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Jon Cuyson is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, artist books, and film. For over two decades, he has explored intersections of identity, movement, labor, and ecological entanglement, often navigating the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction. In 2010, he founded Everyday Productions, a conceptual platform that operates as both laboratory and methodology for experimentation across art, cinema, and design. His projects are shaped by Memory Modules, interconnected works that act as partial archives for submerged histories, maritime labor, and fragments of belonging. More recently, he has developed Mussel Thinking, a framework where mussels serve as ecological collaborators and metaphors for filtration, sedimentation, and clustering. This methodology emphasizes porousness, care, and interdependence, extending his engagement with queer ecologies and wet ontologies. Cuyson constructs immersive environments that reimagine how memory, desire, and ecology interlace across personal and collective histories. His work often blurs distinctions between art and design, installation and scenography, fiction and document, producing spaces that are at once vulnerable and transformative. He earned his MFA in Painting from Columbia University, New York (2010) and is currently based in Manila, Philippines, where he continues to live and work. Jon Cuyson will officially represent the Philippines at the 61st International Art Exhibition , La Biennale di Venezia in May 2026.

9 May –22 November 2026 - Arsenale, Venice, Italy

Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig is an immersive installation that brings together painting, sculpture, sound, and moving image to explore the sea as a living archive of labor, migration, memory, and desire. Developed for the Philippine Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, the work expands painting into a navigable horizon where viewers move through a shifting landscape shaped by distance, relation, and oceanic movement.

The installation is composed of freestanding painted structures, sculptural elements cast from mussels and other marine materials, and a constellation of films that extend the horizon through multiple temporalities. At its center is Kerel, a fictional queer Filipino seafarer whose journey unfolds across moving image works alongside Mutya and Nanay Cleo, forming an evolving constellation that reimagines kinship, diaspora, and belonging.

Underlying the project is Mussel Thinking, an artistic framework inspired by the ecological behaviors of mussels through filtering, clustering, and sedimentation. Rather than representing the sea, the work adopts these processes as both material method and conceptual approach. Through abstraction, accumulation, and cinematic drift, Sea of Love proposes the horizon as a shared space where personal, collective, and ecological histories continually gather, separate, and begin again.

A Million Silver Bamboo: The Rain We Share

May 11–16, 2026

Hosted by Ewha Womans University and organised by the College of Art and Design, EMAP (Ewha Media Art Presentation) returns in 2026 as a five-day outdoor moving-image edition across the university campus. Founded in 2001 in the spirit of honouring the legacy of Nam June Paik, who served as a distinguished professor at Ewha, EMAP has developed over two decades into a public platform for experimental, digital, and archival moving image works. The 2026 edition is especially significant as it marks the university’s 140th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of Paik’s passing.

Titled A Million Silver Bamboo: The Rain We Share, EMAP 2026 brings together forty artists and collectives working across different geographies and generations. It reflects on a theme evolved from Maritime Imaginary in the Age of Climate Emergency, an international conference organised by the College of Art and Design the previous year, extending its inquiry into the poetic and ecological dimensions of water. “A million silver bamboo” draws on a classical image of “silver bamboo,” describing the vertical lines of heavy rain falling through the sky. The title gestures toward a shared planetary condition in which intensifying hydrological volatility has become one of the defining challenges of our time.

EMAP 2026 is prepared under the overall direction of Moon Kyungwon (artist; Dean of Ewha’s College of Art and Design), with advisory support from Frances Morris CBE (former Director, Tate Modern). The edition is co-curated by Sungah Serena Choo, Sooyoung Leam, and John Kenneth Paranada.

Alongside this year’s edition of EMAP, Nam June Paik: Ecologist of the Videosphere, a special exhibition curated by Nam June Paik Art Center will be presented in collaboration with Ewha College of Art and Design.

Participating artists include Ana Alenso, Au Sow Yee, Poulomi Basu & CJ Clarke, Jungki Beak, Oliver Beer, Matthew Benington, Rotter Su & Katherine Hammond, Marcel Broodthaers, Moojin Brothers, Heidi Bucher, Pom Bunsermvicha, Seo Young Chang, Julian Charrière, Marcus Coates, Jon Cuyson, Uri Han, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh & Hesam Rahmanian, Bokyung Jun, Yuki Kihara, Daum Kim, Josh Kline, Shigeko Kubota, Sojin Kwak, Lap-See Lam, Jade Sujin Lee, Angelica Mesiti, Manny Montelibano, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joon, Peter Nestler, Maria Estela Paiso, Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut, Abi Palmer, Minha Park, Shahana Rajani, Yo-E Ryou, Shen Xin, Tong Wenmin, Derek Tumala, Nicolás García Uriburu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Solin Yoon.

MEMORY MODULES

MEMORY MODULE: BREAKING THE WAVES

Breaking the Waves continues my exploration of abstraction as a layered site of memory, labor, and ecological entanglement. The straight lines once drawn with geometric precision have softened and fragmented into horizontal gestures applied with a roller, marking intervals of time, space, and accumulated labor. Once a marker of separation, the line here becomes porous, signaling the dissolution of boundaries, between land and sea, self and other, surface and depth, and acting as a hinge between abstraction and cartography, performance and mapping, queer, affective, and ecological resonances.

Water, both symbol and substance, is central. It carries the paint, shapes the conceptual terrain, and evokes migration, transformation, and loss. Paint flows, evaporates, and settles like silt; time is made visible through layers shaped by gravity and touch. Salt, cast resin shells, and hybrid materials interrupt surfaces, creating a tension between object and illusion. The subdued palette of beige, gray, and brown, punctuated with silver, evokes sediment, drift, and reflected light, conjuring elemental textures without collapsing into representation.

The exhibition title references Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), reframed here as a metaphor for bodily fragility and endurance amid social, historical, and natural forces. These paintings hold space for what is submerged yet resilient, vulnerable yet insistent. Ultimately, Breaking the Waves is a meditation on matter, memory, and movement, gathering the intimate and the planetary, the personal and the historical, into forms that drift, settle, and unfold over time.

2025 / West Gallery / Philippines

Some canvases in Breaking the Waves incorporate resin-cast shells, mussels, artists mandibles, and fragments of marine debris, embedded directly onto the painted surface. These interruptions transform the works from two-dimensional gesture into hybrid, sedimentary forms. The cast materials suggest remnants of shorelines or bodies washed ashore, shifting the paintings into sculptural terrain. These assemblages highlight the tension between fluid gesture and encrusted matter, evoking ecological accumulation and queer embodiment. Abstraction, here, becomes entangled with the physical world, holding memory, excess, and material transformation in fragile suspension.

MEMORY MODULE: HOLE IN THE WATER

Hole in the Water is an ongoing artist book series that fuses archival, found, and personally taken photographs into a fragmented, fluid narrative. At its core is the motif of a black hole—an orifice or opening that operates as both void and passage. This “hole” moves across registers of meaning, from absence and erasure to the queering of space, evoking intimacy, anonymity, and desire within the contexts of maritime labor, historical memory, and geopolitical tension.

The book weaves together images of Filipino seafarers at work, archival queer photographs of sailors, and scenes of conflict at sea, including tensions between Filipino fishermen and Chinese vessels. These are layered with images of Chinese scholarly rocks, creating a porous visual field where geology, history, and identity converge. Each photograph functions as a threshold where intimacy and labor, politics and desire intersect.

Informed by queer temporality and the precarities of life at sea, Hole in the Water unsettles dominant maritime narratives. Mussel Thinking subtly informs the work, shaping how images accumulate, filter, and sediment meaning over time. Resisting mastery and fixed representation, the book invites viewers to linger in absence, to read through rupture, and to consider what it means to know through unknowing.

Series of 50

Photocopies , Magazine bound, 8 1/2 x 11”

2025

EVERYDAY PRODUCTIONS

PARATETHYS/PAKIKIRAMDAM (Sensing the Sea)

ASIA NOW / PARIS ART FAIR 2026 / TALA CHICAGO GALLERY

asia now / paris art fair 2026 / tala chicago gallery

Jon Cuyson: SEA OF LOVE / DAGAT NG PAG IBIG

SEA OF LOVE / DAGAT NG PAG IBIG

9 May –22 November 2026 - Arsenale, Venice, Italy