About

It All Started When...

On the day I was supposed to be born, I decided to stand up.

My mother had been waiting for labor to begin in a hospital in the Philippines, but nothing happened. When the doctor checked the ultrasound, he laughed. Sometime during the night I had turned around. My feet were where my head should have been. Turning to my father, he joked, "This child will give you headaches."

He was right.

Looking back, I realize that much of my life has been spent learning what it means to stand: to stand up to power, to stand with others, and to stand for ideas that matter. Growing up queer in a deeply conservative Catholic environment taught me resilience long before I had the language to describe it. I found refuge in comics, drawing, literature, and eventually in scholarship—not as escapes from the world, but as ways of understanding and challenging it.

Of course, no one truly stands alone.

Whatever convictions I have today were shaped by teachers who showed me that theory is not an obstacle to art but one of its richest companions; by friends and family who never stopped believing that creative work matters; and by generations of artists, writers, and thinkers whose shoulders I continue to stand upon. They remind me that art is never merely decorative. It is a site of argument, memory, disagreement, and possibility. At its best, art asks difficult questions—not because it has easy answers, but because those questions deserve to be asked.

My name is Jose Santos P. Ardivilla, though most people know me as Chong. I am a political cartoonist, writer, artist-researcher, and educator. My work explores history, labor, identity, migration, memory, and power through comics, printmaking, visual ethnography, and cultural criticism. Whether I am drawing a political cartoon, producing a graphic essay, or writing scholarly research, I remain interested in the same question: how images make us see the world differently.

Perhaps the doctor was right after all. My work is, in many ways, about identifying the nation's headaches—and, when necessary, becoming one.

Thank you for visiting.

If you would like to know more about my work, request a CV, or begin a conversation, I would be delighted to hear from you.