Book talk: Philippine Figurine: Image, Ornament, Art

How can the concept of "the figurine" be theorised as a means to rethink concepts of art, ornament, the decorative and the devotional, and their postcolonial implications? In this seminar, Patrick Flores introduces his newly published book addressing these questions. Each of the book's seven essays is a close reading of a particular image, ranging from the annual procession of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila, to the work of the 19th-century painter Juan Luna, to the patronage of former First Lady Imelda Marcos. Flores will reflect on the range of visual materials that he discusses in the book, and offer some comments on their implications for art-historical and curatorial thinking and writing.

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of the National Gallery Singapore. He has written significantly on Southeast Asian art, specifically its colonial and modernist formations, and has curated contemporary exhibitions on and through Southeast Asia. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1998); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017); and The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), which he co-edited with T.K. Sabapathy. He was a Curator (Position Papers) at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Philippine Pavilion in 2015 and the Taiwan exhibition in 2022 at the Venice Biennale. He was the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Protessor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2026.