Nicolei Buendia Gupit

BIO

Born in Los Angeles, Nicolei Buendia Gupit is a contemporary Filipina American artist working across installation, sculpture, painting, and video to probe questions on cultural belonging. Her multidisciplinary practice speculates on diasporic futures and entangles the relationship between ecologies, foods, histories, and cultures. Her recent projects use freshwater from lakes and rivers as an artistic medium to highlight issues around the climate and the water crises in the Philippines. Gupit has exhibited her work regionally and globally at various art venues including Art Fair Philippines in Metro Manila, Philippines; We Are South Music & Arts Festival in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Axis Gallery in Sacramento, CA; ARC Gallery in Chicago, IL; and the Painting Center and A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, NY.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a multidisciplinary artist, I make works that speculate on diasporic futures by uncovering personal & collective histories, entangling our relationships to food & culture, and bridging connections through our shared sense of belonging. My body of work incorporates elements from two distinct but intimately tied cultures: Filipino and American cultures. I combine, embed, reshape, and reconfigure objects and materials to express the cultural hybridity central to my cultural and ethnic identity. Drawing upon my Filipino heritage and my experience growing up in Los Angeles, my works of art speak to the social and colonial ties that connect many immigrant and diasporic communities around the globe. The mixture of low and high technologies in my body of work reflect the contradictions that exist in formerly colonized regions in the world like the Philippines. As a whole, my works telescope from the personal to the global to draw attention to how immigrant and diasporic communities respond to the various socioeconomic pressures placed on them by global capitalism.

Interview with Nicolei Buendia Gupit

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist?

I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1990 to immigrant Filipino parents. Soon after, my family moved back to the Philippines, so I studied kindergarten and first grade there. After my first grade, we flew to LA again and lived in East Hollywood for what felt like my whole life. My siblings and I were raised on welfare by my mom and her twin sister. Looking back now, I miss the '90s Reggaeton, hip hop, and Spanish rock from cars outside our apartment and the different smells from next door like Chinese spices and chorizo. I didn’t appreciate it then, but I felt that I belonged because almost everyone was a person of color like me. LA was my home. It wasn’t until I moved to Massachusetts for school that I experienced homesickness and culture shock. The LA I knew has changed so much then. Once I graduated college, I traveled from one country to another: I flew to the Pacific to be a volunteer teacher for a year in the Federated States of Micronesia. Then, I moved to South Korea to teach English for two years, and after that, I taught in Taiwan for a year and a half. I returned to the US to pursue my MFA, and last year, I flew out again on a Fulbright grant in the Philippines. I’m happy I found a sense of home in other places.

I loved to draw as early as I could hold a pencil, but I had a narrow view of art since my family wasn’t the type to visit museums. As a young kid, my art influences were anime, MTV music videos, and WWE. Drawing became a way to cope with stress at home. Six of us lived together in a one-bedroom apartment. At the age of 13, I planned to work after high school to get us out of poverty. But then my friends and teachers praised me for my coping mechanism. Some of my public school teachers went out of their way to support me in the arts. In high school, I interned at the LA County Museum of Art for a year. Then, I was granted a full scholarship to Williams College where I became the first in my family to finish college. I’m so thankful for that scholarship program and the teachers I had who cheered me on all those years.

Can you tell us about some of your most memorable early influences?

I didn’t know many artists' names before I went to college. During college, I remember being inspired by Adrian Piper, Mark Lombardi, and William Kentridge. Their works, among others, inspired me to make layered watercolor and charcoal drawings of LA bus maps and portrait drawings of people taking the bus.

Where are you currently based and what brought you there? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired your work?

My answer would be completely different if you had asked me this question a few months ago because I had been in the Philippines for a year since August. The communities that I was a part of in the Philippines still inspire my work to this day. Right now, I live and work in Burlington, Vermont in the US. I’m still super new to these parts. If I had to choose, I’d say the best things about Burlington are nature, solitude, and the art community that makes up the School of the Arts at the University of Vermont. The main reason I came here was to continue to teach art at a university level.

What is your studio space like? What makes your space unique to you?

These days, I’ve been working from my living room in a one-bedroom apartment. I often drink tea and cook up veggie meals while working in my “studio” since my workspace is connected to the kitchen. This is a very different situation than what I’m used to. A few months ago, my luggage bag served as my “studio” since I didn’t have a permanent place to stay. During the pandemic, too, I had to work on a small table because my MFA program didn’t allow access to grad studios for six months. Having my own space now makes a huge difference!

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day? Do you work in large chunks of time, or throughout the day?

How I work in my studio really depends on what stage I’m at in my art process. In the beginning stage, I read articles or books or work on my computer to do research. I take my time at sourcing for projects before getting into the “making” stage. For example, the sourcing stage for my recent work, Migrant Belonging(s), involved reaching out to people online about their families’ experiences of moving to Italy. Those interviews informed the sculptures I made for that project. (As a site-specific work, I produced a big part of this project on-site.) Once I finally have a clear plan for a project and have gathered enough sources, studio hours fly by. I can stay focused on making art from early morning to late evening, as long as I have music and food to keep me going.

What gets you in a creative groove or flow? Is there anything that interrupts your creative energy?

I get in the creative zone when I’m working with my hands whether it’s to prepare a mold with silicone or sculpt with paperclay. All I need is a playlist, a podcast, tea, and snacks to stay focused. If I get out of the zone, I can jumpstart my flow by switching activities and then going back into it later. Or I get some fresh air which kind of resets my flow.

How do you maintain momentum in your practice? Is there anything that hinders or helps your focus?

The thing that helps me restart my momentum is seeing art in person at a museum, gallery, or a friend’s studio. I would say that traveling is a great way to regain momentum, too, but the big downside to it is not having one consistent place to work.

What medium/media are you working in right now? What draws you to this particular material or method?

These days I’ve been enjoying paperclay, a mixture of paper fiber and clay. I use paperclay as a casting material for silicone molds. I’ve used other materials for casting, too, including resin, paper pulp, and plaster. But I prefer paperclay for my current projects because it preserves all the details of the silicone mold while being easy to form with my hands. It’s so versatile. I can sculpt with it, draw or paint on it, or embed things inside it, and it dries without having to use a kiln.

Can you walk us through your overall process in making your current work? Does drawing play a role in your process?

Now that I finished that solo show, I feel more ready to start working on my next solo exhibition planned for November 2024. I’m in the beginning stages of this new project which involves digging into my family history and learning more about my late grandfather’s experience in World War II. I’ve also been reading The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos by Primitivo Mijares, How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa, and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and thinking about memory and countermemory as well as history and historical revisionism. I’ve started sketching out what this future work could look like.

What is exciting about your process currently?

One of my future projects involves tracing the steps of my late grandfather’s travels on the Bataan Death March during World War II. I plan to gather what remains of his story as well as visit the stretch of land where the death march took place. Only once I’m there will I know how to move forward with the project. It’s so stimulating and so frightening at the same time because, at this point, anything can happen for that project. I’m so pumped about this new direction!

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

The ideas that have become fundamental in my art practice are identity, language, translation, migration, immigration, storytelling, family, colonialism, decolonization, hybridity, the climate crisis, water issues, and Filipino-American history and culture. Broadly speaking, the built environment, plants, waste material, family and historical photos, and images and objects that refer to the lottery, the dining table, migration, and water have come into play in my works. I view Filipino-American culture as being a sort of “bad copy” of a “true” Filipino culture. Thinking about the relationship between the two has been valuable to my art practice. This is probably why I tend to gravitate toward processes that copy, or duplicate, especially in imprecise ways. This includes image transfer, relief printmaking, stenciling, and mold-and-cast processes. I think of personal identity as a process of building and effacing, and this has influenced the other techniques I use in my art. For example, I draw, paint, glue, crochet, weave, cut, scratch, and sand as part of an artwork to obscure or reveal its many layers. I’ve also used digital processes like video and sound editing to merge digital ways of layering and copying. I anticipate that my work in the future will continue to grapple with these same concepts but with new approaches.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

I’m so glad you asked this question! Over the years, I have kept discovering limits to how art can serve communities and have learned that art can’t answer all of life’s pressing issues. That’s what makes working outside of art contexts and within communities so important for me. In the Philippines, I volunteered with Global Shapers Manila to respond to the needs of specific communities. For instance, we collaborated with the indigenous Dumagat-Remontado community in Rizal to help facilitate the building of a future museum of living traditions. Their lives were at risk due to the government’s plan to build Kaliwa Dam, a dam that would destroy Tinipak River and all the life that the river supports. We also took walking tours with community leaders of the Baseco Compound in Manila. We learned how policies prevented Baseco community leaders from solving problems related to access to water and land rights. Both of those projects with Global Shapers Manila were meaningful to me because they led to direct impacts on the needs of communities. Art cannot help communities in the same way. Even if my studio practice reflected deeply on social issues, my art could only indirectly help by spreading awareness of those issues.

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

I was mindblown when I recently realized the connection between my grandfather’s life and the key events that led to the independence of the Philippines. I’m looking forward to digging deeper into those overlaps between my family’s history and national history.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music — that are important to you?

Literature has become crucial to my practice. A few influential books that come to mind now are Decolonizing Nature by T.J. Demos, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and Woman Native Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Can you elaborate on a recent work of yours, and tell us the story of how it came to be?

This past month, I installed a site-specific project called Migrant Belonging(s) inside a subway station in Milan, Italy. My process involved interviewing first- and second-generation immigrants in Italy whose families came from Albania, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Lebanon, the Philippines, the United States, and Vietnam. When I interviewed each of them online, I asked about the things their family brought to Italy when they moved and their motivations behind emigrating in the first place. From there, I would use paperclay and silicone molds to create copies of the objects they described like passports, medicines, and canned foods. Those objects became placeholders for the different people who shared their migration stories with me. I placed those cast objects on a balsa, or bamboo raft because I wanted them to look as though they were en route, just as my audience—commuters—would be in transit, traveling from one station to another. The balsa appears to float in the air like a passenger boat on the Mediterranean Sea. Inspired in part by my immigrant family’s experiences, the work reflects on immigration barriers that affect the lives of people who leave home in search of a better life.

Have you overcome any memorable roadblocks or struggles in your practice that you could share with us?

It has kind of been a blessing and a curse to exhibit work internationally. I’ve discovered how to ship artwork relatively cheaply to the Philippines as well as how to fit all my sculptural works in my luggage for a solo show in Milan, Italy. It has been a huge learning experience. It’s useful to research the logistics well in advance so that more time and energy can be dedicated to the artwork itself.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? Is there a recent exhibition that stood out to you?

One of the most successful shows I saw recently was at the Tainan Art Museum in Taiwan. It was a group show featuring local artists called “Power! Concrete! Let's Build the Island's Modern Dream!” that revolved around modernization in Taiwan. I was impressed by how the works seemed to teeter nicely between an appreciation for modern times and a longing for a simpler past. Many works felt cautious of the future, by not glorifying modern technology and not romanticizing nature.

I will be the curator for an upcoming group exhibition featuring contemporary artists based in the Philippines so, of course, I’m super excited about the works that will be in the show!

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

When I asked my former boss and artist Anne Bray from Freewaves LA how I could connect with artists I looked up to, she said something along the lines of “Make them want to connect with you through your art.” This has stuck with me for a long time. She was right in that the focus shouldn’t be on wishing people to take notice of me or my work. The focus should be on the quality of work I’m making. Remembering this has kept me going.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

I’ve been juggling between a few different projects in my studio, but none of them are anywhere close to finished. I’m gearing up for the new year and the shows that will come with it. My schedule is so packed for 2024 that I can’t seem to get it straight without my calendar. It makes me smile to say that I have shows coming up on both sides of the Pacific Ocean including a two-person show in Vermont and a solo show in the Philippines!

Anything else you would like to share?

This interview process has been an eye-opening experience, and I’m so grateful to have taken part. Thank you to the team at Maake Magazine for putting this together and for taking an interest in my work!

To find out more about Nicolei Buendia Gupit check out her website and Instagram.