Eisa Jocson

Eisa Jocson trailer video for 2019 HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
© Eisa Jocson
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

"The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury for the 2019 award for emerging Asian artists is extremely honored and proud to reward Eisa Jocson, artist from Philippines, Manila. As a female artist conceiving stunning and always unexpected art projects from performance to sound and visual installations, Eisa Jocson has a unique position in the contemporary art scenes in Asia and globally. The artist creates multilayered images, revisiting the vocabularies of dance and music, as well as infiltrating local popular references and contemporary visual art formats. It is with great intelligence that Eisa Jocson engages today’s life and art, always repositioning her own practice into the unknown, going beyond fixed identities, genders and frontiers.” Larys Frogier

Born in 1986 in Manila, Philippines, she is a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist whose practice investigates the malleability of the body, gender formation, and migrant labor within the service and entertainment industries.The award highlighted Eisa Jocson recent projects, specifically the four-channel video installation Corponomy (2019) and the karaoke video Super Woman KTV (2019), which explore the commodification of the Filipino body and collective notions of femininity.

Corponomy is a self-reflexive piece that synthesizes Eisa Jocson entire practice into a single, evolving framework.
Corponomy as a concept relates to corpus (body/anatomy) and economy, describing the body as it adapts to different economic situations and the relationship between marginalized communities and mass culture. First debuted in 2017 as a performance-lecture at the da:ns festival in Singapore, Corponomy remixes archival material from all her previous works — Death of the Pole Dancer (2011), Macho Dancer (2013), Host (2015), and Princess (2017) — into a single immersive presentation. It functions as both retrospective and ongoing research platform. The 2019 four-channel video installation version was the work that earned her the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award, giving her international recognition in the visual arts world beyond the dance circuit. Corponomy has become a subject of scholarly analysis, including a 2024 paper at the American Studies Association examining its "inhospitable affects" and refusal of exploitative affective labor. In short, Corponomy marks the point where Jocson's individual performance pieces coalesced into a coherent theoretical and artistic framework — the body as an archive of labor — and it continues to anchor her practice to this day.

Super Woman KTV operates through a dual framework that Jocson herself frames as a "contemporary mutation of the Filipino epic tradition". The communal (sometimes individual) practice of singing in karaoke rooms (Bidyoke) is reimagined as a living archive of "collective individualized human experience sung in bonding rituals." The epic hero — here, Darna (the Filipino superheroine) — "becomes us, fragmented through a myriad of popular songs." This connects to Jocson's ongoing Epico ni Darna research, in which the figure of Darna/Superwoman is recast as entertainer, service provider, care giver, and domestic migrant worker — the so-called "Bagong Bayani" (New Hero), a slogan coined by the Philippine government to recognize Overseas Filipino Workers' economic sacrifice.
Super Woman KTV is simultaneously a critique of the Overseas Filipino Musician (OFM) phenomenon — Filipino singers hired to cover Western pop in restaurants, bars, and cruise ships across Asia and the Middle East. The song's narrative of a woman's affective labor "is expanded and mirrored with the care work by Filipino migrant workers at large," and the performance "unpacks the colonial formation and socioeconomic conditions in which Filipino show bands operate."

Performative events and installation views of Eisa Jocson for 2019 HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
© Eisa Jocson
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum