Miguel Aquilizan (b. 1986. Manila, Philippines), is a sculptor whose practice is intuitive, improvisational and inventive in its novel navigation of the material world. A forager and assembler, Miguel Aquilizan salvages and repurposes the discarded, drawing on a Filipino Ethos of continuous reanimation to find latent potential in objects that we cast aside. His process is guided by instinct, pursuing rhyme rather than reason.

Aquilizan incorporates anything and everything into his assemblages: the raw and the cooked, expanding foam and piano keys, fibreglass and foliage, carved fruit, and fake plants. He carves and models, arranges, and assembles, constructs, and deconstructs. Things that should not cohere are coaxed into relation, colliding and cross pollinating until they mutate into new hybrid forms. The resulting works possess a mysterious, magical quality, with one foot in science fiction and the posthuman, another in totemism and animism, suggesting art from a distant time or place, or a speculative archaeology yet to come.

Shaped by his own experiences of migration, Aquilizan often interrogates cultural displacement and ambiguity, positioning the second-hand object as a kind of ‘societal heirloom’. These items, embedded with the residues of migration, colonial histories, and global circulation, become unstable carriers of personal memory. Aquilizan’s totemic sculptures double as memento mori: reminders of impermanence, the inevitability of decay, and transformation, yet also of a strange, elegiac beauty that arises through attitudes of resourcefulness and reconfiguration that are a way of life for much of the Global South. In the artist’s hands, the familiar is obscured, reconfigured, and estranged, implying contamination, hybridity, and otherness as conditions of contemporary life. 

Aquilizan is a member of the family art collective Fruit Juice Factori. He lives and works in between Meanjin/Brisbane and in Los Baños, Philippines. He is a 2025 Ramsay Art Prize Finalist and 2025 Still: National Still Life Award Finalist. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Echoes of a Silent Future, 2024, Edoweird, Quezon City, Philippines; Platform, 2024, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; An Orgy of Speculation, 2021, Artinformal, Makati, Philippines; Lost & Found, 2019, Art Front Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include: A Narrow Strip Along A Steep Edge, 2025, Fort Lytton, Brisbane, Australia; And Clay, 2025, Makers Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia; Big Bang: A Myth of Origins, 2025, Gajah Gallery, Singapore; Pilgrimage: Remote Animism and Ornamental Displacements, 2024, with Jessica Dorizac, The Condensery, Toogoolawah, Australia; Unusual Suns, 2023, with Constantino Zicarelli, MoSpace, Philippines; Island Time, 2023, Jan Lombard Gallery, New York, United States of America; Material Culture in a Material World, 2023, OuterSpace, Brisbane, Australia; and House Party, 2021, Project Space Pilipinas, Lucban, Philippines.