Gabby Tiongson creates beautifully detailed
artworks with the most common material, a sharpie marker. Using sure and strong
black lines, his precision cuts through paper giving life to his ideas and
creations. Design ideas are grafted together using different body parts –
human, animal and imagination. Through his background in medicine, he gained
confidence to toy around with nature, example, replacing a pig’s ear with a
pair of human hands.
Many of his drawings features limbs in the
most unusual places, adorned with belly buttons, a reference perhaps to omphalokepsis,
navel-gazing, and self-contemplation. Indigenous patterns are used throughout
his drawings; the stylized tagalog diagonals add a subtle Filipino essence to
what seems, at the first glance, a western sensibility.
His cartoonish style is a culmination of all
his influences and obsessions, from animated television shows to fantasy genre
computer games (World of Warcraft; Todd McFarlane’s Spawn) and legendary
creatures such as the chupacabra.
“Invention,” Mary Shelley writes in the
introduction of Frankenstein, “does not consist in creating out of void, but
out of chaos.” It is into this creative chaos, this plethora of limbs, that
Tiongson invites us. Like Shelley’s protagonist, he is set to “pioneer a new way,
explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of
creation.”
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