Yasmin Sison’s (b. 1972, Philippines) works linger dreamily within the tranquillity and the oddities of the everyday. Her compositions rendered in both airy and vibrant hues seek to draw out the fleeting and complex emotions buried in the crevices of memory, childhood, and the fragile psychological landscapes of everyday life. Each work offers windows into intimate, charged scenes where the boundaries between autobiographical narrative and staged fiction are blurred — these decontextualised, obscured spaces are laden with an unspoken tension that skirts between the visible and invisible, and play on the fallibility of memory.
Working primarily in painting, Sison often depicts domestic scenes with surreal photographic precision, imbued with a dreamlike ambiguity. Across her practice, themes of play, masquerade, and transformation recur, suggesting the mutable qualities of identity and personal history as they are continually remembered and performed over time.
Drawing from personal and familial imagery, Sison’s recent works capture fleeting moments and quiet rituals that hold emotional weight. With a keen sensitivity towards materiality and symbolism, these works explore the complicated dichotomies surrounding femininity and the domestic. They act as visual records of lived experience, where tenderness and turbulence coexist, an interplay between embrace and strain.
Sison’s works have been shown extensively across the Philippines and globally, participating in group shows at the Bencab Museum, Philippines, 2024; Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovakia, 2019; Pintô Art Museum, United States 2018; Asian Cultural Countil (ACC), Japan, 2018; Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2014; MET Museum, Philippines, 2014; U.P. Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2012; to name a few. Sison was also awarded the Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006.