Christian Tenefrancia Illi



About

Selected Works:

THE DROP (2025)

REVERSED DUNK (2023)

SOIL-BEINGS: Lamánlupa (2024/25)

Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: 갯벌 (2025)

Field Notes on (Structural) Silence:
Or, How to Camouflage with Colours (2025)

TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or 3/4 (2022)

Renegotiations in Self-Determination: Being In-Between (2020)

Choreographies of Labo(u)r (2020)

Something of Substance / In the End (2020)

《 Mashed Potato 》 (2020)

LUDWIG VAN — BTHVN: Hommage à Mauricio Kagel (2020)

FRAGMENTS OF IDENTITY in the postcolonial PHILIPPINES — DIPLOMA (2017/18)

« Ceci n'est pas l'Afrique » ; 𝔅𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔩𝔡 ℑ𝔩𝔩𝔦 (2002) -- Tropical Malady (2017/18)

花樣年華 — IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2017)

St. Luke’s — Medical Center (2017)

SELF-CRITICISM — 自己批判 (2017)

They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals / Kinakatay nila kami parang mga hayop / 他们像屠宰动物一样屠杀我们 — 自己批判 (2016)

COURAGE & INTEGRITY (2015)

L i ñ a g e s (2015)

HERDING ISLANDS, RATS & THE ANTHROPOCENE — Planting ≠ Rice (2015)

P E R D U — À la recherche du temps perdu (2015)

Noli me tángere; อันล่วงละเมิดมิได้ {TOUCH ME NOT} (2015)

南華早報 — SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: The Nine-Dash Line (2013—ongoing)

P Á R Á S Ï T É — A Great Orgy (2013)

CHAU CHAT: Le Début — X.Y. op. 39 (2010)



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Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: 갯벌


<Flat Works> are a constellations of soil pigments, salt crystals, discarded fishing nets, marine ropes, and steel components collected from the tidal flats of Shinan, South Korea. ^{* UNESCO World Heritage-listed tidal flats in the Yellow Sea}

Through these materials, the works explores how a landscape holds traces of color, time, labor, climate, and technological transformation all at once. Each composition exceeds the frame of painting, operating instead as an ecological cross-section, a surface of land sedimented with time—un-folding like layered narratives.

Set against the shifting landscape of the salt fields, this series confronts the inscription ‘LAND FOR SALE’ as both provocation and symptom. It embodies how nature is structured and consumed as part of an industrial logic. The land is no longer an (in)visible ecosystem or a living ground—it is surveyed, partitioned, and exhibited under the flow of capital, often reduced to a ‘flattened value.’

When terrain is translated into sculptural language, how does the landscape become a surface for exchange? What is lost—or reinforced—when nature’s cross-section is re-framed as canvas?

<Flat Works or Untitled Material Studies: Getbol> lingers on the post-industrial surface, translating the silence and residue embedded in the land into consumable ‘flat works.’ In this process, color and texture becomes less a visual ornament than a forensic device, and the flattened plane functions not as a memorial but as a question. It is a study in the politics of natural aesthetics, where memory, labor, and structure converge.



(2025)