Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

WHEN ERNEST CONCEPCION arrived in the United States from the Philippines, he found himself living in suburban New Jersey with his older sister Boredom led him to wage epic wars on paper between armies of the banal: coffee against milk, priests versus praying mantises, tits fighting asses. Though conflict is pivotal to the way we conceive the world, the punny binary the series remind us of Its absurdity,

Concepcion is like a fifth-grader who obsessively doodles in his notebook during homeroom. Culling his Imagery from video games, comic books, movies, Where's Waldo and other artifacts of childhood - as in Ode to Odin (Ode to Odin) - his work evokes the glee of telling others that we've sunk their battleship.

Now based In Brooklyn, NY1 he continues to explore the Idea of conflict as a representation of perpetual movement and evolution. The tensions between siblings while watching TV and his retreat into Interior realms is chronicled in The Death of the Giimore Girl (and the birth of Ona) as the creation of an Imaginary planet where conflict rules the day. For Concepcion, the world does not stand still.