Born in 1973 in Angono, Philippines, Wire Tuazonis a founder of the art group Surrounded by Water. He has held several solo shows and group exhibitions in the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Korea. ‘Resurrecting Resurreccion’, like many of Tuazon’s conceptual paintings, features words with a sourced image. It makes a direct reference to one of the Philippines’ most famous paintings, ‘Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho (The Christian Virgins Being Exposed to the Populace)’ by Felix Resurrección Hidalgo. In a stark contrast to Hidalgo’s 1884 work in which the salacious display of female form before the male gaze was cloaked under a guise of moral censure, Tuazon’s painting shows a mass of people in skimpy swimwear. Men and women now form a voluntary parade of human flesh. This monumental painting, which is based upon a 1960s photograph from the Life magazine, may thus be read as an oblique commentary on notions of morality and social mores in the primarily Catholic country.
