Enduring Identity by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

For years, Salvador Ching has been evolving his version of the vernacular self—men and women in a traditional garbs but enclosed in a flurry of expressionistic colors, at home in tradition and modernity, in the constancy of geography and in the flux of history. They are, of course, nothing but Filipinos, which, for the artist, can be evoked through distinct and recognizable patterns and motifs. That he would choose serigraphy as an important process in his art practice makes evident that these enduring symbols must be repeated, perpetuated and asserted, as veritable extensions and continuations of our heritage.


In what have become his signature elements, the figures in Identity Crisis are once again swaddled in Ching’s sweeps, blocks, and layers of color not to underscore the flatness of the canvas but to render texture and a deepening of space. Contrapuntal to an expressive coloration are lines of barcode extending into the pictorial surface—a stamp that suggests the uniqueness of each composition. Ching’s sense of placement of these elements vis-à-vis the portraits orchestrates a programmatic whole: a balance that soars. Nothing appears out of place; everything is enfolded within the artist’s chromatic realm—a veritable world of its own.

In tackling “identity crisis,” the artist argues that there is an aspect of our racial self that is expressed internally, beneath the surface of skin, through the scaffold of skeleton, in the interstices of DNA. That this self can leave behind evidence and be investigated by future anthropologists and archeologists is proof positive for Ching that a part of our identity is wedded to biology, and therefore cannot be erased. Hence, the heads of the figures are depicted with skulls, as though the artist had given the viewer X-ray vision to see through flesh. In a suite of works rendered on panels of acrylic, the facial bones are merely suggested; once you turn them over, their full skulls will be revealed.

Certainly, the skulls could be read as memento mori, and this view could be supported by the elements of chronography and clouds. Attending to and hovering above a few of the figures, a cumulonimbus suggests the temporality and temporariness of existence: all of us are but clouds that have formed, and just like the others before us, shall break off, scatter and disappear.