ISANG BAGSAK

"What is filipino? What the hell is that? It's like what the hell is Canadian? [...] I've come to a position where I'm interested in 'non-identity', or the idea of 'non-recognition' as a way of coming to terms with identity. I think it's a way of relinquishing a name or an identification, and in a way that gives me more freedom. But of course, I am everything of where I came from. [...] Because when you say a Filipino identity, there's an assumption of what that is or what that looks like, and as an all encompassing thing, I don't know what that looks like. I feel what I do, is that."  

- Lani Maestro 

"But in the end, like this labourer in 'Bayan Ko'[...] he realized that the solution to his particular problem, to get his wife out of the hospital, basic problems like social services and all that, he realized that he can not do it alone. That it had to be done in solidarity with the other groups. And that the solution to that particular problem of his would depend on the solution of the bigger problems. And the bigger problems of course, definitely is the system." 

The underground circulates a pamphlet of his writings, “The Suffering Pilipino”: “We Pinoys suffer collectively from a cultural inferiority complex. We are doomed by our need for assimilation into the West and our own curious fatalism…” “Fatalism is fatal,” begins another influential essay. He describes us as a complex nation of cynics, descendants of warring tribes which were baptized and colonized to death by Spaniards and Americans, as a nation betrayed and then united only by our hunger for glamour and Hollywood dreams.

"... Just after completion of his four-month research grant from the Asian Cultural Council to study the modern-to-contemporary shift in American Museums. The conversation, held at They cover a range of issues on the topic of Southeast Asian Art, recorded at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York City in October 2010 covers a brief history of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, from the cultural programs of Imelda Marcos to the recent flourish of the “artist-curator.”

Flores discusses his views on the influence (and sometimes lack thereof) of Western Art History on the region and the current challenges faced by SE Asian artists and curators in trying to assimilate into the larger international art community."

http://artonair.org/show/patrick-flores

Installation as a medium was able to reference the local, and also the urgent political context that the art of the region expressed. At the same time it was understandable or intelligible as a global art discourse. Installation was a common language that artists all over the world spoke.