Bay Area artist Melanie Tiongson creates fun and whimsical artworks featuring figures full of curiosity inspired by Filipino folklore and the uncompromised freedom of her young daughter’s imagination. Her mixed media paintings feature a combination of purposeful collage of vintage Tagalog books, expressionist abstraction as well as illustration to communicate positivity and love.
Born in the Philippines, Tiongson tries to integrate the stories which shaped her as an artist into each of her artworks. To do so, she collects old vintage papers and books from the Philippines dating all the way back to the 1800s. When possible, she integrates stories of Filipino folklore and Philippine’s history into her collages. This mix of the historical and the whimsical encapsulates Tiongson’s experience as an immigrant and a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
