Launched in 2012, Art Busan has grown as Korea’s leading premium art fair, with the collective support from participating galleries, partners and collectors. Featuring more than 5,000 contemporary art works from 134 galleries in 21 countries.

In Lyndon Maglalang’s Everything is in Parables, faceless figures navigate vast and pallid terrains, in tender confrontations with the world within and the world without. And much like his first international solo exhibition together with Galerie Stephanie, his series confronts his personal and artistic endeavors: a paradoxical progression of himself and the world, while questioning the essence of introspections in viewing it.

One finds in Maglalang’s artistic practice a religious rigor, each stroke pre-determined, deliberate, and thoroughly thought-out, a sworn commitment to the canvas. Each piece is a parable, a simple truth told in simple terms. Nothing is out of place and without intent and purpose. As is the case with his figures: they are meant to be where they are — not lost, not aimless, not absent, but subsumed by the present moment. It is in this, their most withdrawn state, that they seem most exposed to the viewer.

Rendered in muted acrylics and fields of dry paint, there lies in each work an unsettling quietude. Bearing only the faintest traces of reality, the Parables are grounded in the truths of the human condition. Interior and exterior realms become indecipherable, as vast landscapes become stifling and interior spaces feel disorientingly emptier. And, wandering these stretches, absorbed in quiet contemplation, Maglalang’s figures strive to find their footing between the strange and the familiar.

Taking cues from the Bible, Maglalang’s works are guided by tales as that of the man who built his house on the rock, and impart gentle reminders to keep our lights out in the open, to provide for all besides ourselves. With that, the artist abides by the sanctity of an existence guided by a heightened awareness of one’s internal landscape, and the world at large.

Maglalang’s Parables do not deny that navigating the human experience is a markedly lonesome undertaking. Indeed each is marked by a stillness one may only enjoy from one’s company. Yet, these works are not about the lonely, nor do they dwell in the throes of loneliness. Presented as diptychs, each insists on coexistence, reciprocity, and balance and carries with them the artist’s guiding principles for an intentional existence — at one with oneself and the world outside. Maglalang’s wandering figures, though cloaked in anonymity, are no strangers to us, their isolation making space for reconciliation, their vulnerabilities giving into cathartic self-realization.

– notes by Gabrielle Gonzales