The most recent honorees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Thirteen Artists Award continue a legacy of redefining and pushing the boundaries of Filipino modern art.
“There is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” These are the words of art historian E.H. Gombrich in his classic text The Story of Art. As both a society and as individuals, we look to art to gain a deeper understanding of the world. For a long period of ancient and modern history, art strove toward realism, capturing the world as it so looks. But, as Gombrich argues, there is no such thing as “Art” in a purely aesthetic, idealistic, static sense. If so, the story of art could have abruptly reached its zenith upon the perfection of perspective. Rather, the story of art is the story of distinct practices of artists who identify and tackle fresh challenges, context to context, over time and space. The Philippines arguably has one of the longest traditions of modern art in Asia. And the story of Philippine art is a story of our artists. Nowhere is that more so clearly reflected than in the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ (CCP) triennial Thirteen Artists Award (TAA).
The Thirteen Moderns: Reimagining Art
The TAA is so-called after the Thirteen Moderns, pioneers of Filipino modern art. Led by Victorio Edades, the group includes Arsenio Capili, Bonifacio Cristóbal, Demetrio Diego, Botong Francisco, César Legaspi, Diosdado Lorenzo, Anita Magsaysay, Vicente Manansala, Galo Ocampo, Hernando Ocampo, José Pardo, and Ricarte Puruganan. It was established in the 1930s to advance modern art in the country. They rejected the traditional rural idealist subjects painted in the Spanish academic style that dominated Philippine art at the time, instead embracing realistic subjects and struggles, while also exploring their own modernist art styles.
In 1970, Roberto Chabet, the father of Philippine abstract art, under his capacity as the founding museum director of the CCP, honored the Moderns with an exhibition called the Thirteen Artists. It featured artists of that time who captured that same spirit, with “a recentness, a turning away from the past, familiar models of art making, a movement toward possibilities and discoveries.”
The exhibition led to the establishment of the Thirteen Artists Award by the next CCP Museum Director, Raymundo Albano. The institutional program would showcase artists who “restructure, restrength, and renew artmaking and art thinking … that lend viability to Philippine art.” Their selection reflects both artistic excellence as well as their potential to influence and inspire the future of Philippine art.
For over half a century, the TAA has provided a living survey of Filipino modern art, reflecting what that means today and tomorrow. The inaugural batch included National Artist Ben Cab, while succeeding batches have spotted icons early on their artistic journey, such as Santiago Bose, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, and Elmer Borlongan, among others.
The Thirteen Artists: Continuing The Conversation
The most recent iteration, TAA 2024, represents a dynamic spectrum of art today. The honored artists include: Catalina Africa, Denver Garza, Russ Ligtas, Ella Mendoza, Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan, Issay Rodriguez, Luis Antonio Santos, Joshua Serfain, Jel Suarez, Tekla Tamoria, Derek Tumala, Vien Valencia, and Liv Linluan.
These artists were selected by a distinguished committee that included past awardees Phyllis Zaballero (TAA 1978), Antipas Delotavo (TAA 1990), Buen Calubayan (TAA 2009), Wawi Navarroza (TAA 2012), as well as CCP Visual Arts and Museum Department officer-in-charge Rica Estrada Uson.
Following their award, and while the CCP Main Building undergoes its renovation, a special exhibit opened at the National Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Mervy C. Pueblo (TAA 2015). Just like Chabet’s original exhibition of the Thirteen Artists back in 1970, the TAA 2024 exhibition provides a space for the public to engage with art of such immense urgency.
Each iteration of the award and exhibition is a snapshot of a moment, yet simultaneously a window into broader possibilities. They carry forward the spirit of what artists do for art: challenging, questioning, transforming. Art lives. Artists continue.
Catalina Africa
Catalina Africa conjures worlds where landscape becomes language, and art transforms into a mystical dialogue with the earth. Her multidisciplinary practice is a profound invocation of natural mysteries, turning galleries into liminal spaces of transformation. As the curator describes, Africa creates environments “where flowers tower over us, shadows harden into shrines, and raindrops shimmer as thresholds between earth and sky.”
Her sculptural installations are spells and love letters, revealing a “personal cosmology” that invites viewers to reconnect with the profound, often forgotten magic inherent in our relationship with the natural world.
Denver Garza
Denver Garza weaves his background in psychology and mental health work into a nuanced artistic practice that explores the intricate landscapes of human experience. Through painting, mixed-media works, and participatory performances, he creates intimate investigations into life’s uncertainties. His art becomes a delicate mapping of the psyche, transforming personal and collective psychological terrains into visual metaphors.
Small gestures accumulate into a collective struggle in his installation, allowing burdens and hopes to be externalized and ritualized for a community to carry together.
Derek Tumala
Derek Tumala navigates the intersections of art, science, and ecological consciousness. His multimedia practice explores intricate networks of interconnectedness, transforming scientific inquiry into poetic visual narratives.
In “Vanishing Tribe,” Tumala draws powerful parallels between endangered species and precarious cultural landscapes. As the curator notes, the work illuminates “the quiet violence of erasure,” a meditation on disappearance that resonates beyond environmental collapse, speaking to the fragile ecosystems of both nature and culture.
Ella Mendoza
Ella Mendoza transforms ceramic art from functional craft into a provocative exploration of form and meaning. Her work traces a nuanced journey from traditional vessels to conceptual sculptures that challenge perception.
In “Meat Paradox,” Mendoza confronts viewers with a visceral meditation on cognitive dissonance. As the curator observes, her installation explores “the tension of holding contradictory beliefs while refusing to reconcile them,” creating forms that hover between flesh and abstraction, between revelation and ambiguity.
Henrielle Baltazar
Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan excavates hidden narratives through the meticulous language of natural history and taxonomic documentation.
Her art book “Fragment Index: Counter Archive” is an intricate exploration of material culture, transforming seemingly mundane objects into profound historical testimonies.
Issay Rodriguez
Issay Rodriguez navigates the intricate terrains where human experience intersects with ecological consciousness. Her practice is a nuanced exploration of interconnectedness, rooted in archival research and community engagement.
In “Star Eater, Soil Heater,” Rodriguez transforms scientific inquiry into a poetic meditation on care and responsibility. As the curator observes, the work reveals how “attending to the world, with curiosity and imagination, is an act of healing—both for the soil and for ourselves.”
Jel Suarez
Jel Suarez navigates the art of transformation as a self-taught collagist, her practice a delicate choreography of gathering, dismantling, and reimagining. In her installation “An enduring text,” she creates what the curator describes as “small records of care, memory, and attention,” fragments of life suspended in clear acrylic, each a “specimen” that defies scientific detachment. Suarez crafts intricate compositions that breathe new meaning into forgotten materials, preserving their essence while propelling them into unprecedented narratives.
Joshua Serafin
Joshua Serafin choreographs a radical reimagining of Filipino identity, transcending colonial boundaries through a multidisciplinary practice that blends dance, performance, and visual art. Based in Brussels, Serafin performs a profound cultural recovery, returning to precolonial mythologies that celebrated diversity and fluidity. Their work becomes an embodied archive, challenging imposed narratives and reclaiming the multiplicities of self that existed before external demarcations.
Liv Vinluan
Liv Vinluan excavates the intricate layers of historical memory, transforming archival fragments into poetic meditations on loss, transformation, and ecological imagination. Her installation “Flora de filipinas de funeraria x frankensteinii y Recancimiento” becomes a haunting reimagining of botanical histories. As the curator observes, Vinluan creates “elegies” that are not scientific documents, but profound explorations of what has been lost and what continues to resonate in our collective consciousness.
Russ Ligtas
Russ Ligtas orchestrates a profound investigation of identity through performance, transforming the Filipino body into a living archive of memory, myth, and resistance. His multidisciplinary practice navigates the complex terrains of personal and collective narratives, using alter egos as transformative lenses. In “The Last Hapi,” Ligtas creates a quasi-documentary performance that challenges the very notion of fixed historical narratives, revealing identity as a fluid, evershifting landscape.
Through each incarnation and persona, Ligtas dismantles normative histories, offering a radical reimagining of how memory, culture, and self intersect and resist erasure.
Tekla Tamoria
Tekla Tamoria transforms discarded materials into powerful narratives of cultural resilience. Her practice is an intricate dialogue between sustainability, personal history, and collective memory, where repurposed fabrics and found objects become threads of social testimony.
In “What A Journey It Has Been,” a title inspired by the Lea Salonga ballad, Tamoria weaves a complex tapestry that, as the curator writes, captures “the textures of urban survival and middle-class Filipino identity,” a landscape where landmarks, symbols, and intimate family fragments intertwine.
Vien Valencia
Vien Valencia situates his work at the intersection of community, time, site, process, and anthropology.
In “Long Drawing,” he traces a chalk path from his current home through the streets to his previous homes, creating a cartographic meditation on movement and belonging. As the curator notes, Valencia chooses the streets—“overlooked, burdened, humble”—as his picture plane, turning urban spaces into an archive of survival.
Luis Antonio Santos
Luis Antonio Santos transforms the ephemeral into a profound meditation on memory and loss. His practice is an intricate exploration of how time erodes and reshapes our understanding of experience, using painting and photography as archaeological tools. In his work, galvanized iron sheets become palimpsests, layered narratives that refuse to be forgotten, capturing the delicate tensions between permanence and impermanence.
This article was originally published in our December 2025 Issue.
Photography by Excel Panlaque of KLIQ, Inc.
Shot on location at The National Museum of Fine Arts
