Eduardo Joaquin

Eduardo Joaquin (b. 1997, Philippines) is a Hawaiʻi-raised artist whose paintings consider the ways place persists through memory, even as its meanings shift across distance and time. Having moved to Hawaiʻi at the age of seven and lived across eleven zip codes since, Joaquin approaches home not as a fixed geography but as something continually reconstructed—carried forward through images, objects, and the accumulated traces of places once inhabited.

Across his work, familiar forms become vessels for these personal and geographic histories. Lei recur as both material and metaphor, drawing on their cultural associations with celebration, exchange, arrival, and departure while becoming portals to places that remain accessible primarily through memory. Elsewhere, torso-like forms resembling tombstones are inscribed with the zip codes of former homes, transforming an ordinary system of geographic designation into a record of movement, attachment, and loss. Throughout, Joaquin is interested in the uneasy space between preservation and nostalgia: the desire to hold onto a place alongside the impossibility of returning to it unchanged.

For Joaquin, painting offers a means of negotiating that distance. Images are reconstructed rather than retrieved, shaped as much by what has been forgotten, idealized, or altered over time as by what remains. Painting becomes a ritual of return—one capable of collapsing disparate geographies and temporalities into the same pictorial space.

Joaquin received his BFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2023 and is currently an MFA candidate at New York University. His work is held in the collection of the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and has been exhibited at the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, Maui Arts & Cultural Center, and 80WSE, among others. He has received awards and scholarships from the Martin Wong Foundation, John Young Scholarship Foundation, and Jean Charlot Foundation, and has participated in an artist residency at BoxJelly in Honolulu.