CLARENCE CHUN AT ART FAIR PHILIPPINES 2020
MONO8 Gallery presented the works of Filipino-American artist, Clarence Chun at the 8th edition of Art Fair Philippines. Chun, who primarily works in abstraction to reveal narratives hinged on the artist’s relationship with water. Having spent part of his childhood in Tacloban (PH) and later, living as an adult in Hawaii (USA), His works are charged with the technical aspects of western abstraction drawn from biographical accounts of having lived near oceans; how his identity could somehow be captured among the layers of texture applied to his canvas, which ironically seems flat from afar.
Thus, reminding us of the ability of water, particularly seas, to appear calm and yet turbulent. The hidden complexity in Chun’s works has the same attributes propelled towards the identities distinctly formed within the Filipino diaspora, where one no longer belongs to a certain territory but rather only to the space, the memory, and the time spent traversing across waters.
CLARENCE CHUN (b. 1975) was born in Tacloban and raised in the cities of Houston and New York. He now lives between Manila and Hawaii. In 1999, he was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoekel Fellowship from Yale University School of Art, and, had later received his BFA in Painting (cum laude) from the University of Houston School of Art and his MFA in Painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Chun is also the recipient of the John Young Artist Award from the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2013. His works have been exhibited widely in Southeast Asia, in the United States, and in Europe and are also in the permanent collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art (USA), Hawai’i State Art Museum (USA), and the National Museum of Fine Arts (Manila, PH).
