Following the special exhibition of Yoshitomo Nara, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KdMoFA) has collaborated with Mind Set Art Center (MSAC) to present a heavyweight exhibition: “Tide Table” by Filipino female artist Marina Cruz. This will be Cruz’s first museum show in Taiwan and a fruit of her long-term collaboration with MSAC, which has built a deep engagement in Asian contemporary art and unique tastes in art selection, it serves as the trustworthy platform for collectors. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Patrick Flores, who will serve as the chief curator for Taiwan at the 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2022. The show presents a collection of vital artworks from the artistic practice of Marina Cruz, which involves diverse artistic techniques and media. The artworks on display include paintings on canvases, fabric collages, laminated photos, and embroidery evoked by the artist’s personal history intertwined with the biography of her house comprehensively. Altogether, the collection showcases a variety of aspects of her artistic career spanning over more than 20 years.

Marina Cruz grew up with her maternal grandmother in an old house as her parents were both busy working. During her youth, she developed a deep connection with the historical objects of her family, the old house and the maternal genealogy. Cruz’s practice focuses on the motif of familial memories and existence of life. With fine strokes and elegant lines, Cruz paints the vintage clothes that the family elders sewed by hand. The practice allows her to record details of her residence and to awaken parts of her personal history. The house was also subject to frequent floods, a natural phenomenon that was considered both a disaster and a routine occurrence. Cruz records the stains left by the floods and the dates of these incidents in a time table. The unique record is her way of presenting the trials and tribulations that humans go through in tackling changes in nature. The curator has named the exhibition “Tide Table” as a way to reflect Cruz’s life story and to hint that the artist has condensed much of her sentiments, as well as the shifts in nature and history, in the tide table.

In Marina Cruz’s works, both the method of display and the individual images operate simultaneously on several different levels. She is predisposed in each exhibition to use her diverse collection of antique, nominal, and semantic material in such a way as to bring into attention some characteristic of painterly representation. The astute presentational tactics; the devices of display and the source of her imagery; the recollection of events in her family history and the history of her depicted objects, pile the many layers in Marina Cruz that are waiting to be surfaced and understood. For this reason, notwithstanding her intentionally nostalgic use of old things and old lives, we suitably recognize Cruz’s practice as a meticulously contemporary one, primarily concerned with the conflicting nature of the painted object and the actual event behind it: the visibility and invisibility of its subject; the simultaneously physical and yet ethereal nature of the painted image. There’s a flair of a simultaneously tangible but untouchable presence felt in the photographs uncovered by Cruz and her grandmother from more than fifty years ago which serve as the source for her paintings. She deals with the stories of survival and recapture of the dresses of her twin mother and aunt which she summons in her exploration of the life and after-life that inhabits these objects. Her painting process, like one’s memory, is often faintly trailed, recognizable under her elusive lexis of portraiture.

Born 1982 in the Philippines, Marina Cruz graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines. She was the Grand Prize Winner of the Philippine Art Awards and of the Philip Morris Awards in 2008. She was awarded the Asian Fellowship Grant by the Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Art Center in the USA, and the Residency Grant by the La Trobe Visual Arts Center in Australia. In 2012, Cruz was named as one of the 13 Artists Awardees by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Taipei, Paris, Germany, and the Philippines, to name a few.

※ In response to pandemic prevention measures, the opening reception is changed to exhibition doors open, no refreshments will be served. On entering the gallery, please comply with COVID-19 prevention measures:
- Wear a mask at all times
- Complete the COVID-19 registration
- Sanitize hands with alcohol

[ Tide Table ] Marina Cruz Solo Exhibition
Curator: Dr. Patrick Flores
Dates | 16 July(Fri.) - 17 October(Sun.) 2021
Opens | 10:00 - 17:00 *closed on Monday and National Holidays
Venue | Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei
Organizer: Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts
Co-organizer: MSAC