Re-imagined Identities in the Artistic Diaspora: Filipino-ness as Contemporary Art

This thesis is a creative systems approach to contemporary Filipino art in Australia. It denaturalizes identity construction in art practice abroad and contributes to the field original findings from a textual and semiotic analysis of institutional texts, ones that confirm how international exhibition spaces encourage difference in contemporary art. It also seeks to widen the range of identifiable Filipino contemporariness outside established constructions of folk Catholic Filipino identities among others, by highlighting new creativities seen in the works of three Filipino-Australian artist case studies: Alwin Reamillo, Diokno Pasilan, and Marikit Santiago.