After a long hiatus in doing Live Installation Mideo M Cruz is now back to present a major work entitled “Life is Beautiful”. Here he will discuss the flood of stimulus that brought us to a certain zone in our habitual norms. The diarrhea of information that demands us to believe that we live in a beautiful world.

Mideo M Cruz was listed as the most controversial artist by Flavor Wire in 2011. He hit the headlines when the conservative members of the church wanted to take down his installation in the Cultural Center of the Philippines in August 2011 for allegedly blasphemous content. In mostly unorthodox method his works show strong allegorical images that challenge the social order. His creative practice continually produces intelectual images that generate debates and challenges perception.

Born in 1973, lives and works in Taguig City.

Mideo M. Cruz is an active cross-disciplinary, artist-organizer based in Manila. His art production has been built upon overtly and subversively expanding and evolving communicative language and contexts. Aiming to stimulate interaction and critical consumption of art. Taking his multi-sensory advocacy from the streets to the internet and galleries, Mideo M. Cruz has crafted political yet humorous work and social discourse realized both collectively and individually. As an artist-organizer, he has consistently addressed issues of haphazard globalization vis-a-vis identity and skewed access to productive assets. “Cruz is a facile generator of anxiety and debate and is skilled in the production of excitingly intellectual images and forms within the unorthodox as seen in his art practice teeming with imitable social and political commentary.” Philip Paraan. In 1992 he initiated "UGATLahi", an art collective that is oriented towards nationalistic social causes asserting artistic production as a tool of socio-political significance to facilitate the uplifting of human conditions. Later he was one of the co-founders of the multi media event "Tupada." Since 2002 he had been preoccupied with the open international artists' network "new world disorder" initiating art events and interventions to interrogate capitalistic and imperialist globalization. He was one of the artists central to the revival of performance art in Manila in the 90's. Equally competent in using new media as well as streets actions, resourcefully working collectively or individually, Mideo M. Cruz seeks to expand and explore art as a communicative language to stimulate interaction and critical perspectives.

He is a recipient the 2003 Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award, the 2003 Sungduan Grant and the 2006 Ateneo Art Award. Cruz received a Visiting Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council New York USA 2008/2009, was Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts San Francisco in 2008, and received a travel grant from the NCCA for attending Art Tuilage, in Burgundy, France in 2007. He also was awarded an Artists Residency at the Gallery Gachet in Vancouver, Canada in 2007. He was recipient of the Visiting Foreign Artists Fund Canada Council for the Arts 2007, and received a travel grant from the NCCA for attending the Inter Azioni XX Festival in Sardinia, Italy in 2007. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, the United States, Serbia, China, and Berlin.