Philippine Figurine: Image, Ornament, Art
$40.00 SGD
ISBN: 978-981-18-4046-3
245 mm (H) × 180 mm (W)
241 pages | 20 colour illustrations
Paperback
15 July 2026
Publisher: National Gallery Singapore
About the author
Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of the National Gallery Singapore. He has written significantly on Southeast Asian art, specifically its colonial and modernist formations, and has curated contemporary exhibitions on and through Southeast Asia. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017); and The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), which he co-edited with T.K. Sabapathy. He was a Curator (Position Papers) at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Philippine Pavilion in 2015 and the Taiwan exhibition in 2022 at the Venice Biennale.
This compelling collection of essays is a mediation on “the figurine,” theorised as a means to rethink concepts of art, ornament, the decorative and the devotional, and their postcolonial implications. Each of the seven essays is a close reading of a particular image, ranging from the annual procession of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila, to the work of the 19th-century painter Juan Luna. Written by leading curator Professor Patrick Flores, this third title in the National Gallery Singapore Art Writing imprint is an enlivening reading for those with an interest in art theory and the postcolonial condition of the image in the Global South.
Philippine Figurine is an elaborately annotated, exquisitely precise art-historical exposition of the cultures of the Philippines as an archipelago and a colony. It gifts to contemporary consciousness a spectral brilliance gained from material sites of cultural knowledge. Patrick Flores leaves us beholden.
—GEETA KAPUR, art critic and curator
National Gallery Singapore Art Writing is a new, imprint celebrating the diverse voices and genres of writing that create the discourse of art in Southeast Asia, both historically and in the present. Going beyond conventional art history, books in this imprint include compilations of artist writings, art criticism and experimental approaches to the image. Philippine Figurine is the third title in this imprint.