Buen Calubayan (b. 1980, Philippines) is a Manila-based artist whose current work is at the intersections of art, labor, and pedagogy. His interrogations on the institutions of painting, landscape, and linear perspective have led him towards strategies and activations that examine the body’s rhythm, movement, and sensing capacities, realigning bodies and worlds to challenge traditional models of power and oppression. Ultimately, his practice looks into systems at work in everyday life and in relation to the institutions that frame and govern our lives.
His artistic research is realized through diverse methods, from conducting collaborative sensing workshops to diagramming systems of perception, from developing a museology of employment and housework to appropriating historical paintings, and from screening tutorial videos to publishing experimental handbooks, among others.
His work has been presented at institutions such as UP Vargas Museum and Ateneo Art Gallery in the Philippines and HKW in Berlin, Germany, and at galleries in the Philippines, Seoul, and Taipei. He has undertaken residencies in Japan, Australia, and Singapore. He was awarded the Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art at the Ateneo Art Awards in 2013 and the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2009.