Wire Tuazon is one of Philippines most accomplished contemporary artists who seeks inspiration from pictures and texts, is featured at HBArt auction for the first time. Images are not merely visual cues but powerful signifiers that implicate history itself while his trademark text transcends its linguistic properties to become, inevitably, an image, generative of associations as well as collisions. Patrick D. Flores, curator, writer and an academician has described accurately on the practice of Wire Tuazon in an article titled Hunting and Gathering:
 

“Wire Tuazon has always been drawn to the found image as a basis for the condition in which an imagination of reality plays out. The found image is an index of the activity of reading, and therefore implicates the labor and the desire to figure and to figure out. When he overlays words or phrases on this found image, another layer of labor and desire emerges, this time partaking of the work of language, or more to the point, of text. The artist disrupts the notion of language as merely referential. He argues that writing is formative and that it shapes knowledge in the context of, again, figuring and figuring out. Text and image, therefore generate painting. The latter is not only an optical apprehension; it is also not just pigment on ground. Painting is procedure.”
 

Beyond Another Image austerely illustrates an outline of an avatar symbolising the human head with the title as text. The ambiguity leaves the viewer to imagine a familiar face in place of the unknown.
 

Wire Tuazon is a visual artist whose practice combines the hyperrealist, semiotic, and the performative. Graduating with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1999, he became a founding member of the art collective Surrounded By Water, which set up independent artist-run spaces in Angono and later on in Manila in 2000. In 2001, Tuazon received a residency grant at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History from the Japan Foundation Asia Center. In 2003, Tuazon was chosen as one of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ annual Thirteen Artist Awardees. He served as President of the Rizal-based Neo-Angono Artists Collective in addition to participating in numerous group exhibitions and public art performance festivals across the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and Korea. He has held over 20 solo exhibitions namely Cave to Canvas (2012, Manila); A Poem of Fire (2011, Manila); Alleged Legend (2010, Beijing); Chance Imagery (2009, Kuala Lumpur); Authentic Hacienda (2006, Manila); Re-surface: The Damned Collages (2000, Manila); and When Everything Becomes Silent…I Jump, Dirty Room (1996, Manila) among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs internationally namely Multiple Languages, Curated by Leslie de Chavez & Louise Marcelino, Silverlens, Manila (2014); Summa Art Fair, Finale Art File Booth, Madrid (2013); Artriangle 3, National Gallery of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (2010) and more. He has recently participated in Art Stage Singapore 2015 showcasing a body of works consisting of large scale oil paintings of photographic quality with arrows strewn across the floor of the booth and on the artworks.

 

REFERENCE

Wire Tuazon Performance Art vs Performance Art, Hunting and Gathering , Patrick D. Flores, Finale Art File, 2015.

http://www.wiretuazon.com/