About

My name is Chong Ardivilla. I am a political cartoonist, writer, and artist-researcher based in the Philippines. I hold a PhD in Fine Arts, specializing in Critical Studies and Artistic Practice, earned as a Fulbright Scholar at Texas Tech University.

The works collected here are essays in comics form. While I grew up loving superhero comics, I have become increasingly interested in what the medium can do beyond entertainment. Comics, for me, are a way of thinking through identity, labor, history, memory, and the everyday politics of being alive. Rather than illustrating ideas, I use drawing as a mode of inquiry—one that allows scholarship, autobiography, and visual storytelling to meet on the page.

I work across political cartooning, printmaking, comics, and visual ethnography. My practice moves between the academy and the studio, where research and drawing continually shape one another.

I am also monocular. Losing vision in one eye has made me more attentive to the act of looking itself. It has taught me that seeing is never merely optical but also historical, emotional, and political. Navigating a world largely designed for those with binocular vision has sharpened my awareness of what is overlooked, omitted, or rendered invisible. That perspective continues to inform both my scholarship and my art.