Exhibit and talk on Chinese-Filipino artist Elisa Tan

Elisa Tan: Container of Distance will feature the works of the late Chinese-Filipino conceptual artist. This is part of MCAD Commons, an exhibition project which offers the singular programming of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde to a larger audience, fostering creative development, ideas exchange, and curatorial discourse. 

After studying in Manila, Elisa Tan spent a decade in the United States and Europe, where she became a respected figure in the arts scene. Her early efforts as a painter of large-scale canvases garnered significant recognition in the mid to late 1970s. When she moved to Paris in the 1980s, her intellectual efforts to merge word, image, and the everyday finally began to reach their most sustained following. Her envelope series, expressed in her symbology, is a sequence of ever deeper meditations on what she calls “containers for thought.” Within that framework, she created space for color, abstraction, the concrete, accident, and the deceptive power of the small scale. A spiritual crisis led her to stop creating public art. She later converted to Christianity and lived a private life in Baguio, where she passed on. Her work has been archived by her estate.

The exhibit also features the poetic constellation of her ideas. There will also be talks by scholar-curator Dr. Maria Cristina Juan, a faculty member at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, who specializes in transnational Philippine cultural studies, and professorial lecturer Dr. Flaudette May Datuin, who teaches at the Department of Art Studies of University of the Philippines Diliman. They will conduct conversations on the late artist’s works and creative process on 11 October at 3 p.m.

The exhibition is free and available for public viewing from 10 October to 16 November. It is open from Tuesdays to Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., except holidays. Both the exhibit and the discussion will be at the Space63, Comuna, 238 Pablo Ocampo Sr. Extension, Makati City.