DEBUTXXII

No one could deny that the world, particularly the West, has undergone dramatic upheaval since the millennium - when Blindside developed the first iteration of DEBUT. Where once there was optimism for a unity informed by a worldwide free-trade market and Westen democracy, today people face geopolitical fracture, economic instability and resurgent nationalism. Technological anxiety has evolved from the “millennium bug” to the existential uncertainties of the AI and the post-truth era. Environmental targets slip further from reach, as global consumption of fossil fuels continues rising. While the constant brutal wars in different part of the world produce more refugees and immigrants, country borders become hardened. Protectionist and nativist mentalities are reshaping human relations.

In such a fractured moment, where does art position itself?

Art offers a lens: a way to observe, to question, and to discover through beauty. This year’s annual graduate exhibition acts as a cultural thermometer, registering the concerns and creative responses of an upcoming generation of artists. DEBUT XXII features three art graduate students – Phoebe Haig, Sam Jones, and Lance Zuniga – whose works masterfully explore materiality and concept, providing a collective space to consider our era, and perhaps, to locate hope.

Lance Zuniga’s mixed-media installation, Filipino Disneyland, constructs a confession booth from latex, aluminium frame, Perspex, LED lights, Webcam, microphone and speakers, and AI script. If we imagine there are two flipped realities in this world, each the other’s simulacrum–one held by high culture and the wealthy, and the other held by the poor and working class, Lance’s booth is in many ways analogous to the Catholic confessional. Material choices such as LED lights, Latex, and Perspex signal the vernacular and assign Filipino Disneyland a character of ‘low culture’. Eye-catching, purpose-driven; the high level of transparency exposing the users to the gaze of others suggests rapid service, swift entry and exit. Symptomatic of low expectations in the quality of service at this booth, an “AI Jesus language model” responds poorly to users’ confessions. It is a “quick fix”; a fast-food shop for spiritual needs. Unlike the church booth, which speaks to worship and order, Lance’s booth is devoted to an aesthetic of chaos and contrast. The yellowed, skin-like Latex surface leads the user to imagine having an olfactory experience as if encased inside another organic being. In the artist’s words, this booth marks the experience of the diaspora. “.. a confessional booth becomes an inverted theatre of devotion, where material and machine mirror the diasporic body: porous, translated, always in flux.”

In the glare of Zuniga’s LED sign, Sam Jones’s photo-based installation explores revelation through structure and shadow. Installation view, Men and Tupperware, exposes both the pristine set and the messy reality behind it. The images capture the content of a photographic set and proffer a view outside this set. Prints are attached to multiple raw MDF boards. The boards are wobbly leaning against the wall – each creates a dark void behind the prints. This front-back binary echoes the play of the overexposed and underexposed in the photographs. The instability and rawness of the MDF board structure cancel the gloss, flatness and permanence of photography. As Jones states: “My work manipulates the image to test its strength, re-incarnating the beauty of luxury as a cunning lie.”

Where Jones uses installation to interrogate truth, Phoebe Haig’s paintings directly depict extreme and intimate moments of light. In her three paintings titled Eyes Open or Closed, Take off and Wing Work, light is anthropogenic, blinding and viscous–flooding faces, smoke and sculptural detail. Pheobe’s painting calls to a tradition of painting light in the Western art history–from Johannes Vermeers’s paintings in the 17th Century to Impressionist painting on the cusp of the 20th Century. Depicting the closeup view of a larger image which obscures the light source, The work presses the viewer to imagine the content beyond the frame. The graphic yet fluid technique situates the work in our age of digital imagery. Phoebe suggests that the meaning of painting today, in comparison to images digitally produced and manipulated or captured in photographs, can be found in the medium’s unique sensory capacity: to evoke heat, stickiness and embodied perception.

Together, these three artists employ light and shadow as allegories for contemporary crises: the glare of surveillance and simulation, the shadows of exclusion and erasure, the blurred lines between truth and fabrication. DEBUT XXII does not offer easy answers. Instead, it creates a refuge–a temporary space for observation, sensation and intellectual engagement. In a time of political and epistemological uncertainty, this exhibition asserts art’s enduring value: as a viewing point, a place of critical reflection, and a ground from which to imagine possibility.