User:Jenniferstern88/Paz Abad Santos

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Paz "Ching" Singson Abad Santos was born in the Philippines on March 26, 1943. She is a tapestry artist whose work imbues a medieval Western art form with with a distinctively Filipino style.

Life and Work Abad Santos earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 1982. As an undergraduate, she became interested in tapestry making. Her first major work, Delirious Spin, combined painting with hand-stitching and knotting on burlap; it won a gold medal in 1980 from the Art Association of the Philippines. As her style developed, her burlap tapestries became larger and larger in scale. She began to incorporate a wide range of natural materials (leaves, twigs, seeds, husks, pebbles) and indigenous craft products, such as banig (woven mats) and sawali (woven bamboo splits), as well as splashes of acrylic and deliberately cut holes. In recent years, she has developed a deep interest in art therapy.

Exhibitions She has shown her work in individual and group exhibitions in the Philippines, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and internationally: she was Philippine representative to the 7th Asian International Art Exhibition in 1992; Philippine representative to the 2nd ASEAN Symposium on Painting and Photography in 1995, and a participant in Global Focus on Women in Art and Culture, Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, co-sponsored by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Her giant twin tapestries, Easter and Ad Infinitum, hang by the altar in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Forbes Park, Manila.

Awards Abad Santos won an award from the prestigious Mobil art competition in 1982 and was a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1992. Prominent Filipino artists and critics, including Rod Paras-Perez and Alice Guillermo, have praised her work, Guillermo referring to it as "intuitive and spontaneous, turning the particular texture of the burlap fiber into a positive value...while conveying a direct, primitive appeal...[she achieves an] unusual fusion of delicacy of feeling with massiveness of energy."