BUSAY, Cebu City—As many as 300 artists took part in the TOPS ArtFest held last Oct. 22–25, but a stroke of serendipity had me meeting four (one by proxy) and learning about the variety of their creative processes.
The first was visual artist Adeste Deguilmo, who had a morning meet-and-greet at the Activity Space with students from the Singapore School Cebu.
The second was designer and arts-based researcher Kaye Yuvallos through her proxy-friend Mef Marzan. Yuvallos is based in New York City, so Marzan staffed her booth on the ground floor of the mountain wing elevator lobby while a volunteer handled the other one on the third floor.
The others were Gen Z artists Jheane and Julia Borja, sisters, who arrived for our tête-à-tête before the ArTabang Auction went live.
On its third run this year, TOPS ArtFest’s theme “Building and Breaking Norms” encouraged visitors and enthusiasts to look at how artists dealt with “structures, traditions, conventions, and assumptions” that shaped their art and society.
‘Every person is special’
Deguilmo had two art pieces on lot in the ArTabang Auction and 10 paintings on sale. The first was a decommissioned helmet of Cebu’s nonprofit Emergency Rescue Unit Foundation, which he designed and called “Golden Harvest,” and which fetched a hammer price of ₱120,000. The second was his 4 ft x 8 ft oil painting “No Ordinary People,” which, according to TOPS program director Sarah Henderson, got the highest bids alongside Demi Padua’s artwork.
Facing his young audience, Deguilmo named the famous artists in “No Ordinary People”: Filipino painters Fernando Amorsolo and Malang; Spanish painter-sculptor Pablo Picasso; Italian polymath-painter Leonardo da Vinci; Japanese sculptor-installation artist Yayoi Kusama; Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; and Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.
“If it truly happened that they’d all be in one place, it’d be a spectacle. But whether the famous faces are there or not, everyone is special. Life is inspiring because of the people in it,” said Deguilmo, who taught painting and figure drawing at the University of San Carlos in the early 2000s and who was a student of Martino Abellana, the “dean of Cebuano painters.”
A student asked about the painting’s background. Deguilmo, who grew up in Mindanao (he was born in Isabela, Basilan), said it was from a photo he’d taken of the Cebu public market.
Another student asked if the contrast between the painting’s foreground and background was intentional. The question made Deguilmo smile. He replied in the affirmative, saying that he wanted a static background and that one with color would have been chaotic.
How long did it take him to finish the painting? Three months, with the two months spent thinking of what to paint, he replied. Apparently, someone had suggested painting famous artists but he wondered what the story behind it would be if he were to pursue the subject. He was adamant that his painting would show the Philippine experience.
Sitting down with CoverStory after his meeting with the students, Deguilmo said he thought of the lives of Filipinos, of the experience in the market while completing “No Ordinary People.” He spotlighted Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring because “whether you’re knowledgeable about art or not, her expression is appealing,” he said. “It’s as if someone called her name and it made her blush.”
Of his 10 other oil paintings, there were only two at his booth because “the eight were sold out.” Smaller in size (8 feet by 11 feet), they made up his “Golden Harvest” (aka Rice Harvest) series. As described in his catalogue, they showed farmers using the thresher, a machine the Americans introduced in the country in the 1940s but was only widely used in the 1970s.
Deguilmo is a regular TOPS ArtFest participant. In the inaugural TOPS 2024, he unveiled his “Lamdag: Apotheosis of Cebu,” a 8.5 feet by 18 feet oil painting positing the philosophical question of who the real Cebuano is. In TOPS 2025, he collaborated with Ariel Caratao in an experimentation session where they used coffee wash and oil in painting action figures on the spot.
Balikbayan box
Yuvallos’ work was both book launch and exhibit titled “This is How I Hold You From Here/A Companion to A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box.” Marzan said the setup evoked the concept of home, where balikbayan boxes are packed and received. She invited viewers to sit and read the books “This is How I Hold You From Here” (red) and “A Companion to A Manual on How to Pack and Send a BalikbayanBox” (white), which were on sale. She said they were a continuation of Yuvallos’ exploration of the balikbayan box, the symbol of Filipinos living overseas.
According to Marzan, Yuvallos’ work started from a class assignment in which she and other students were told to think of a symbol that they could fully explore. Also, it was Yuvallos’ first time in the United States and “to experience diaspora.” Yuvallos wrote in the companion manual that she migrated to New York from Cebu City in 2024, inspired by her sister who’d moved to Canada in 2018 but passed away in 2022.
A handout from Marzan on Yuvallos said the artist’s work focused on stories of “the materialities of care, labor, and belonging within the network of diaspora.” An earlier work of hers—“A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box”—won The New School’s Student Research Award.
Marzan further said the manual was personal: It had Yuvallos’ thoughts on the balikbayan box, which she saw as an expression of love and a record of cost. Yuvallos said the manual had evolved from her earlier work, which was prodded by curiosity, on sending and packing the balikbayan box, and was “an accordion publication [of] more than 100 feet long,” with steps compiled from instructions online, conversations, and community annotation sessions held in New York.
Interestingly, Marzan revealed that Yuvallos herself didn’t send balikbayan boxes home despite, as the artist wrote, knowing “whole chains of people who packed boxes and did pack boxes, who sent and received them, who existed on every side of this practice.”
“This is How I Hold You From Here” is the fictional story of Tita Lina, who always packed soap—“the kind that smells really good”—chocolates, toothpaste, floss, and toothbrushes, as well as cans of Spam and corned beef because “they’re expensive and from California.” Lina also put in clothes, towels, and used jackets to fill the gaps in the box.
“Every box packed is different—cheese, vitamins, more vitamins because of the virus and American supplements are the best, stuff from Trader Joe’s and Costco,” wrote Yuvallos.
Marzan said Tita Lina was a composite character—“an alias”—put together by Yuvallos from her conversations with overseas Filipino workers in America. (Here, Yuvallos uses the term “OFWs” as a blanket term for Filipinos abroad.)
I finished reading Tita Lina’s story and saw that it lent a particular poignancy to the act of sending balikbayan boxes to the Philippines. The recipients were oblivious of Lina’s feelings and struggles. They never knew that she couldn’t pack, together with the goods, the words she wanted to say: “I never went to places like Disneyland even though I had access to it. I never did. Why? Because my head is with my children. I couldn’t bring myself to go without them.” “It took me three years to buy apples.” “I want them to feel like I’m thinking of them. I know it’s hard in the Philippines.” “I’m so happy they requested something from me.” “All of the people that helped me, I returned to them. It was my dream to pay them back.”
Out in the world
Jheane and Julia Borja’s closeness has made people think they use the same canvas when painting. It’s a misconception that has followed the sisters since they embarked on their art careers and their joint exhibits like “Starlings Out of the Rafters.”
Julia told CoverStory their exhibit showed their combined dynamics: “We were relating it to murmurations of starlings. They have this intricate dance, this psychic power of communicating with each other and making small moves based on what’s beside them, [resulting] in beautiful shapes.”
The closeness is striking given the sisters’ convivial enthusiasm for art and physical proximity. “We’re really close because we grew up as classmates even though I’m older than [Julia],” said Jheane, who’s a year older.
Their parents were always traveling for business in the Philippines and they wanted their children to be with them, so the solution was homeschooling.
“We were isolated. We had no external teachers, only books. We had a lot of time to ourselves, so that’s when art came in,” Jheane recounted, adding that they also didn’t have peers to compare themselves with in making sense of themselves and the world.
Said Julia: “Each other’s company was really a necessity. It was like trauma bonding.”
Their art lessons began with self-study of anime and cartoons. Eventually, Jheane wanted to break free from the rigidity of anime and plunged into fine arts and history. “The more I knew about [art], the more interesting it became. It’s a journey, and I love that it’s still exciting to me,” she said.
But their closeness mustn’t be mistaken “for collaboration,” Julia pointed out. “We’re just presenting side by side. It’s a dialogue between [our] paintings.” She said her work is a play in abstraction, of solitary figures figuring themselves out or sharing a dynamism with another, and was looking into freedom of expression.
“I work with the human figure and their emotions because they are available to me,” Julia said.
Jheane said her paintings showed her search for more malleability in her form despite her preference for configurations and human figures that, as she put it, give the audience instantaneous recognition. “I like being connected to someone and bringing them into my space—a space I created that allows people to be in it,” she said. “But it’s not direct because I still need that abstractness with these new works.”
Jheane said she liked the flexibility and was looking to connect, which was what she highlighted in her paintings, reflecting her (and Julia’s) isolated upbringing.
Remarked Julia: “We’re creating a new place in our paintings amid the isolation and Internet. As kids, [we] had limited experiences. Ours was a homegrown lab.”
Jheane agreed, likening their growing up years to being “incubated, of [being] like Petri dish people.”
Notwithstanding their solitariness, Jheane and Julia are in agreement that they’d be professional artists in the coming decades. Jheane said art suited their lifestyles. Julia said it’s a way to make sense of the world and connect with others while bringing themselves to the world and vice versa. CS
