350 Asia
ART CLIMATE PROJECT
Weave of Hope - Exhibition
Combine creativity and solidarity into a tapestry of resistance for fighting the climate crisis
Asia is well known for its diversity. We have a long history of maintaining a complex set of cultures and traditions.
Our traditions also represent how the community captures the significance of our surroundings into the art. Most of the patterns being embedded into the design are taken from what they see every day which symbolizes the nature and environment they live in.
That’s including how we present ourselves through appearance. In every corner of Asia, we shared common practices of weaving threads and turning them into clothes.
We have “Sarong” from Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore we have “Batik”. In those countries, they also known “Ikat” as one of the oldest weaving technique.
In South Asia, we have the “Saree”. This vibrant ethnic attire is one of the oldest forms of clothing in the world, and although it’s mostly worn by Indian women, it’s also common in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and many other South Asian countries
350.org in Asia would like to capture that unity in diversity, by inviting artists to show their respective weaves and pattern, digitally.
We would like to weave that creativity and solidarity into a tapestry that brings us together.
In the end, we hope the weave of the collectives works can be a “cloth” that protects and secure us all.
The cloth that brings warmth and unites us in solidarity.
For more info about this project, check out here
Public Exhibitions
There will be a public exhibition showcasing the selected artworks from several countries in Asia.
Participating countries include the Phillippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia. The first exhibition will take place in Quezon City, Manila, on 9-10 September 2022. The second exhibition continued in Taipei, Taiwan, on 14-16 September and will be wrapped up with a series of art activities and exhibitions in Jogja, Indonesia, on 27 September – 3 October 2022.
The public exhibition will feature nine artists from Asia, and they will showcase a variety of interpretations of the Weave of Hope project themes. A selection of artworks from the local art communities will also be exhibited with these artists, as well as art performances, movie screenings, cultural talks, and discussions.
Quezon City, Manila (9-10 September 2022)
Themes: Weave of Hope: Woven by Blood
Location: Silingan Coffee, Cubao Expo in Quezon City, Metro Manila
Following the Asian theme of weaving, the artists have come to call it ‘woven by blood’ exploring the themes of collective memory, martyrdom, continuity and intergenerational succession in the struggle for ecological and social justice as exemplified by the three grandmothers that are featured in the artwork.
The artists have chosen abaca as its primary material. In its varied forms, the abaca rope functions as a screen that serves as a protective shield of the installation artwork — a tribute to the unwavering valor of the three grandmothers taking a stand and leading their communities against the forces of development aggression which has escalated to an unconscionable degree the past several decades.
The abaca fiber is a significant material for weavers all over Southeast Asia. The IKAT weave is one of the most prevalent forms and designs using abaca fiber as the base material.
The strength of the abaca fiber is legendary. It is the same material used for the huge ropes of the anchors of big ships in the past and up to the present. It is unique because the more it’s exposed to the ocean’s salt water, the stronger it becomes.
It is a perfect metaphor for the wisdom and strength of our grandmothers fighting for the space and time to live decently and safely.
Our goal is to pay tribute and to celebrate the life, death, and continuing struggle of the grandmothers whose life of inspiring action challenges us to continue the bloodline of stewardship and defense of communities and ecosystems from development aggression.
Lastly, the exhibit invites the audience to continue the bloodline of heroism in defense of people and our planet.
Minim Photography Studio, Taipei, Taiwan
(14-16 September)
Themes: Nature Whisper
Natural Whisper discusses the connection between humans and natural. Climate change in Taiwan has caused the sea around Taiwan to rise at twice the global sea level rise. The interaction between nature and the human environment is very sensitive and dynamic. Every living creature has the instinct of continuous evolution. How can people protect the places and lifestyles they love from climate change?
Everyone can take action and make a difference. Everyone should take action.
As a fashion designer, Cindy used wool felt sculpture combined with plants and moss, showing that during the quarantine period, people needed to find calm and peace from themselves. And nature always has strong and endless vitality, giving us positive and hopeful power.
As a father and an ink painter, while raising his son, Yi-Te found how climate change has a great impact on the environment for his son in the future. He wants to start to fight for his son. All these emotions have shown in his latest artworks by using intense color or the strength of the stroke.
Passionate outdoor people like Irene and Cyun Lin are trying to protect the places and lifestyles they love from climate change. As a person who loves the outdoors, Irene sees the impact of global warming, she interviews people and spreads the message to uncover the damage of our planet and how many people are still holding the hope to make a difference.
Kiniko Art Space, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
(27 September – 3 October)
Themes: Weaving the Hopes
Action and sustainable practices for climate crisis
Curators: Irene Agrivina & Nona Yoanishara
Climate change is real, it’s accelerating and it’s terrifying. We are adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate 100 times faster than any previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age. The climate crisis from climate change is more desperate than ever, ice caps are melting, the disease is spreading, heat waves are multiplying, droughts are laying waste to crops and ecosystems, tropical storms are strengthening and politicians continue to ignore the warning signs.
The increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere, carbon dioxide that got there because of burning fossil fuels, has raised the globally averaged surface temperature by over a degree Celsius. This temperature rise, attributed almost entirely to human activity, has precipitated massive and rapid changes across the globe, and these changes are forecast to worsen in the future.
Action matters more than ever because the world needs to take aggressive action to avert the worst of climate change. The planet is fast approaching the catastrophic global temperatures that countries have promised to avoid. Every fraction of a degree beyond that will wreak havoc on the livelihoods of millions of people, potentially destabilize economies and political systems, and dramatically reshape water access and the ecosystem as we know them.
Many activists are already taking various and simultaneous actions around the world. Creative minds are needed to work around the issue of climate change, producing pieces that remind people of the dire environmental consequences if we don’t take action now. Art can help stop climate change because it is so effective in sending a message. It can help people process information, but most importantly it can be understood by everyone no matter who they are or where they come from.
Weaving the hope is an exhibition that presents various works from interdisciplinary artists that focus on the climate change issue. These selected artists not only work on the message that can raise public awareness about the environmental issue that we face right now but also on the material and production that lower the carbon footprint. Compared to far-larger “culture industries” like fashion and entertainment, the art world’s role in environmental concerns such as climate change is relatively modest. But every action from every sector including art is needed to create more sustainable practices to help the world combat global warming.
The participating artists in Weaving the hope were agreed to be part of this global action, alongside the exhibition series at Manila, the Philippines and Taiwan. Artists are concerned in delivering messages through their art work and using sustainable and circular material and lower carbon footprint production. Through this exhibition we hope that we are creating new concepts of sustainable art and climate change art, the artists themselves have actually been addressing the climate change debate in their works. Through a wide variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, artists have been engaging in complex conversations in the global arena.
As Bruno Latour said, “The climate question is not one aspect of politics among others, but that which defines the political order from beginning to end, forcing all of us to redefine the older questions of social justice along with those of identity, subsistence, and attachment to place.”
Here, we take a closer look at artists who shed light on the impact of climate change and who use art as a form of activism. Such anxieties surrounding global warming have been investigated and explored in a plethora of ways, both conceptually and materially. This exhibition, foregrounds how these artists importantly challenge pre-existing notions of art making by re-thinking and re-contextualizing the conditions in which art is produced and presented to the viewer.
Consisting of more than 10 artworks, the “Weaving The Hope” exhibition is an artistic achievement both as a visual exploration and with enthusiasm and curiosity inviting people to learn more about climate change and participate in building a better future. This exhibition also became an opportunity to introduce the three selected artists in three-dimensional artworks. In the form of a sustainable textile installation with variable media and dimensions. In addition, this project also includes six invited artists, collaborative art performances and public mural art. Our participants moving tributes to earth and places special to them demonstrate how all of us are affected by the climate crisis, no matter where in the world we live.
Their artworks also reveal the power of the arts to make the issue of climate change more relevant, to spark dialogue about our planetary emergency, and to advocate for climate action. They remind us of what is at stake if we don’t change course urgently, fairly, and compassionately.
Weave of Hope
Combine creativity and solidarity into a tapestry of resistance to fighting the climate crisis.
We would like to invite artists from Asia to submit their works that focus on hope and solidarity during the climate crisis. We would like to feature multiple interpretations and a variety of feelings about our climate issues, and also how we fight for justice.
The art submission will be judged by a panel of curators, and we will pick the winner that represents each country. We will exhibit the winner in public spaces in the selected country in Asia.
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Artist Profile
Johnny Guarin – Philippines
John Erhard P. Guarin is a Filipino painter, poet, and hip-hop recording artist from Tondo, Manila. He pursued a Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Arts in Visual Communication at Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute of Science and Technology (EARIST). He began painting at the age of 13 in the streets of Manila. By 24, he started volunteering as an artist for 350.org.
It was not until 2017 that he accepted commissions to create art for different religious networks and organizations. From there, he began to develop his career as a professional painter, crafting his works using mainly oil on canvas. From November 2019 until early March 2020, he was deeply involved with the “Alas ng Bayan”, a collaborative art project organized by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, the Constantino Foundation, and 350 Pilipinas, which seeks to introduce and inject history and feminism as fundamental elements in the way young people respond to the worsening state of national forgetting and the climate crisis.
Bong Dela Torre – Philippines
Edwin Gonzales dela Torre (Bong) is a theater artist with an ardent engagement in the local visual art scene. An inactive Philippine Educational Theater Association member more popularly known as PETA, he spent most of his formative years as a cultural worker in the mentioned company. He has rendered theater arts workshops for the different indigenous communities from the Cordilleras down south, mainly in the Bukidnon territories.
Now in his senior years, he continues to pursue a path of service through partnerships with other individuals and collectives sharing a similar vision. In the climate justice advocacy space, Bong has spent almost two decades’ worth of volunteer service mainly as a creative catalyst using his adeptship in theater and other art disciplines and forms.
For the past eight years, he has channeled his forces mainly into the different advocacy efforts of 350.org Pilipinas. Having been exposed and immersed in Indigenous culture, Indigenous realities, and Indigenous spirituality, Bong continues to explore the empowering and liberating functions of the creative process in a world where the forces of greed and corruption are escalating to a degree never seen before. This is the underlying struggle in the weave of hope: woven by blood installation art event. To fight greed, deception, and corruption with truth, honesty, and astute engagement with fellow freedom fighters and environmental defenders.
Tzu Hsuan Yang – Taiwan
Tzu Hsuan Yang (Cindy) is a fashion designer for the brand URNAVY with a Korean partner. Graduated from London Chelsea university textile design master’s degree. Cindy’s artwork is usually inspired by nature and daily life.
Cindy likes to use wool felt to develop her work because it can be used by needle felt and wet felt to create soft sculptures. Expressing color and fiber texture are both fascinating.
“Silent Healing ” is a wool felt sculpture combined with plants and moss, and the concept shows the relationship between humans and nature. During the quarantine period, people need to find calm and peace in themselves, and nature always has strong and endless vitality, giving us positive and hopeful power.
The artwork is a human body’s shape and heart combined with moss and ferns commonly found in Taiwan’s forests, presenting felt fibers that grow and weave with the natural texture of plants. Symbolizing how humans could self-heal and also get power from nature.
Cindy believes nature has a very sensitive feeling toward the human environment. Every living creature has the instinct of continuous evolution, self-healing, and regeneration. Hoping the works can inspire people to find their way to be calm and peaceful in these pressure days of epidemic prevention.
Yi Yun Cheng (Irene) – Taiwan
Irene is an adventure outdoor sports podcast producer & host. She works with passionate outdoor people to protect the places and lifestyles they love from climate change. As a person who loves the outdoors, Irene sees the impact from the global warming. If we don’t know, we don’t care. If we don’t care, we don’t protect.
Cyun Lin（貓哥） – Taiwan
Lin Qun, known as “貓哥,” originally worked as a research assistant at National Taiwan University, and started operating a compound bookstore in 2003. In 2018, he modified a mobile book cart to provide borrowing services for new residents and foreign migrant workers in remote villages. In 2019, with the expiration of the restaurant lease, he simply drove a book cart and moved to Gongliaoto to start his life career of living by the sea.
Yi Te Tsai – Taiwan
Yi Te Tsai, is a Taiwan-based Ink-Artist, and teacher with more than ten years of experience in the field of art. Graduated from the Arts Department of Painting and Calligraphy Arts M.F.A. at the National Taiwan University of Arts Department. His artwork is inspired by his daily life, flowers, and nature. Yi Te explores mixed materials that can be found in daily life. Since he became a father, Yi Te started to be much more concerned about the environment than before.
Caroline Rika Winata – Indonesia
Caroline Rika Winata (Rika) was born in Bandung, Indonesia, and currently lives in Jogjakarta. Having graduated from the Indonesia Institute of Arts with a major in textiles, Rika works mainly with tie-dye. She has participated in several exhibitions, fashion shows, and the design of contemporary dance costumes.
Among these is Intimate Distance at the National Gallery, Jakarta; the 6th Asian Fiber Arts Exhibition at Bentara Budaya, Jakarta; the Arafura Craft Indonesia-Australia Exchange exhibition at MAGNT Darwin, Australia. “2020 ARTFEM Women Artists 2nd International Biennial of Macau” at the Former Municipal Cattle Stable, Macau SAR. Rika has done much research on the idiom of mass culture, such as train tickets, used bras, etc. The idiom helps in communicating messages through the artwork.
Ambar Kusuma Wardhani – Indonesia
Ambar Kusuma Wardhani. aka Amber Kusuma, an Indonesian woman (born in. Sentani Papua 1978), carried out several roles, including a mother, edupreneur, a sustainable fashion designer based on local and wasted sources, a teacher, and an artist who explores mixed media as a means of creating such as drawing on paper mix textiles waste collage, digital mix hand embroidery, and textiles waste art installation.
Amber is a member of several communities, such as the women artist collective EMPU Gampingan Yogyakarta, XDKV ISI, the women artist collective by Galeri Seni 10 Bandung, and the Indonesia Upcycle Forum (IUF). In addition to working and enjoying her role as a mother of two kids, Amber also teaches sustainable fashion & art at the AK STUDIO course she built.
She’s also a guest lecturer at the Indonesia Institute of Arts Yogyakarta, as well as filling several webinars & workshops on fashion, upcycling, and sustainability. The themes of the works she raised took the theme of women’s identity, local wisdom, and the activities of domestic women.
Pramadhita (Yola) Setra – Indonesia
Pramadhita (Yola) Setra, a final year student of Fine Arts Education State University of Jakarta, is interested in fiber art that raises themes from her daily life experiences.
Yola realized that the human earth was threatened by humans’ actions. To prevent further damage, she believes that human needs to take more action, which eager her to join the Weave of Hope Project. Although the change will not be easy, Yola affirms that small things can make an impact. As an active person in the fine arts ecosystem, she has faith that works of art can also awaken human awareness of environmental damage and that humans still have hope of improving it.
Artworks
Philippines: The 3 Grandmothers
Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay
“Bai Bibyaon is an outstanding indigenous woman leader. The only female chieftain in the history of the Manobo tribe, she has led the defense of the Manobo ancestral land since 1994. She was among those who led the pangayaw (tribal war) against the intrusion of a destructive logging company that threatened to destroy the ancestral lands in Talaingod, Davao del Norte. She remains active in asserting the rights of indigenous peoples until today.”
“For decades, Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay has been at the vanguard of the Lumad struggle, defending the communities of Pantaron range against plunder and militarization. Together with other Datus, she surpassed the hardships brought by militarization, all for the defense of their ancestral land and the environment.”
Gloria Capitan
Gloria Capitan (March 28, 1959-July 1, 2016) was an anti-coal activist and human rights defender affiliated with the Coal-Free Bataan Movement. She was a former president of the Samahan ng Nagkakaisang Mamamayan ng Lucanin. This community-based organization campaigned actively against developing a coal plant and open coal storage facility in Barangay Lucanin, Mariveles, Bataan. Known for her physical strength and mental discipline, she would construct wooden houses using her own hands. She was known throughout her community as a fierce yet caring, fearless, and hands-on leader ready to call out and resist environmental and social injustice. She was a woman made powerful by her conviction and obstinate refusal to accept a future devastated by dirty energy and greedy corporations.
Gloria was assassinated in her videoke cantina by two unidentified gunmen on July 01, 2016, the very day President Duterte was sworn into office. Her death was the first recorded extrajudicial killing under the Duterte administration. Gloria was known for her fortitude against adversity. She received many threats but continued to participate actively and lead campaigns up to the time of her death. As she used to say, “Titigil lang ako ‘pag pikit na ang mata ko! Ano pa ba ang magagawa ko e patay na ako. Hindi ito para sa akin, kundi para sa mga apo ko, masakit ang loob ko kapag nakikita ko silang nagkakasakit”.
Vertrudez “Daisy” Macapanpan
“Daisy is a 68-year-old environmental and indigenous rights defender who was a staunch advocate of the Protect Sierra Madre Movement. She has criticized infrastructure projects like the Kaliwa Dam which will destroy the homes of indigenous groups as well as kill flora and fauna of the area.
On June 11, 2022, she was illegally arrested without a warrant. Before her arrest, she had been protesting against the Ahunan Pumped-Storage Hydropower Project. She still remains detained to this day on baseless and trumped-up rebellion charges.”