Opaque and beaming with color,Bhen Alan weaves texture and soul together into loud art. His work plays with tensions of visibility across the Filipino diaspora, and the complex web of citizenship, identity, gender, and sexuality. Formally trained as a painter, his most recent pieces call upon traditional forms of Filipino textile weaving, dating back to the thirteenth century. Raised in the Philippines, Alan grew up immersed in Filipino folk dance, costume making, and textile arts in which he took for granted: “I really didn’t know that those things were art” (Alan, 2022). As an intentional introspection, Alan constructs pieces using traditional Female Filipina practices, solidifying them as art. In the context of the devaluation of feminine or domestic craft, Alan’s work holds a distinct statement, operating outside of the mainstream art world that consistently devalues textile art, or belittles indigenous art practices as without meaning or form. He works with natural materials like leaves, bamboo, coconut leaves, and feathers, along with recycled plastics, race sacks and more. Alan’s large form woven pieces explode off the wall, and display a dynamic flamboyance, asserting his position as a queer artist embracing a Filipino identity that not all can publicly flaunt.
His solo show at Boston University, titled Hidden and Hiding (Tago ng Tago) surrounds his relationship and empathetic connection to unauthorized Filipina migrant workers forced to conceal their immigration status. Leaving the Philippines to Canada as a teenager, Alan worked to separate from his Filipino identity, hiding behind assimilation efforts, refusing to eat Filipino food or practice Filipino arts. A child of a mother who left for labor, his work integrates the intimate complicated pain of a child losing its mother to a labor force to support him. Heavily inspired by the women of his childhood, Alan constructs embraces vibrancy through ornamentation, layers, and dramatic textures that stretch across the diaspora.
The bright reds shade the women’s skin, looking directly at the viewer, surrounded by deep purple flowers. The figures are stoic, stuck against a wall on repurposed plastic, placed in a liminal position. The installation base weaves repurposed plastic upon a frame, which is painted upon with oil paint. The women represent the craft they are depicted on, representing the continued traditional passed down of weaving. Their positionality is temporary however, as once the paint dries, Alan rips the woven layer from the base, separating the women from their initial home. After the separation, the women are unidentifiable, left as collections of red and purple with octagonal holes throughout. Alan watched his mother leave, and he recreates a similar story with the group of women distancing themselves from the wall. The temporary arrangement of the women connects to the transnational diaspora of Filipina workers in the labor force, separated from family and community, left with faces of fortitude and pride. The rapid separation and perhaps destruction of the piece questions the violence and pain of diaspora, distinctly tied to Capitalism and Colonialism, as well as the temporality and the construction of borders and citizenship.
