ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents Buen CALUBAYAN’s (b. 1980, The Philippines) solo exhibition Amoy Araw: Rhythms of Play and Labor from 26 Feb (Wed) – 12 Apr (Sat) 2025. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea in six years since the 2019 solo show at ARARIO GALLERY Ryse Hotel. The exhibition presents 21 new works that explore themes of critical pedagogy and sensory practice through the languages of painting, video, and installation.

Buen CALUBAYAN is a Manila-based artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of art, labor, and education. His work critically examines institutional frameworks such as painting, landscape, and linear perspective, drawing from them various strategies and practices that explore bodily rhythm, movement, and sensory capacities. By doing so, he challenges traditional models of power and oppression, reconstructing the relationship between the body and the world. Ultimately, his work focuses on the systems that govern everyday life and the institutions that shape and control our existence. Through painting, drawing, video, and installation, CALUBAYAN questions the imposed Western visual systems and offers alternative perspectives.

The smell of the sun, traces of movement

It is a phrase that evokes the lingering traces of movement—the rhythmic imprints—left on the bodies of children playing outdoors or laborers after a day’s work. The concept of “rhythm,” which runs through CALUBAYAN’s recent works, refers to the rhythm of light, bodily movement, shifts in the environment and landscape, and the fundamental forces that enable the creation and transmission of knowledge. This exhibition invites audiences to engage with a diverse range of works that explore these dynamic rhythms, which serve as the foundation for learning, memory, and communal experience.

A new sensory experience

CALUBAYAN’s artistic universe is grounded in long-term, in-depth research. Under the broad framework of “critical pedagogy,” he investigates the history of landscape painting, educational practices, and indigenous land struggles and integrates art history with socio-cultural issues to explore the inseparable dynamics of the senses, knowledge, and politics through the language of art. He considers “movement” and “rhythm” to be the essence of learning, urging a rediscovery of one’s body and senses beyond fixed conventional viewpoints. As part of the concept of “grounding”, he deconstructs traditional learning and advocates for relearning and collective study.

This exhibition is based on CALUBAYAN’s longstanding research on pedagogy, examining how conventional linear perception and colonial perspectives have constrained our senses and knowledge while exploring new possibilities to overcome these limitations. The artist critiques the neoliberal education system, which operates like a factory converting students into mere labor forces, as well as the historical legacy of perspective in art that has flattened our vision. Instead, he proposes Indigenous communities’ experiential learning methods—rooted in play and labor—as an alternative knowledge system. By expanding sensory perception, the exhibition demonstrates how body- and sensation-centered learning can foster awareness of social issues and communal empathy. Inviting audiences to rediscover their own bodies and senses beyond fixed viewpoints, this exhibition explores alternative possibilities for broadening our ways of perception.

This exhibition weaves together various strands of research and practice, including landscape painting and the institutional history of art, Waldorf pedagogy, memory work and art therapy, indigenous land struggles, education and practices centered on movement and sensation. Through video works, the artist reveals the artificial manipulation of urban landscapes and the disruption of natural rhythms, while paintings and chalk drawings explore the interaction between the body and the environment. Diagrams and drawings highlight the impact of fundamental actions—such as walking, breathing, and movement—on sensory perception. Additionally, CALUBAYAN emphasizes the educational aspect of the exhibition through notebooks and sketches that serve as a guide to his artistic practice.

Using a range of medium, CALUBAYAN expresses resistance to the ways in which our modes of existence have been structured and defined. In this exhibition, he places movement and rhythm at the core of learning, advocating for the concept of “grounding”—a process of dismantling conventional learning, relearning, and learning together. By reconnecting the body and sensory organs, the exhibition lays the groundwork for knowledge that is directly felt and experienced through the body.

Address
85 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM

Artist
Buen CALUBAYAN

Exhibition Dates
Feb 26 – April 12, 2025

Website
https://www.arariogallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/arariogallery_official/

Contact
info@arariogallery.com
+82 2 541 5701

About the Artist

Buen CALUBAYAN lives and works in Manila, Philippines. He studied Cultural Heritage at the University of Santo Tomas and worked as a conservation assistant at the UST Museum from 2002 to 2006 and as a researcher at the National Museum of the Philippines from 2010 to 2013. CALUBAYAN has held solo exhibitions at various institutions, including the UP Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines, 2023–2024) and ARARIO GALLERY Ryse Hotel (Seoul, Korea, 2019), and has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as Mindset Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan, 2020), House of World Cultures (Berlin, Germany, 2017), ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, China, 2016), Gwangju Museum of Art (Gwangju, Korea, 2014), and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila, Philippines, 2013). Moreover, from 2008 to 2018, he took part in numerous residencies in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and other locations. In 2013, CALUBAYAN received a Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art at the Ateneo Art Awards in 2013 and a Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2009.

(Text and images courtesy of ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL)