Curatorial Notes

Jonathan Ching rescues a bouquet of discarded flowers from the trash and transcribes it into a painting. In its image, he sees the remains of an encounter between human and the divine.

Partly wilted and partly still alive, Ching's chosen subject has lived a past life as an object of supplication, an offering to the Buddhist gods in his mother's shrine at home. Depicted in monumental scale, the white chrysanthemums tower over its audience, it fans out and encompasses; each petal appears like quills and stays not quite still, as its subtle colors quiver in the fleshy layers of oil paint. Standing in front of it, one gets the feeling that what they are encountering may not belong to the human world entirely.

Ching considers his relationship with religion as peculiar. He grew up in a Chinese Buddhist household but attended Catholic school. Over the years, he has noticed the intersections of these two beliefs. In this body of work, Ching inspects the ritual of offertory that has been practiced across ages and cultures. “We offer things in exchange for favors”, he observes. Exploring the ideas of desire as human disposition and generosity as a divine act, Ching portrays this ritual as laden with images of human becoming gods and gods becoming human. In Buddhism, the activity of offering is a remedy for our worldly attachments as a way of transcending to the divine realm. Meanwhile, Christianity centers on God the Father sacrificing his son to become human. Such is true also in local indigenous beliefs like the pagdidiwata of Tagbanua, wherein the babaylan, a mediator of the spirit world who does the offering of harvest assumes the identity of the deities.

Finding the sublime in the everyday scenes has since been at the core of Ching's works. In They might be giants (2019), mounds of whatnot left on the sidewalks from the day’s business are cloaked in tarpaulin and bound by rope. These are common sights in the streets of Manila, but when filtered through Ching’s process become mysterious dormant bodies from a mythical world.

These new works for Art Fair exhibit the same skilled restraint that generates wonder about the act of offering. In relatively smaller paintings, the flowers are placed against plastic table cloths used in local households and carinderias. “In a sense, I am documenting it as I see it, and juxtaposing the religious with the secular world. It’s a sort of recycling, you take the object away from the actual use and you change its context,” he explains. He takes interest in the layers of realities and the meaning that emerges: “The paintings depict real flowers placed on top of paintings of flowers—the divine is placed on a mundane setting—the sacred on top of kitsch.” It is an object offered in prayer, placed against images of yearning for abundance that will never wilt, like gods taking human form.

Words by Carla Gamalinda

About the Artist

Jonathan Ching (b.1969) is a painter based in Manila, Philippines. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering (1991) from the De La Salle University Manila before he pursued a degree in Visual Communication from the College of Fine Arts in the University of the Philippines Diliman (1997). Ching is one of the founding members of the collective Surrounded By Water.

Ching’s works are visual narratives of the everyday, explorations of the city he traverses, and documentations of his experiences. In his observations, he offers nostalgia captured in the stillness of paintings melding with a personal understanding of space. To Ching, his works are autobiographical nodes which mark directions for mapping and placemaking daily life. His practice serves both as a personal history and as a purposeful account of the transformation of urban life. Ching has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the Philippines and in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.