Liv Vinluan

b. 1987, Philippines
Lives and works in Rizal, Philippines

Liv Vinluan was born into a family of artists and academicians. She is the great-granddaughter of Norberto Romualdez, Filipino statesman, Supreme Court Justice, and a deemed champion of the Tagalog language. Her paternal grandparents, Numeriano and Lelis, were school teachers in the town of Pozzorubio in Pangasinan. Her father is Filipino abstractionist and Professor Emeritus Nestor Olarte Vinluan, former Dean of the College of Fine Arts in the University of the Philippines.

She graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines, where her monumental undergraduate thesis, ‘Sin Vergüenzas’, won her the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. She was later on selected as one of the nominees of the Fulbright-PAEF Scholarship in 2014, but ultimately decided to defer the scholarship to concentrate her efforts closer to home.

In 2015, she completed the watercolour piece ‘Cariño Brutal’, another monumental work which was Shortlisted for the 2016 Ateneo Art Zobel Prize for Visual Art. In early 2016 she was invited by the López Museum & Library for the exhibition, ‘EXPOSITIÓN’. The following year her work for ‘EXPOSITIÓN’, ‘Ang Cabilogan ng Isang Cuadranggulo’ (‘The Roundness of a Square’), was nominated for the 4th Edition of the prestigious APB Signature Art Prize.

In the year 2019, Liv was chosen as the recipient of The Karen H. Montinola Selection grant for the 2019 edition of Art Fair Philippines.

Through her work she continues her investigations on death and mortality, the cyclicality of histories, the inconsistencies of human behaviour and character, and the passage of time. She lives and works in Rizal, with her husband, artist Ian Jaucian.