00:00You make the artwork, you know, you put your hours and sweat into it and then for a person
00:08to auction it off for a profit. It's like, it's really not about your art, it's about your brand.
00:15I think when an artist I truly admired wanted to do a collaboration with me,
00:32that's when I felt vindicated. As far as being vindicated by the public,
00:37I sometimes resisted, I rejected. There were two occasions when I felt that what I did was correct
00:48and I felt like I did something good. It was when Albert Uhlen, a German artist,
00:57wanted to do a collaboration with me and Schnabel invited me to his studio and gave me a painting.
01:07I don't think artworks are honest. I think when you're a young artist you keep it honest
01:18because you don't know the rules of the game yet, but as soon as you get into the system
01:26and you know how to play it, I don't think you're trying to hack the game to your advantage. So,
01:35I don't know, maybe what I see as honest is like naivety.
01:46After coming from the States, it was difficult but it was challenging at the same time and I felt
01:54like at the time the art scene was very open to a lot of possibilities. That's why I was able to
02:03do an exhibition with, a collaborative exhibition with Romeo Lee. The exhibition was called
02:10Lee Almighty. Me and Lee, I was supposed to make Lee into the star because Magnet,
02:20it was shown in Magnet Gallery because Magnet Gallery was in ABS-CBN where they make stars
02:26and I thought it would be a good idea to make Lee a star because Romeo Lee is very well known in the
02:34underground music scene. Why not make him into a star because he's not just any cardboard cutout
02:45celebrity. He's sort of the real deal and that's how I got involved in the Philippine art community.
02:56There's a lot more people buying art for investment. It doesn't come from the passion
03:06of collecting, it comes from playing the game. Being in on the game, it's sort of like a gamble.
03:15It's changed from art collecting to art buying now. Sometimes a collector will buy my painting
03:23in February in an art fair and then you'll see it in the auction house in September
03:28and the prices, yeah, would triple and you feel bad because you feel like you've been
03:36cheated because you think you make the artwork, you know, you put your hours and sweat into it
03:44and then for a person to auction it off for a profit, it's like it's really not about your art,
03:51it's about your brand and it sucks and that's what's happening in the
03:57in the art market right now because it's become such a business.
04:10I call myself more as an art organizer than a curator. It's hard to because I pick
04:19from my gut instinct. I think the more fringe, it depends on the artist, the more crazy the work
04:27looks, the better for me. I try to pick artists who are sort of like more fringe look,
04:36fringe work, whose works are more fringe and the fringe.
04:45Friend of mine, Paquito Bolino from France, recently showed me the work of Renzo Dizon.
04:53He's a tattooist but also a painter and also, yeah, there's some interesting artists like
05:02Aling Lucrecia. Yeah, I don't know if she's, yeah, I haven't met her. Yeah, a lot of the works that
05:11are being shown in Kalawakan art space, space time, Kalawakan and Pablo, San Paquito projects.
05:22Like I said, more like fringe. It's not Makati, BGC area artists. Yeah, I find some of the stuff
05:31they're showing more interesting.
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