March 16 – July 21, 2019
Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez

Super Sarap at Asia Society Texas is the second iteration of Super Sarap, which started in Santa Ana in 2018. Houston-born and Bay Area-based artist Charlene Tan joins the original crew of artists Mik Gaspay, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, and O.M. France Viana to revisit commonplace objects and food within Filipino cooking. Through sculpture, photography, and video, the artists elicit personal and collective memories and offer cultural connections that go beyond the Philippine diaspora.

The exhibition title, Super Sarap, fuses both English and Tagalog together, to hold multiple meanings. It can convey something that is extremely delicious, an expression of excitement and affirmation. It can also imply an exaggeration in terms of scale: something that is beyond, powerful, large, and exceeding the norm. In Super Sarap, the artists play with these definitions and mutate symbols, making them both strange and familiar, challenging cultural norms associated with food.

Installation view, Super Sarap, Asia Society Texas Center, 2019 © Nash Baker