Who is Roberto Chabet? Coined the Father of Philippine Conceptual Art, little is known of his work outside the vibrant and textured art scene of Manila. An artist, a teacher, curator and mentor, he has influenced a generation of artists, many of whom define our understanding of contemporary Philippine art today. It is a curious anomaly this oversight, one that is currently being addressed in a year long series of exhibitions, talks and an archive,1 that celebrates fifty years of his professional practice. For the first time Chabet’s extremely alert and sophisticated installations and collages are being presented abroad—Singapore, Hong Kong and possibly Indonesia in 2012—and in this they have prised open history’s thin understanding of Southeast Asian Conceptual Art with rabid debate. ‘To be continued’, the title of the exhibition that launched this ambitious project was indeed a profound calling to question.
Chabet’s plywood constructions from 1984 to the present, corralled for the first time, sat alert to their context, confident in their identity across the bunker-like galleries of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts (ICAS), today headed up by Australian Charles Merewether. Curiously, this exhibition coincided with the inaugural Art Stage Singapore, the splashy new fair and brainchild of Lorenzo Rudolf of Art Basel fame, and yet this non-commercial, unknown, internationally-flavoured work sited within academe arguably stole ‘the stage’ as the ‘freshest discovery’ of the week’s activities. It begged the question, how was it possible that the artworks of Roberto Chabet could have been overlooked outside the Philippines until now?
Tony Godfrey, author of the seminal publication Conceptual Art (1998), also based in Singapore, admits Chabet was news to him. He was... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline