Manuel Ocampo’s exhibition at Art Fair Philippines (Feb. 21-23, 2025) was a full-circle moment for the artist.
Quite a wild journey that brought him to various cycles that included being a UP Fine Arts graduate, an immigrant in the US, becoming a well-known figure in the global art world, and an occasional art organizer who has gathered his peers and young artists from the Philippines, and the public, through art shows in local and international venues, such as the MIAM (Musée International des Arts Modestes) in Sète, Southern France.
In 2002, his coming home thrilled the Manila art community. Ocampo had already received various accolades, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Rime Prize in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome. He had also mounted shows in the US, Germany, and Spain, and had art collectors such as the Saatchi brothers of the famous advertising firm. He also did the booklet art of American musician Beck’s Odelay album.
But rather than meet a patronizing artist wowing them, the public instead saw Ocampo’s rebellious side, his authentic point of view. His works veered towards questioning art and the gallery system, and pushed them to levels of discomfort in discourse and presentation. Ocampo’s paintings were audacious with strong iconography, unapologetic in his choice of quasi-religious, even phallic references, juxtaposed with cutesy cartoonish figures.
‘Vomit shake’ of imagery, the artist describes his works. Ocampo’s prints exhibited at the 12th Art Fair Philippines. (Photo by Francine Medina)
In 2003, he had a collaboration with underground artist and punk star Romeo Lee in the show Lee Almighty at Rock Drilon’s Magnet Gallery, which was right smack in the ground zero of showbiz-ness, ABS-CBN in Quezon City.
An ode to the anti-star, there were no Ocampo paintings but a chaotic installation consisting of Lee’s “ukay-ukay” finds and a life-size reclining statue of the naked punk icon in gold paint. The grand entrance of Ocampo and Lee were pure red-carpet parody. Ocampo hired a pedicab to drop them off at the art gallery entrance where they were met by members of media, fellow artists, and fans.
These days, Ocampo continues to shuttle back and forth to Manila to be with his family in their city home, or to paint in solitude in his studio in Bataan. But, despite being accessible in his country of origin, Ocampo has remained low-key and prefers that his works get the full attention. His generosity continues to be palpable, however, when it comes to giving formal art talks during his exhibitions.
His participation as a featured artist at the ArtFairPH/Projects section of Art Fair Philippines this year comes as an exciting surprise as well as a thoughtful rediscovery of his works. On his Art Fair show titled Ideological Mash-up/Remix. his daily life and art practice, his interest in prints, and turning 60 years old this year, here’s Ocampo in his most candid words:
Manuel’s studio in Bataan (Photo by Manuel Ocampo)
You spent time at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in Singapore in 2019, and you work in your studio in Bataan with a lovely view of the sea. That much we know. How are days like for you now? Are you based in the Philippines? We’re missing you in Manila’s whirl of art happenings. How have you been lately, besides being busy preparing for this show?
Yes, I’m based primarily in the Philippines, though my life oscillates between two distinct rhythms. For two weeks each month, I’m in Manila, where mornings begin before dawn. I wake up at 5 a.m. to prepare breakfast and pack lunches for my kids, who attend school nearby. The chaos of Metro Manila’s traffic dictates our schedule—despite their school being a mere 3 km away, the journey can devour over an hour if we’re not out the door by 6 a.m. sharp. In those Manila weeks, my studio practice pauses; the city’s demands leave little room for creativity. I get fed up with city and all I do is count down the days until I return to my sanctuary in Bataan.
Being in Bataan—my studio overlooks the South China Sea, where the horizon stretches endlessly. People often ask if I swim everyday, but truthfully, I rarely step onto the sand. Mornings bleed into afternoons as I work only to be interrupted by the brown-outs.
2018 brought me a personal reckoning, I was diagnosed with diabetes, a wake-up call that forced me to overhaul my life. Gone were the nights of wine time and drunken laughter with fellow artists; I traded rice and pasta for leafy greens, and miracle rice. Then, in 2021, a cardiac arrest stopped my heart for five minutes. When I awoke, I learned the surgeon who revived me was named Jesus. I’ve never been religious, but I can now say that Jesus saved me.
In your recent Esquire interview, you mentioned resisting the idea of public vindication. What motivated you to participate in a high-profile event like Art Fair Philippines—where visibility is unavoidable, and you’re inevitably positioned as an art world VIP? How do you navigate that discomfort?
What compelled me was the opportunity to finally bring the STPI print series home. These works were created during my residency at STPI and debuted in their gallery in 2019, but showing them in the Philippines felt urgent, almost necessary. While the pieces don’t belong to me—they’re property of STPI—I wanted them to resonate here, in the context they indirectly reference. There’s a quiet dialogue in these prints about materiality and memory that I think speaks differently to a Filipino audience.
That said, my discomfort with public performance hasn’t faded. When asked to explain my work, I still feel like I’m performing alchemy—turning process into platitudes, reducing intuition to a sales pitch. It’s absurd, really. The work exists because words failed in the first place; now I’m expected to retrofit a narrative onto it, as if creativity were a product with a manual. I’d rather let the pieces themselves occupy that space of ambiguity. Art isn’t a transaction—it’s an invitation. Yet audiences often demand a guided tour of the artist’s psyche, as though our role is to broker meaning, rather than trust the viewer to meet the work on their own terms.
As for the “VIP” label? It’s a myth. The art world’s hierarchies are just sleeker iterations of confinement. Imagine being shackled with rubber chains instead of iron: you gain the illusion of mobility, but you’re still expected to orbit the same systems—openings, small talk, the theater of relevance. I show up for the work, not the pageantry. If there’s any vindication, it’s in the moments someone spends truly looking, not in the spotlight itself.
‘If All You Are Is A Nail, Then Everything Looks Like A Hammer To You’ print by Manuel Ocampo. About 10 meters wide and 2 meters tall, it features Latin American colonial photos from the artist’s personal collection. (Photo by Francine Medina)
How would you describe the collective theme of your works shown at AFP?
The body of work I presented at AFP, part of my print series Ideological Mash-up/Remix created during my residency at STPI, revolves around a deliberate collision of symbols, histories, and cultural ephemera. Imagine taking the visual language of power, pop culture, spirituality, and colonial legacies—Nazi uniforms, vintage illustrations of ethnic tribes, retro sci-fi alien abduction sketches, He-Man action figures, My Little Ponies, and religious iconography—and throwing them into a blender. The result is a grotesque yet purposeful “vomit shake” of imagery that challenges notions of taste, authority, and historical memory.
At its core, this series interrogates the aesthetics of ideology. By mashing up symbols like the swastika, which the West has deemed morally untouchable, with the saccharine innocence of children’s cartoons or the mysticism of folk traditions, I aim to destabilize their original contexts.
To me, these symbols are not sacred or inherently evil—they’re abstract ciphers, stripped of their loaded histories by my position as a Filipino artist operating outside the West’s cultural hegemony. Using them becomes an act of defiance: a middle finger to the unspoken rules about what marginalized voices are “allowed” to engage with. Why should the West dictate how these images are used, interpreted, or condemned? For someone from a nation historically dismissed as peripheral, repurposing forbidden iconography is a way to reclaim agency. It’s a refusal to conform to the moralizing diktats of a world that has often rendered people like me invisible.
The series also leans into kitsch and so-called “bad taste” as tools of subversion. By juxtaposing the solemnity of religious icons with the absurdity of 1980s cartoon heroes, or pairing ethnic tribal motifs with sci-fi fantasy, I’m highlighting the absurdity of hierarchies—whether in art, politics, or culture. The Nazi uniform, for instance, isn’t just a provocation; it’s a metaphor for the banality of evil when divorced from its original context. Meanwhile, the rainbows and ponies act as a dissonant counterpoint, mocking the idea of purity in any form.
This isn’t about shock for shock’s sake. It’s about questioning who gets to define meaning, who controls narratives, and how symbols can be weaponized—or disarmed. As a non-Westerner, I’m less burdened by the taboos these images carry in Europe or America. That distance allows me to remix them into something new: a visual language of resistance that’s equal parts parody, critique, and rebellion. The “mash-up” is both method and metaphor, mirroring the fragmented, hybridized identity of living in a postcolonial reality where cultures collide, overlap, and mutate.
In the end, Ideological Mash-up/Remix is a carnivalesque revolt against the tyranny of “good” taste and the arrogance of historical ownership. It’s a reminder that symbols are only as powerful as the meaning we assign them—and sometimes, the most radical act is to laugh, remix, and spit them back.
A piece of him. Manuel Ocampo signs his prints for buyers at Art Fair Philippines. (Photo by Francine Medina)
What are the joys and challenges of working with print, which is the general media you employed in this show?
The joys of working with print lies in its inherent duality, it is a medium of both precision and possibility. While the ability to produce multiple offers a democratic appeal, allowing art to reach broader audiences. Ironically, the works I created for STPI subvert the traditional expectation of printmaking as a medium of reproduction. Though print is often associated with editions, these pieces are singular, blending the ethos of print with the exclusivity of unique art works.
As someone who is not familiar with the medium the challenges of printmaking can be a steep learning curve but can also be lead towards a form of creative liberation. Silk screen, the technique I employed most in this show, became a bridge between my painting practice and the print studio.
In so many ways, you’ve often conveyed that there’s no reading to your paintings and works of other medium. You’ve mentioned that your intention “to push the conventions of painting to the point of ridicule….beyond thought.” But your works are filled with bold symbpls and iconography. Surely, the viewer can’t help but find meaning in the historical, religious, and political references in your works. What do you say to that?
When I’m painting, the symbols lose their significance and become paint, raw material, like brushstrokes or color fiels. They dissolve into the act of creation, existing purely as images rendered in paint. It’s only when you distance yourself, step back, and observe the work as a totality that these elements reemerge as symbols. They regain their weight, their history, their associations. But in the process of making, my engagement with them is abstract, almost instinctual. They’re not tools for messaging; they’re gestures, textures, a means to ornamentalize the work.
You just turned 60, on the day of the AFP Vernissage. What a milestone to survive the times and still be here, as we all are. Looking back to when you were an immigrant in the US, working through shifts, to making it as an artist, and moving forward, where are you taking your art and practice, Manuel?
Celebrating my 60th birthday on the opening night of the AFP vernissage feels like a full-circle moment. It’s quite a journey to have weathered years chaos, reinvention, and to stand, still creating, still questioning. It’s a testament to stubbornness. Surviving as an artist in this world is its own kind of rebellion. At 60, I won’t pretend enlightenment has found me. I’m still a cynic… I’ve learned to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to hold plans loosely. Is there even an alternative to this?
As for where art practice is headed, revisiting my STPI prints after six years was a surprise and it convinced me to make prints again.
Moving forward, I’m leaning more into print making’s democratic process. Its multiplicities, its refusal to be precious. Maybe it’s age, but I’m less interested in grand statements than in the poetry of the middle finger.
Survival isn’t an endpoint. It’s just the material we work with.
