery show titled “Totems.”
They speak to the displaced fisherfolk of Bulacan whose paddles exemplify new meanings, as tools of the trade that have become artifacts of a past life lost to the reclamation of Bulacan’s coastal grounds.
He also worked with the Dumagat-Remontado indigenous people living by the Tinapak River in Taytay, Rizal for “Imprint of an Imprint of an Imprint,” which was exhibited in Singapore this year.
Valencia, together with the community documented the terrain of the river through a technique called frottage, wherein a coloring material is rubbed on fabrics stretched over rock formations, in effect mapping the ancient striations that have formed naturally. The atmospheric sounds were recorded as well and presented as “sonic sculptures” during the Singapore exhibition. The visual and audio documentation are all that will be left with the Kaliwa Dam’s projected completion in 2026, flooding the entire terrain surrounding the Tinapak river.
For his show at Vetted titled “Strolling Home,” the artist made use of the jute sacks that he collected. They bear markings of their origin, mostly from foreign lands, alluding to the nomadic concept. The title marks Valencia’s return to painting, as he revisits not just the method, but also the mood and experiences when he was studying in UP.
Those walks inform his paintings, which evoke the visual language of the streets–the houses patched up with whatever materials their owners could gather, peeling paint that reveal the many layers beneath, surfaces weathered through storms and the blazing sun. He assumes a critical gaze, stripping his visuals of the gaiety provided by color, using just a stark palette of white and black instead. His gestural strokes carry memories from those strolls along with the emotions they conjure.
“Strolling Home” is on view at Vetted (Unit 126, Milelong Building, Amorsolo St., Makati City) from Oct. 7 to Oct. 25, Monday to Friday, 1p.m. to 5 p.m. For updates and inquiries, contact @vetted126 on Instagram.
