No Chaos No Party: 28 Artists in Metro Manila

No Chaos No Party is a conversation in text and images with twenty-eight contemporary artists who live and work in Metro Manila, Philippines. It illustrates how artists love and hate a perfectly imperfect city, because Metro Manila is full of contradictions. So the title uses the concept of chaos, a word often used to describe the Metro in a negative way, as a positive starting point for a diverse set of artistic energies inspired by the limitless content the city provides.

In its entirety, Metro Manila is considered one of the most densely populated, polluted and traffic-ridden cities in the world. It, and by proxy the Philippines, is a complicated place, due to poverty, corruption, uneven infrastructure, typhoons, religion and the blurred postcolonial legacies left behind by Spain and the U.S. But there is also a rich and thriving cultural voice that keeps Metro Manila hurtling forward into an unknown future. The visual arts are a significant part of this and contemporary Philippine artists are recognized as important voices within the local, regional and international art worlds.

This book is not an attempt to define, but rather, an incomplete oral history of twenty-eight artists. And by taking a more playful approach to book design and the printed medium, No Chaos No Party hopes to complement their styles and practices through the inclusion of notes, sketches and photographs from their personal archives, as well as a glimpse into the weird and wonderful world of Metro Manila itself.

Published in 2016 by Solutions/Eugene Ong

218 pages / Hardcover