Yasmin Sison-Ching
Published September 06, 2020
In the last twenty years, Yasmin Sison-Ching has been refining her painterly alterations and reproductions of photographs, highlighting unexpected juxtapositions of materials, objects, and overlooked details and transmuting the familiar into something uncanny.
Whether painted in her signature delicately impastoed oil or using other media, her work oscillates between strangeness and sentimentality. Her paintings of the familiar or mundane place the viewer somewhere between nostalgia, calm, and unease, but never crossing the line to fear, aversion, absurdity, or otherwordly weirdness. What are portraits remain as portraits, except for a striking imbalance. For instance in Underneath the Sky, a solo exhibition, she presented large-scale paintings of children of family and close relations. They gaze, at times wince, quizzingly or unnervingly back at the viewer as they are paired mysteriously with some found object that seems to belong to the bottom of the ocean. In much earlier works, she made several painted reproductions of photographs of people and interiors, obscured by floating amorphous beings made purely of paint, the artist's markings.
As she continues to polish her technical prowess, she's unleashed visions that grow more personal as the years go by, having become known for work that draws on her personal relationships (for instance, the memories of family members) and comments on the self (her use of the mask). Meanwhile, she has never lost touch of her roots, going back to the laboratory, so to speak, still exhibiting photographs, collages, and assemblages. Many of these experiments move into play, engaging with materials and ideas that in ways viewers don't expect from her.
Yasmin Sison Ching is a Filipino Contemporary artist with many solo and group exhibitions. She is also known among collectors, having had her works sold at auction several times.
