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Inhabitants
Don Bryan Bunag
February 6 - 8, 2026
1/10
In Inhabitants, Don Bryan Bunag extends painting toward the condition of an inner environment—one that feels uncannily close yet remains fundamentally unreachable. Inflected by Immanuel’s Kant thought of “inner sense,” the means by which we perceive and represent the various states of the mind, the works situate the viewer before spaces that resemble thresholds, cosmic events, and scenes on the verge of transformation: domains that seem to recognize us, even as they seem estranged.
Working within a restrained monochrome tempered by bluish inflections, Bunag summons a visual language of sacred geometries, portals, structural repetitions, and quiet intimations of the void. The scale of the canvases amplifies this encounter, drawing the body into a direct confrontation with form and absence, surface and depth. These are not images to be glanced at but fields to be entered—if only imaginatively—through the artist’s unwavering and exacting vision.
From the impenetrable opacity of the triptych “God of the Gaps” to the hovering incision of “Omnipresence,” Bunag translates mystery into the living matter of paint. Fabrics and threads are integrated into the canvas, producing textures that feel embedded rather than applied, as though signals were being transmitted from beneath the skin of the work. These tactile interruptions suggest coded messages—traces of an underlying order, or perhaps of its breakdown—hinting at realities that exceed what can be fully seen or named.
At once hair-raising and deeply poetic, the works seem to arise from pure conjecture, aligning themselves with the speculative logic of science fiction. They propose parallel worlds that coexist with our own, not as escapism but as a recalibration of vision. In doing so, Inhabitants clears the senses, inviting a renewed intensity of looking—and with it, an exhilaration of being fully, precariously present.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
Don Bryan Bunag
Don Bryan Bunag (b. 1993) surveys and reframes identity through interpretations of spiritual and metaphysical landscapes that respond and embrace sensibilities related to memory, space, and time. Bunag’s practice center on the sentimentality of remembering through a series of carefully arranged mise-en-scène, which dominates his body of works. Forming these narratives, Bunag evens out every element in his compositions by using monochromatic colors that emphasize the neutrality of forms and release the work from any central figure or subject. Thus, dispensing the experience of looking at a canvas or the gallery space as the central landscape --- seizing our sense of time in the images formed. Apart from narratives drawn from memory, Bunag re-imagines scenes from films and renders them into paintings and assemblages arresting motion, movement, and character. In doing so, the artist believes that time and self can be deconstructed and reconstructed through images, objects, and materials to help us understand and reflect on the notion of identity built through and defined by a cluster of landscapes.
Bunag was selected as the Grand Prize winner of the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence (MADE) in water-based category in 2015. He was a finalist at the following competitions and awards: Don Papa Rum National Painting Competition (2019); Art Renewal Center ARC Awards in New Jersey (2019, 2018); Special citation Metrobank Art and Design Excellence (2014); Grand Prize Winner, Vision Petron National Students Art Competition (2012, 2013), and the Gintong Kabataan Awards for Visual Arts (2013) in his hometown of Malolos. In 2019, he participated in the artist-in-residence program of CANVAS in Batangas. His works have been exhibited at the UP Vargas Museum, National Museum of the Philippines, Yuchengco Museum, Kohesi Initiatives (Yogyakarta), and a solo presentation at Art Fair Philippines (Ysobel Gallery) in 2018. He has been featured in exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia. Bunag received his BFA (Visual Communication) from the Bulacan State University in 2014. He works and lives in Malolos, Bulacan.
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