Manuel Ocampo. A Curator for the “Bastards” of Filipino Art

Manuel Ocampo at Manila Vice, the exhibition he curated for Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sète, France, April 13–September 22, 2013.
artist in front of exhibition title wall
Manuel Ocampo at Manila Vice, the exhibition he curated for Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sète, France, April 13–September 22, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Ocampo laments the contemporary art market boom in the Philippines. When he moved to Manila in 2005, the local art scene was made up of small independent galleries “in shopping malls and next to McDonald’s”1 showing experimental art that served other artists, musicians, and writers.2 When the market for contemporary Asian art boomed around 2008, an artist’s worth became defined by auction houses, dictating the style of Filipino art.3 Having lived outside the Philippines—in Los Angeles, Rome, and Seville—and participated in international exhibitions and biennials since the early 1990s, Ocampo’s reputation and the value of his work grew, and with it his desire to critique the market-driven notion of success and to create more informal spaces for art to thrive at the margins. In 2010 Ocampo curated an exhibition called Bastards of Misrepresentation: Doing Time on Filipino Time at the Freies Museum in Berlin, asserting aesthetic autonomy amid what he saw as the misrepresentation of Filipino artists, their politics, and their community.4 He included artists who had been ignored by the art market but had long been part of the local art scene. In 2013 Ocampo curated the second iteration of this exhibition, called Manila Vice, at Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète, France, where he used black painted walls, calling the space an “anti-museum.”5


  1. Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎

  2. Manuel Ocampo, “A Rant and Rave,” in Manila Vice (Lyon, France: Fage Editions, 2013), 35–36. ↩︎

  3. Manuel Ocampo, “A Rant and Rave,” in Manila Vice (Lyon, France: Fage Editions, 2013), 36. ↩︎

  4. Susan Gibb, “Never Give Up Before It’s Too Late: Manuel Ocampo,” ArtAsiaPacific 79 (July/August 2012), available at artasiapacific.com/Magazine/79/NeverGiveUpBeforeItsTooLateManuelOcampo. ↩︎

  5. Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎