Filipino visual artist Rommel Joson is in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months, from June to August 2025.
About the Artist
Rommel Joson is a painter and book illustrator currently teaching drawing, illustration, and print production design at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts where he is also taking his post-graduate studies. His various roles deal with the intersection and interaction of text and image. His art practice draws inspiration and raw material from both historical and contemporary visual communication artifacts such as reading primers, children’s books, encyclopedias, illuminated manuscripts, information graphics, comics, and even print ads.
Part of his process involves creating unreadable glyphs and ciphers that mimic the texture and structure of recognizable books and texts. These invented scripts, combined with imagery from historical and contemporary books, result in hybrid forms—artist’s books and paintings that explore the tension between the familiar and the obscure. By taking the commercial processes of book design and illustration and subverting their function, the resulting objects and artifacts attempt to engage viewers in active decoding.
http://rommeljoson.com
https://www.instagram.com/rommeljoson/
About the Residency
“Dahan-Dahan” (Filipino adverb: slowly/carefully)
My work at Rimbun Dahan—composed of paintings, glyphs, and an accordion format artist book—is my exploration of slow, branching, and mythic time through the interplay of text and image. This is the longest I’ve stayed in another country, and the largest block of uninterrupted time to work on my art, away from the demands of other tasks and duties back home. I chose to approach the experience by viewing it through the lens of language and time. During my stay, I noticed many word similarities between Malay and Filipino, no doubt because of the common Austronesian roots. I also observed how my experience of time shifted, not only because of my physical distance from other work concerns, but also the time differences in the rising and setting sun. Suddenly, as I immersed myself in the surrounding flora of the arboretum and deliberately walked into my new surroundings, I experienced a slowing down of subjective time. In Filipino, moving slowly and carefully translates as “dahan-dahan” and serendipitously also translates to “branches” in Malay. Thus, I’ve come to think of my work at Rimbun Dahan under this conceptual umbrella—a meditation on language, place, and time.
During the conceptualization stage, I was initially inspired by the Voynich Manuscript—a medieval codex written in an unreadable script and language and accompanied by plant illustrations. As part of my process, I created a kind of tree alphabet inspired by the arboretum. It has been said that typography is “thought made visible”. And these invented glyphs reveal as much as they conceal, obscuring words while at the same time placing them into forms and shapes that reflect my own subjective experience of the surroundings.
Then I searched for Filipino words and nouns that can evoke double meanings and cultural connotations when paired with images. Words like “kama” (bed), “puso” (heart), and “loob” (literally inside but can also refer to the inner self) have particular resonances during my stay at Rimbun Dahan. These words refer to my experience of bodily rest, Filipino mythical stories about the surrounding flora (such as the banana plant), and the witnessing of the Eid al-Adha sacrifice. I paired these words with surreal images and inscribed the words using the invented alphabet. Through all this, the space of the studio became a place where I attempted to explore my personal experiences of the residency, the mythic connotations of the surrounding flora, and the linguistic similarities between the culture I bring and the space I’ve been transplanted into.
