Bjorn Calleja (Filipino, b. 1981) is a contemporary painter and interdisciplinary artist from Manila, Philippines.,His paintings, sculptures, installations and animations explore identity, spirituality and personal and general history, using perspective and scale as a metaphor for how individuals affect the world at large. His imagery is shaped by 1980s and 90s popular culture, kitsch, the internet, and the textures of Manila's urban landscape.
Calleja earned a BFA in advertising from Far Eastern University in 2004 and later taught there part-time. He grew up in Sampaloc, a downtown Manila district he has described as a melting pot of people from different social backgrounds, and spent much of his adolescence among an older street crowd.Early in his career he worked corporate jobs and as a graphic designer, and co-founded the design studio Other Things (2012–2014), which employed a team of visual artists.His early influences include James Ensor and Hieronymus Bosch, alongside lowbrow artists such as Mark Ryden and Yoshitomo Nara.
Calleja began minting NFTs on the Tezos platform Hic et Nunc in 2021, after a friend introduced him to the space. His first work made specifically as a digital piece was a collaboration with the Filipino photographer luciusfelimus.In 2024 he showed Other Nature, a hand-painted animation in oil, acrylic and aerosol on canvas, as part of an objkt-curated selection of ten works at the Tezos Realm event in Singapore during TOKEN2049 week.He has said the pace of Web3 eventually burned him out, and that he has since engaged with it “in my own time”.
His paintings are represented by Tang Contemporary Art, which has shown his work in group exhibitions including “Tutti Frutti” in Bangkok in 2022 and “Beyond Context” in Hong Kong in 2026.
