The Mighty Bhutens are comprised of mosaic artists Kabunyan de Guia, Oliver Olivete, and Guiller Lagac. Photographed by JL Javier for the February 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
An artist village just off Session Road keeps the spirit of the city’s creative community alive.
When Session Road in Baguio closes for its weekend markets, your eyes can turn to all directions for something interesting to find. Sweep left and right and you’ll come across tables of wooden souvenirs, knitted hats, bags, and flashy knickknacks. At the row for street food, see swathes of strawberries, bundles of kakanin, and a mountain of fried ube on a stick, still warm.
There was a time when you could even look down and find pieces of Baguio’s charm embedded on the sidewalk.
In the mid-2000s, Session Road was paved with small mosaics where cracks or holes in the road were once found. In an essay by Grace Subido in the book Tiw-Tiwong, she records the time when Baguio’s art community and its inhabitants collaborated to fill in sidewalk cracks that the government did not repair, transforming the scars into art with broken multi-colored tiles and other found materials.
All the tiles were brought together by the citizens themselves, making the occasion a fiesta of sorts that also sheds light on the Baguio art community’s bold and sometimes cheeky nature. If they want to make a serious statement, they’ll make it fun, and they’re sure to make it stick.
Mosaic as an art form represents Baguio culture in many ways. It is a city of cobbled up beliefs and ways of life, Subido’s essay poses. In a hodgepodge of influences, cowboys exist in the cold mountain, and road names literally intersect the Filipino and colonial American past.
“Road names reflect the intriguing amalgamation of native and outsider: Kennon road (after Lyman Kennon, road builder) feeds into Kisad (referring to spirit possession of the mambunung or priestess) road, which lies along one side of tourist landmark Burnham Park (named after Daniel Burnham, Architect of Chicago),” she writes.
Among the artists who participated in that mosaic town fiesta was Kabunyan de Guia, his former college classmate Oliver Olivete, and Guiller Lagac, whom they met at the Victor Oteyza Community Art Space. The three continued on as an artist group called The Mighty Bhutens soon after. With mosaic as their medium and a unique sense of humor that binds them together, the trio could easily be mistaken as a comedy group, until they get started on their artworks.
The making of their mosaic style is a lot like jazz. “It’s jamming with the cosmos,” Kabunyan says, an oft-repeated phrase among his family of artists. It is also informed by the Filipino “Bahala na” idiom and its Kankaney counterpart, “Waynasdi.” When they create mosaic works, there is a rough sketch on the surface that guides them, but the final look of the piece is largely commanded by the lines that are naturally formed from the edges of the broken tiles they place.
Up close, the tiles are distinct from each other. But from afar, the colors blend and form a tapestry in collaboration with the cosmos. Their art can be found along the waiting sheds of Halsema Highway near Baguio’s city limits, in public spaces such as the Bonifacio High Street in Taguig, and the Museo Pambata in Manila.
The Bhutens’ mosaics also spill into the interiors of the Ili Likha Artists Watering Hole, a continuously ongoing project between Kabunyan and his father, the National Artist Kidlat Tahimik. Today, most traces of the Session Road mosaic have already been paved over but the same curious wonder the art had inspired can be found in Ili Likha.
The Session Road mosaic spurred this “heightened consciousness of the ground beneath your feet,” as Subido describes. People stepping on the colorful mosaic road for the first time had no choice but to slow down and marvel at the path below them. And that same feeling, of your whole senses at attention not just below but all around you, envelops anyone stepping into Ili Likha. Aside from the mosaics, lizard prints on bamboo, steel railings with their signature kidlat emblem, and stone chiseled to form little dwende can be found around if you look closely.
When they were first constructing Ili Likha in 2014, the father and son pair envisioned a place where artists could come and rest, similar to an oasis where animals of different species converge peacefully in the wild. There, artists have come to set up shop too, and budding creatives also visit the place to eat and pass time with other friends.
Kim Santos, a photographer who grew up in the city, recounts an old interview with Kidlat for her college thesis: “For an hour, Tatay Kidlat shared the philosophy behind Ili-Likha, why it’s meant to remain a work in progress, evolving like the stories it holds. He took us through the space, weaving meaning into every detail of the artworks we passed. And then he said something that’s stayed with me: Find your dwendes, your little selves inside. They’re the ones who whisper the stories you’re meant to tell.”
Meanwhile, Sela Gonzales, another artist and photographer who is also from the city, shares that Ili itself has influenced her eye for images. “Who I am now and how I want to create pictures is influenced by my time there,” she shares in Filipino. Spending time at Ili also taught her that being an artist is not just about one’s artistic output but it is also participating in the collective energy of the community.
Growing up with a mosaic of personalities of all ages nurturing their own artistic practices is a kind of wealth that generations of artists have inherited. What began with the mosaic-making on Session Road’s pavements has found new ground in Ili Likha, weaving another chapter in the vibrant history that colors Baguio.
