My Own Words: How the Philippines Found Its Way to Printopia 2025
Growing regional conversation among printmaking communities
By Marz Aglipay
This article is a preview of the content published in CHECK-IN 2025, A&M’s annual publication. Stay tuned for the launch of the print edition and e-publication in June.
'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
The Contemporary Printmaking Phillipines booth at Printopia 2025. Image courtesy of Fara Manuel.
For the first time, the Philippines joined the roster of international participants at Printopia, New Zealand’s annual three-day celebration of contemporary print culture and community. This year’s edition marked a milestone for the archipelago’s expanding printmaking community: the debut of Contemporary Printmaking Philippines, a booth featuring the works of 28 Filipino printmakers.
But this moment is not just about visibility. It is about how we got here.
The road to Printopia 2025 has been paved not by institutions alone, but by artists moving with intention, often independently, across Southeast Asia. In the past five years, the quiet labour of connection has taken root, forming a region-spanning network of printmakers who exchange not only techniques, but trust and kinship.
In 2024, Printopia festival director Ina Arraoui made a purposeful trip through Bali, Chiang Mai, and Manila, identifying them as active printmaking hubs in Southeast Asia. But even before that, Filipino artists had already been stitching these threads of connection. Bacolod-based printmaker Angela Silva visited Kitikong Tilokwattanotai of C.A.P. Studio in Chiang Mai (2018) and later Black Hand Gang in Bali (2023). Artists such as Plet Bolipata and Elmer Borlongan, who established Pasilyo Press, a print center in Zambales, and Noel Epalan of Kikik Kollektive from Iloilo also made their way to C.A.P. Studio in 2022 and 2024 respectively, contributing to the momentum.
My own path briefly brushed past these communities, I missed a planned visit to the Devfto Printmaking Institute in Bali but managed to connect with printmakers Kevin Jordanus and Rinaldo Hartanto of Black Hand Gang in 2022. In the same year, I met Yang Xiuting of STPI Creative Workshop and Gallery, a fellow practitioner in print. These encounters laid early groundwork for more sustained collaborations.
Speaking with Silva, she recalls, “I visited Kitikong in Chiang Mai, who then introduced me to Miranda Metcalf, host of the Hello Print Friend podcast, and she had interviewed Ina.” These introductions revealed the quiet pulse of a growing regional conversation that was already in motion before Printopia’s spotlight.
A virtual meeting of printmakers from Metro Manila, Bacolod, Baguio, Indonesia, and Singapore in 2023.
Top to bottom left to right: Angela Silva, Daniel Florendo, Rinaldo Hartanto, Gabrielle Gonzalez, Overinked Studio in Quezon City, Annatha Lilo, Black Hand Gang Studio, Yang Xiuting, and a screen grab of artists who attended the online gathering.
In 2023, I organised a small Zoom meeting among these print communities in observance of Print Day in May, an annual international print celebration observed on the first Saturday of May. It became the seed for Prints Made in May, a project that brought together printmakers from these studios and Filipinos practicing outside the capital and overseas. A more prominent result was the establishment of the Asia Pacific Print Club (APPC), which mounted a traveling exhibition across its member studios’ countries: Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Its third stop was at Gravity Art Space (GAS) in Quezon City in February 2024. More than an exhibition, it was a proof of concept: Southeast Asian printmakers were ready to work across borders, share space, and imagine collective futures.
Installation view of Asia Pacific Print Club #3 (2023) at Gravity Art Space, Philippines.
Arraoui’s visit to the Philippines last year added another thread to this network. Her tour through Manila was immersive. She visited key spaces in the local printmaking scene: MARS Center for Printmaking at Philippine Women’s University, Fundacion Sansó, Overinked Studio, The Drawing Room, Ateneo Art Gallery, CANVASGallery, Talyer 15, and the Association of Pinoyprintmakers at De La Salle College of St. Benilde. Many of these institutions are artist-run or school-based, and have long been supporting the very printmakers whose works were seen in New Zealand.
Left to right: Elmer Borlongan, Jone Sibugan (of Overinked Studio), and Ina Arraoui during a visit to Overinked Studio.
This growing network helped make the Philippine booth at Printopia possible, and so did proximity. Fara Manuel, a multimedia designer and intermedia artist of Studio Ciclo, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Massey University in New Zealand. She took on the role of curator for Contemporary Printmaking Philippines. “Angela [Silva] and I invited printmakers from a range of backgrounds and practices.” Manuel shares. It was a two-part process: Silva coordinated artists and consolidated works from the Visayas and Manila with printmaker Kristen Cain, while Manuel handled curation and logistics on-site in New Zealand.
The result is not merely an international presentation, but an extension of the collaborative, resourceful spirit that has long defined Philippine printmaking.
Print Fair+@GAS Poster Art by FM Monteverde.
Back home, these waves continue. In Quezon City, we are preparing for Print Fair+@GAS, a month-long printmaking event we have envisioned for over a year. Co-organised by Silva, the Gravity Art Space team, and myself, it is our most ambitious effort yet to show what contemporary printmaking is today. This time, it is a physical presentation. Print Fair+@GAS echoes the online project Limbag Kamay (2021), a digital print fair born out of lockdown, produced in collaboration with the Association of Pinoyprintmakers, Fundacion Sansó, and Cartellino, and functioned as a fundraising effort to build and distribute etching presses around the archipelago. Though only photos and lecture videos remain online from Limbag Kamay, its memory lives on in the 4 etching presses they've managed to produce and distribute. Its resonance also persists as a private community of earnest printmakers still grappling with limited access to presses and affordable supplies.
In many ways, Print Fair+@GAS is that legacy reborn, just as Printopia is helping amplify our voices to a wider public. With Print Day in May happening in the same period, it feels like a convergence. Across Manila, Auckland, and beyond, printmakers are pulling proofs, packing portfolios, and preparing exhibitions.
We are busy. And we are present.
Printopia 2025 was a chance not only to be seen, but to be understood: as a people whose histories are printed not only in books, but in relief blocks, etching plates, and silk screens. The Philippine booth at Printopia stands as a testament to this collective effort, anchored in shared legacies and reaching toward a future inked with possibility.
Printopia 2025 was held from 2 to 4 May 2025 at Corban Estate Arts Centre Henderson, Auckland, New Zealand. While Print Fair+@GAS is on view from 2 to 30 May 2025 at Gravity Art Space, Manila, Philippines.
This article is a preview of the content published in CHECK-IN 2025, A&M’s annual publication. Stay tuned for the launch of the print edition and e-publication in June.
About the writer
Marz Aglipay has spent over a decade covering art in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, while developing a practice of printmaking with handmade stamps. She runs Marz Today, a boutique print studio based in Quezon City.
