Born in 1971 in the Philippines, Mariano Ching received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of the Philippines and subsequently studied printmaking at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts. He is a recipient of the Monbusho Japanese Grant, and the Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006. Ching’s practice encompasses painting, photography and illustration. In his first foray into portraiture, Ching chose to focus on human oddities and ‘freaks’. In ‘Portrait Series: Four-Legged Woman’, which is based on Charles Eisenmann’s photographs of New York circus performers in the mid-1800s, the subject’s grotesque physical deformities compel a conflicted fascination. Where humans might otherwise inhabit a landscape or environment, Ching has performed a reversal, transforming the human body into a vessel or site for an interior world – where the weird and wonderful collide and its only constant is mutation; but it is one that now arguably obscures, rather than reveals, the subject’s fraught humanity.
