champoy is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and performer and also currently an MFA cohort at the UC Berkeley Art Practice. Born in the highlands of Bukidnon, a landlocked province in the island of Mindanao, Southern Philippines. champoy has been based in the US/Turtle Island since immigrating in 2002.

champoy’s drawings and paintings exhibit varied elements from comix, organic patterns and a humorous sense that is lifted from personal cosmology and ancestral visions mixed with commentaries on advertising and consumer culture. The site-specific installations that champoy created are personal inventories of fragments from a historical perspective that is constantly shifting. Usually starting off from points where the colonized and colonizer blurs out, they then become improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question materiality and our making of the world through language and knowledge. champoy’s arrangements strategically invites the viewers to look deeply into what is made present or absent, what is visible and not visible, and asks them to move into the space with a heightened awareness of their body and senses.

champoy’s most current work is centered around merging installation, line, video, and performance in countering the dominant narratives of empire mainly through uplifting champoy’s own stories. This ethno-autobiographical approach allows champoy to inquire and look deeply into the multitudes that the artist inhabits and the complexities that come with it. Within the privileged position as an artist champoy is also able to assert and ask questions about what it means to have self-representation as part of an evolving Filipinx diaspora -to see and be seen as someone who not only produces objects but is also produced as the object.

To learn more about champoy’s work please visit their website and Instagram

Visit the exhibition catalogue

Curator
Kevin B. Chen

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