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Happy AAPI Heritage Month! I am finally back in the states after spending a total of 4.5 months traveling. I think it's safe to say I will be here again for a while, as I finish some outstanding projects & look for new work. Throwing it back to last year, I had a wonderful opportunity to work with Artronika & the South Asian creative community doing photography for their Chakras events at the Siesta Day Club near Chinatown, Los Angeles. The events included a 7-course food experience by Bombay Beach restaurant — each course corresponding with one of the 7 chakras & their colors — as well as cultural music, dance & visual art by a number of artists from various parts of the South Asian diaspora & adjacent. It was a pleasure to work with the South Asian community, whom I feel is often forgotten from the AAPI experience. Definitely make sure to follow Artronika on Instagram & catch their next event around LA County! Artronika is a non-profit arts organization that produces immersive arts programming showcasing South Asian talent collaborating with visual artists in non-traditional performance spaces. Executive Director, Ireesh Lal, is a trumpet player and Recording Artist that has been producing events throughout Southern California for several decades. Last year I'd just gotten my Nikon ZF, & I also took out some new fractal filters for a spin for the first time. Here's a selection of photos below made using a 24-70mm lens. Click any image to enlarge. View from a computer for the full experience. May 2025This was my first Chakras event. I didn't know what to expect, other than what I'd seen in YouTube videos from prior research. I remember it being very hot that day & I was boiling alongside the artists (haha), whom were all very welcoming & seemed to be having a great time regardless. The food & music were phenomenal. It was also my first time seeing a contortionist in-person. Paired with the food & music, my mind was a bit blown. 😅 Ireesh Lal DJ'd a mix of electronic and world music while playing jazz trumpet and synths. Neel Agrawal joined on tabla and Indian percussion. Norton Wisdom painted live on a fiberglass canvas. Choreography and dance by Lena Fumi. Body painting by Sig Aberin and Rio Sirah. Amita Batra hosted the afternoon and additional vocal performances by Arzeen Kamal & Ashwin Sriram. Several additional guest musicians were also featured throughout the event.                                                 August 2025This day was a lot cooler (in temps)! No fractal filter this time, but I came strapped with a flash unit after seeing how varied the lighting was at the last event. Plus, with the event starting later in the day this time around (after how hot the last one was!) & the sun going down, it really came in handy with the later performances. Saw some familiar faces from the last event as well as met some new artists. Also got to hang with some friends who came out, too! No food pics this time, but just understand that the food was of course remarkable once again. Ireesh Lal DJ'd a mix of electronic and world music while playing jazz trumpet and synths. Neel Agrawal joined on tabla and Indian percussion. Norton Wisdom painted live on a fiberglass canvas. Choreography and dance by Lena Fumi. Body painting by Rio Sirah. Comedian Dhruv Singh hosted the afternoon. Local underground South Asian songwriters performed a mix of original and covers throughout the event, including Vaishali Sanas, Flyght Club & Arzeen Kamal.                                                             Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates on my blog posts. If you are interested in hiring me for event photography, shoot me an email.
If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments.
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Tomorrow, 3 May, is the last day of my Balay da Judge artist residency with the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library in San Fernando, La Union. 🥲 This will be my last update on this project for a while. I am returning to the US next week, where I will prioritise processing the 35mm film I used to create the main part of this project. The digital photos published in this blog series are meant to serve as previews of the work-in-progress, not final works, but I hope you all enjoyed what you saw. I am hoping to get all film scanned & edited before the end of this year. It will be a priority! These were a few photos I was able to create during the photo walk portion of my photo workshop, using the prompts from our photo scavenger hunt list. These were the very last photos I made with my Nikon ZF (and Pocket Dispo lens) on this trip. View from a computer for the full experience. Click any image to enlarge.   
 Below is an event recap photo gallery provided by the library as well.                      I am also very excited to soon share the workshop participants' photos they created during our photo walk! The submissions are rolling in & already they're all SO incredible! As an art educator, the proudest moment you can experience is seeing your students put your lessons to practice & witness them create. So please stay tuned for updates on that as well! The library & I will be collaborating to publish an online exhibition of the complete collection of photography, & hopefully a printed zine (still TBD).
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates on my posts. All updates on my residency will be tagged under Balay da Judge. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments.
Hey all, this is the last week of my Balay da Judge artist residency, as it ends on May 3... This will be one of my last few updates on the work-in-progress I've created for this project, so I hope you enjoy.
While this is more of another side quest & not really related to the residency project, my mom & I paid a visit to Ma-Cho Temple in San Fernando. Ma-Cho Temple is located in the barangay of Ilocanos Norte, where my mom & dad had their first house together. My mom said the temple has been there for many years & it's a place she'd always wanted to go, but never did. She said back in the day supposedly it was never open to the public. Before I leave San Fernando, I wanted to visit this place together with her since she said she'd always wanted to see what it was like. After visiting, my mom also got to show me a bit of Ilocanos Norte. All photos below are from my Nikon ZF using a Pocket Dispo lens. View from a computer for the full experience. Click any image to enlarge. 
Loved that all the parked cars happened to be red.
Ma-Cho temple was built in San Fernando, La Union in 1978 by Filipino-Chinese devotees. It is the first Taoist temple in the Philippines. Sat on top of a hill & overlooking the China Sea, this temple is located within the middle of the hustle & bustle of San Fernando city life. The temple is filled with gardens, pagodas, sculptures & an interior temple with the most intricate carved ceiling art I've ever seen. While I'm not a follower myself, my interest in culture extends to religion & spirituality, & I love visiting places like these. Last autumn, I recently came back from visiting an epic Taoist temple for the sea goddess Mazu in Taiwan. Naturally, stopping by this type of location would interest me. (I'll eventually share photos from that trip, but it's not a priority at the moment.)
After spending some time at the temple, we went around Ilocanos Norte to find the first house her & my dad lived in together as a couple. 
Here, you can see the entrance to the small street leading up to my parents' old house. Since it's not an actual street, there is no street name, but it is off of Ortega Street.
We walked down the small corridor & came across someone staying near the house. The lady told my mom that the original owner (who owned the house when my mom & dad were renting from them) sold the house some time ago & the former owner's nephew is currently the caretaker for the house. My mom explained that she used to live there many years ago with my late dad. She told me she had not been back to that house since the 1970s, & that back in the day it was still dirt roads around there with not as many other houses around.
After we visited her & my dad's first house off of Ortega Street, we went to visit one more house of theirs', which is actually also located just within Tanqui, behind the church at the town plaza in San Fernando.
Located behind this house on Zamora Street, just up the alley on the right (which also has no name) is the last house my mom lived in before immigrating to the United States. She said it is also the house she was living in when she brought my brother home from the hospital. He was born in 1975 & she immigrated to the States in 1980. She lived in this house for about 5 years.
During the photo walk portion of my photography workshop this past weekend, we walked up this street to get to the capital grounds on top of the hill, where students would practice their photography skills & create photos using the prompts in their scavenger hunt list. I made sure to make a little pit stop by this house (just on the road, we didn't go through the alley), where I shared a bit of my family history & why this project is so personal to me.
I also forgot to update you all on which house my mom & dad formerly lived in on Zandueta Street, the street that crosses the library. Here is a photo again (which I already featured in part 2), as well as its placement on the map. You can see that Puón Books/Alfredo F. Tadiar Library is just at the end of the street. 
I hate all the political tarps. LOL
On a final [side] note — I'd also like to point out that some of you may have noticed I added something new to this post, which are the interactive maps. Since a lot of my work really is a visual diary of place, I wanted to further help viewers visualise these locations by sharing maps of where they're actually at & what is surrounding them. This inclusion was inspired by the comic series Windmills: Bearings by Filipino komik artist, Josel Nicolas. I recently got to purchase this graphic novel at Puón & read it during breaks from my residency work. An autobiographical graphic novel, I was inspired by Josel's juxtapositions of his unique illustration style with photography & maps, to further give readers an understanding of place. Not only was this an art style I have not yet encountered in comics (although I can't say it's like I've read millions of them), his writing style was poetic, & his narratives on personal traumas & mortality were deeply heavy, yet oddly relatable. I also really appreciated his humor & very generational-specific references ranging from WWF (F, not E, because us millenials grew up during the WWF era still!), to music references like Oasis (my fav!) & Slade, to random illustrations of Gael Garcia Bernal for no real reason (maybe other than the fact that we grew up watching so many of his films in the early 2000s). Anyways, please consider this my modest book review & get your hands on this inspirational graphic novel if you don't already own it! But bear in mind (hehe), it does contain some very heavy topics.
I have one more post before I time out of my residency tomorrow, 3 May! Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates on my posts. All updates on my residency will be tagged under Balay da Judge.
If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments. |
NICA AQUINOIn this space I'll share digital previews of my film photography, updates on new artworks in progress, upcoming programs, inspiration & my other misc interests. Archives
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