2025.7.8. — 7.11.

— Soojeong Park, Jihee Jun, Han Munhee(Amo) (DCW 2025 Alumni), Jinyoung You, Hyejung Jang (DOOSAN Art Center), Binna Choi (DCW 2025 Supervisor)

DCW embarked on its first Asia-Pacific field trip to Manila, capital of the Philippines. Over a four-day schedule from July 8 to 11, DCW 2025 met with artists, curators, critics, and collectives based in and around Manila and visited various institutions and historic sites in the area. This was an invaluable opportunity to understand a new culture through unbounded conversations and exchanges, discover points of connection and envision broader communities. 

Day 1 - City of Manila I Makati City
Day 2 - Field Trip to Batangas with MCAD⠀
Day 3 - Pasig City I UP I Quezon City
Day 4 - Intramuros I Escolta

It’s taken me a lot more time than them to process this weeklong field trip. After a physical journey that lasted a full day, after all the traveling to unfamiliar encounters before finally returning to my own familiar place, what I came to realize was that part of the field trip was this process of asking myself how I might call forth all the things it left me with.

What strikes me most as I reflect on my different encounters in Manila is the variety of different occasions and the welcoming attitude we experienced. When we came knocking on their doors and proposed meeting, all the artists, programmers, and researchers gave us their time without any hesitation. The welcoming approach they showed us as unfamiliar visitors was something imbued in the individual creative methods and themes that emerged in our conversations, but it was also something fully present in their attitude toward us.

The ways in which Isola Tong encountered people and shared stories through the medium of weaving were something that created a large yet delicate framework for restoring nature from the state of disconnect, disaster, and collapse that occurs from being unable to occupy its inherent place. SAKA’s work does more than just use the language of art to give support to resolve the economic and political issues faced by the farmers and fishers they collaborate with—they are also acquiring new knowledge (artistic approaches to self-expression, methods of raising crops, recipes, tattoos, etc.) and engaging in practice to create a setting for those things to circulate in society in new ways. The work of 98B Collaboratory involves becoming “renters” under special conditions and forming bases within the building to manage and exhibit historical archives of the building owner’s family, which it then shares with different artists.

For all these people, hospitality isn’t something that begins and ends with a general tendency to willingly embrace strangers. It offers a larger form of support where they are providing a place to be together or making room for strangers to do something, even if it is not the perfect setting. It’s like they’re creating a score as they dance together, but some level of “de-scoring” can also seep into that—like a place where people can tell their stories while swaying collectively or swaying on their own.

When art translates into education and focuses on labor, it becomes less a question of where to start something and more one of finding how you can contribute—of constantly considering how you can reflect that method and attitude of creating spaces for others in your own curatorial practice. It’s like the moment when people bouncing through UP campus in Manila in a jeepney passed a coin from hand to hand on Dayang Yraola’s instructions, pulling on a thin cord to reduce the speed.

So it’s about curating where art lies in places where people can remain—curating that is filled with rickety settings where those places can be bound together or sometimes unraveled.

— Soojeong Park(DCW 2025)

After visiting the Philippines, I found myself feeling oddly uncomfortable. I think it had to do with the combination of a certain feeling of indebtedness—after receiving so much warmth and sincerity that it seems impossible to repay—and bafflement over how I could even begin to speak out or clearly portray what I learned on the field trip. We had meetings every day and learned about the legacy of colonial history, which remains deeply embedded in Philippine society—things like corruption, monopolies, and the hacienda families that have assumed control of social infrastructure and power. As I heard about how these social structures have colluded with the art world system, and how artists are fighting through their tears to join forces in practices to oppose these structures, I felt like I could gain some vague sense of the climate. But I also sensed that what I was seeing and hearing was just a fragment—like I’d just marked one point on the map in a way that mixed with various misunderstandings, understandings, and unanswered questions.

In that sense, I see the meaning of this field trip in terms of it being a reference for pursuing the next thing—marking a reference point by creating a space for the next contemplation, learning, and experiences. The experience of meeting people who willingly invited us in and gave us their precious time raised my hopes for carrying things on and meeting again in the future. The things that I didn’t fully comprehend and the plans that didn’t come through just created a reason to come back again.

After traveling the roughly four-hour distance from Manila to Batangas, we heard the sound of singing in a regular rhythm at the Mahalina Farm—like “doo, doo, doo, doo.” It was a beautiful sound, clear and resonant like striking a wood pipe. I listened for a while and looked it up on a birdwatching app, which said it was a bird known as a coppersmith barbet. I never did actually see the bird in all that foliage, but its cry really stuck with me. Like the beautiful reverberations of a bird’s call, my encounters and conversations in the Philippines left an impression on me, and I look forward to carrying that on in the future.

— Jihee Jun(DCW 2025)

Where does love begin, where does it linger, and when does it end? Love takes on innumerable faces for all of us. Sometimes, love is ignited when we see something we’ve never seen before. It condenses at a very intense temperature and is quietly sustained as a faint and challenging flame inside of us. The vague clustering of stories that occurred during our research is something that burned up and lingered in just such a way.
I think one such memory is the experience of being in front of that platform in front of a with long, heavily hanging curtains. In her home, Kiri Dalena spoke calmly about her personal history, her experiences with social violence, and the associated feelings of affection, and it still amazes me how it could feel so warm inside the home of a stranger we were visiting for the first time in a different country. The political history was obviously different yet somehow relatable, and the reason individuals grappling with struggles in such a society can experience happiness even amid the sorrow lies in those kinds of encounters.

I can remember the experience of being inside that small bus, traveling for a long time with so many passengers in it that all the folding seats had to be lowered. There were 15 people in all assembled there for the curator program. I think of us coming together with vague hopes for the future befitting our similar ages—getting more excited about love stories than stories of art. What binds us together is that shared sense and the ability to laugh when the word “performance” is mentioned as a joke during a conversation about unrequited love. Those intimate and enjoyable conversations continued over the course of a long day, and they still return to me sometimes.

The intimate settings, the mundane conversations, the clashing of imperfect language—all these things happen in a state of affection. I find myself reflecting on the process where an act that could be seen as rude instead somehow turns into love.

It is surprisingly easy to love someone or something that has an overwhelming presence. Imagine the experience of unconsciously ruminating as they keep encountering “Bagong Pilipinas”(1) propaganda over the course of a long car ride. (Not to mention that the traffic in Manila was horrendous.) The practice of politics and art begins with the act of questioning the pervasive imposition of positivity. And questioning is something that starts to speak and with sustaining the encounters that make such things possible—in places where that love turns into a tiny spark.

(1) In addition to the “Bagong Pilipinas” (“new Philippines”) slogan, there are also variants such as “Ako ang bagong Pilipina” (“I am a new Filipina”), “Marunong humawak ng pera ang bagong Pilipino” (“The new Filipino knows how to handle money”), “May pagmamalaki sa sariling kultura ang bagong Pilipino” (“The new Filipino takes pride in his own culture”), and “Modernong transportasyon sa bagong Pilipinas” (“Modern transportation in the new Philippines”). These are examples of government mottos emphasizing intelligence, pride, and modernity in the Philippines.

— Han Munhee(Amo)(DCW 2025)