Conversation with Carlos Quijon Jr.

Manila-based writer and curator
By Ian Tee

Carlos Quijon Jr. Photo taken by Mars Edwenson Briones.

Carlos Quijon Jr. is a writer and curator based in Manila. He has published works in Art Monthly (United Kingdom), Artforum (New York), and Asia Art Archive's IDEAS (Hong Kong), among others. His curatorial projects include 'Courses of Action' (Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, 2019), 'a knowing intimacy or a life' (Vargas Museum, 2019) and 'a will for prolific discourses' (The Drawing Room, 2020). In 2016, Carlos was shortlisted for the Purita-Kalaw-Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism; and currently, he is a research fellow in the Getty Foundation's 'Connecting Art Histories Project'.

In this interview, Carlos speaks about his experiences as a young arts practitioner, his research interests, and building a network of friends and collaborators.

Para Site Hong Kong's inaugural Workshop for Emerging Art Professionals, 2015. Image courtesy of Para Site Hong Kong.

You completed your undergraduate studies in 2013, majoring in Philippine literature in English. What prompted your decision to pursue a Masters in Art Theory and Criticism? Was the university your point of entry into the art scene?
I studied Comparative Literature for my undergraduate degree. The programme had a strong postcolonial trajectory and emphasis on a vibrant local theoretical culture. I fell in love with reading and writing alongside writers and thinkers who offered a different literary canon. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote on postcolonial modernism in Philippine poetry in English.

The university offered opportunities for me to formalise my participation in the art scene. I took a Masters course on art criticism under Patrick Flores. He encouraged us to continue writing after the course was finished and to find spaces that are hospitable to the kind of writing we wanted to do, or even to create our own spaces. Although there are a number of ways to participate in the art scene in Manila as a writer, the university was crucial in sustaining interest in the landscape. While most of my time was spent on work, the university coursework required us to be attentive to art history and its developments in the present, and that made it easy for me to pursue art writing among other things that I do.

You were a participant in Para Site's inaugural Workshop for Emerging Art Professionals in 2015. Looking back, what were your expectations prior to entering the programme? And what did you get out of this experience?
When I entered the programme in 2015, I did not have any experience with exhibitions yet nor had I written any publications. Most of the participants in my cohort had been pursuing individual careers and practices, so talking to them was a little intimidating but very interesting, since I come from a very rigorous theoretical background with minimal pragmatic concerns. In terms of expectations, I just came to learn as much as I can. It was also my first overseas trip.

Hong Kong is an energetic place and that is reflected in the art scene. At times, I was overwhelmed by the possibilities for art practice, my brilliant peers, and the mentors whose names I know of through their writing. I had a good dose of naïveté that allowed me to be open to new experiences, but I was also theoretically earnest and wanted to thoroughly understand the issues and concerns presented to us.

For me, the most important take-away was a political way of thinking about practice from the mentors, especially Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guererro. They are also the curators of the first exhibition I coordinated in Manila. I was also excited to know more about the region, particularly through conversations with Simon Soon and Lyno Vuth. I have made enduring friendships with individuals in the cohort, such as Wong Bing Hao, Qu Chang, Leo Li Chen. We still meet from time to time at biennales or other international platforms. The requirement of the open call was important for me as it didn't not ask for much in terms of experience, unlike other curatorial workshops.

'a knowing intimacy or a life', 2019-2020, exhibition installation view at Vargas Museum, Manila. Curated by Carlos Quijon Jr. and presented as part of the 2018 Curatorial Development Workshop Exhibitions. Image courtesy of A.g. de Mesa.

How did you sustain your curatorial practice, especially in the first few years? I understand that you taught from 2015 to 2018. Did you have other sources of income?
I did not work on exhibitions until 2016, beginning with Cosmin’s and Inti’s travelling exhibition in Manila. It was only in 2017, when I started working with Patrick, that I regularly coordinated exhibitions. I think in a context such as Manila, it is important to be proficient in as many aspects of artistic or cultural labour as you can. I did writing, some publication coordination and editing, alongside exhibition coordination. It remains a hustle that reflects how the practice of younger curators become multi-hyphenated.

In 2019, you curated your first exhibition 'Courses of Action' (Goethe-Institut, Hong Kong). It was a proposal selected through an open call from alumni of Para Site's annual Emerging Art Professionals programme. What drew you to the two films included in the show: 'Sanda Wong' (1955) and 'Once Upon a Time in Manila' (1994)? And were there changes to the exhibition from the original proposal to its final realisation?
I was primarily interested in them because they interfaced with Manila. 'Sanda Wong' was a collaboration between Hong Kong and Manila production houses; while Cynthia Luster, the actress in 'Once Upon a Time in Manila', was born in Japan and had a prodigious career in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines. I am continuing my research on Luster, exploring how her figure and career can be studied as an embodiment of transnational media and socio-cultural history that connects these countries.

Curatorially, I am interested in how contemporary art might converse with different cultural objects and archives. I wanted to approach the exhibition in quite an eclectic fashion, by way of genre films, just to trouble the way we think about “contemporary art” and the forms a contemporary exhibition can accommodate. Aside from these films, another node in the show is the archive of a labour school in the Philippines that trained union leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. Archive of the People, an artist collective based in Hong Kong, found out that one of the key players in the Hong Kong riots studied in this school. This was a serendipitous discovery that was particularly timely too, since the exhibition opened during the initial wave of protests in Hong Kong.

I think curatorial labour is exemplary when it gathers different things in conviviality, a certain animated way of shaping one another that might be quite difficult to pull off just from a traditionally art historical or sociological vantage point. I also find it interesting to see how this propels registers of practice and social life towards different directions.

'a will for prolific discourses', 2020, exhibition installation view at The Drawing Room, Manila. Image courtesy of The Drawing Room.

Speaking from your experience and observation, how important are fellowship programmes for individuals pursuing a career in this field? What are the benefits and potential drawbacks?
I imagine that I am part of a generation of art professionals whose curatorial education is not exclusively shaped by academic infrastructures and whose practice is not reducible to locational fidelities. The workshop in Hong Kong and the Transcuratorial Academy in Berlin and Mumbai granted me a more unusual circulation. My affiliation with the university certainly figures in where I end up practicing. However, because the network that I have cultivated has a more dynamic relationship with a national frame, I come across a wider latitude of collaborations and friendships. Such a network may also be key in mediating intimidations and pressures from various structures of power. One potential drawback might be the tendency to completely disavow the national context or to fetishise local ones in favour of ideations that are more fixed, professionalised or European.

A recent example of what these fellowship programmes might lead to is a project that Singapore-based art historian, curator, and critic Kathleen Ditzig and I are developing which explores possible Afro-Southeast Asian connections in art. We were both part of the Transcuratorial Academy network and have attended the program 'Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South, and Southeast Asia' (MAHASSA) convened by the Cornell Institute of Comparative Modernities, Asia Art Archive, and Dhaka Art Summit. These networks and their motivations expose curators to larger formations and interests.

Between research tasks, curatorial work and art writing, how do you manage your time? And what do you prioritise in your decision to take on additional projects?
Rest is important. Reading is part of my regular days, so I have learned to distinguish when I do it for work-related fulfillments or for leisure.

Contribution to discourse assumes primacy in my decision-making, and by that I mean accounting for what my practice contributes to or participates in. This is a form of ethicality that I pursue.

Patrick Flores has been your mentor since 2015, and you have worked on a number of projects with him, including the 2019 Singapore Biennale. I'd like to ask how you first met Patrick, and what is one important lesson you took away from your interactions with him?
Sympathy is one lesson that resonates, and it informs how I approach art history, criticism, and curating. Sympathy is crucial in interrupting or delaying the negativity of critique, and the certainty of conventional readings. I think it takes sympathy to do a close reading of texts. It intertwines intimacy with material, and what Irit Rogoff calls "the embeddedness of criticality". I am wary of easy categorizations or distinctions, especially in looking at art historical narratives since these tend to foreclose certain registers in favor of narrative completeness and historiographic self-sufficiency.

For me, criticism should be initiated from a situation of sympathy so that it may resist self-righteousness or close-mindedness. In sum, I think sympathy is important because it comes from a desire to understand rather than a pre-meditated understanding. This is imperative in any curatorial endeavour since what you want to cultivate is a desire to be in the presence of materials and urgencies that insist on their sociality or conviviality.

In our correspondence, you mentioned that Eve Sedgwick's notion of "ardent reading" is guiding your current exhibition projects. For the uninitiated, what does being an ardent reader entail? Could you talk about how this idea relates to the exhibition premise for 'a will for prolific disclosures' (The Drawing Room, 2020)?
I have been fascinated by this phrase from Sedgwick for quite a bit now. It comes alive somewhere between ardour (intensity or passion) and arduousness (difficulty or strain), that for me always characterises the intellectual or theoretical encounter. For Sedgwick, “ardent reading” is a method that refuses normative critique, and instead invests on “the surplus charge of the reader’s trust in texts to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.” It “assembles and confers plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self.” We can say that it is motivated by sympathy, but definitely without forsaking an interventive agency.

'a will for prolific discourses' is my first show with a commercial gallery and the idea may be seen in how I try to engage with the commercial without completely negating it. We usually understand the commercial as something to be resisted as a sign of autonomy or independence, so we resist its logic by way of immaterial practice such as performance. While that is usually the case, I wanted to offer a reconsideration that confers materiality, particularly the prolific materiality of craft, a possible moment of radicality. This is an ardent reading of practice and one that recognises the artist as a thinking person situated within and among forms and socio-political contexts. Within this framework, I evoke one of Roberto Chabet’s ideas about the avant-garde, that it is shaped by “a will for singular disclosure,” and stake its revision towards a more prolific life, intimating practices that are craft-based or are kin to such.

You also spoke about your belief in theory and art history, and that "the 'academic', as a concept, needs to be operationalised and reconsidered". To what end and for whom should such reexaminations be directed?
This is also an important lesson that I learned from Patrick. The way it is deployed now, calling something “academic” translates to a trope for the elitist, the inaccessible, the difficult, or the anti-democratic. But if we look closer at the valencies of what are deemed as academic ideas or procedures, we will know that they exist in different densities in other discourses as well. The academic informs artistic and historical discourses at various levels, and rather than to disavow it, I think it would be more important to always think about and particularise moments where the academic presents itself.

It is the role of thinkers, writers, artists, and to a certain degree, the public to not just stop in the act of naming something as academic as if it is something fixed and immovable. Instead, the process should probe questions that will operationalise it: is the use of the concept correct? Does the concept make sense in the particular context? Is it explained properly? Merely dismissing something as “academic” is lazy, unproductive, and uninformative. As we use and understand concepts, can we also attempt to clarify the demands that we make to discourse and knowledge-production?


'a knowing intimacy or a life' is on view at the Vargas Museum till 7 March 2020.