ARTIST STATEMENT
Pushing the limits on the absurd iconography of anime and manga, CHIMERA is an investigation into the imagined Asian feminine as an identity constructed by images and perfected in cyberspace. Enduring endless replications and transmutations of her body, the work ultimately asks how the visual conventions of anime establish a neo-Orientalist mythology of the unreal Asian woman. Alongside this query is a practical interrogation into the illicit authority of the pictorial space, and the power that images hold in dissolving the boundaries between reality and fiction in the contemporary context of a technologised world.
CHIMERA extends on Megan Phipps’ ideas of female corporeality in the otaku subculture and Tamaki Saito’s renowned theories on anime girls as ‘fictional creatures of male desire’, pairing these concepts with extensive research into Superflat artists such as Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Mahomi Kunikata.
Stylistically inspired by Nara’s Midnight Tears (2023) for the way its subject emerges and glows in an undefined space, CHIMERA’s girls too are suspended in a magical, dream-like mist. This idea of fantasy is furthered by a saturated palette and layering of thinned pigments, with small patches of colour dancing around the canvas, reminiscent of refracted light. Following Nara’s impressionistic take on the anime style also disrupts opaque representation as a mimetic device, with the paintings’ indistinctness trivialising the legitimacy of illusionistic naturalism typical of Orientalist paintings.
The work also exhibits traces of Motoko Ishibashi’s Wicked City series, in which anime girls are metamorphosed into almost sub-human creatures, becoming a grotesque imitation of the otaku’s exercise of power over his fantasy object’s corporeality. Here, too, these anime girls resemble fantastical experiments with hubris-driven mutations, until there is no difference between them and other inventions of mythology: mermaids, centaurs, dragons.
CHIMERA threatens the gentle otaku-fication of our Asian women, revealing how their continuous objectification and over-sexualisation in visual culture has not ended, but merely switched tactics, since the time of the Odalisque.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Princesa ng Baboy is an oil painting responding to the diasporic identity and the alluring trap of self-essentialisation, utilising borderline stereotype symbols of a shared collective history to illustrate an ambivalence toward one’s race. In the making of this work, I became fascinated with the idea of identity as a ‘communal affiliation’ and conflicting personal, social and cultural perceptions. Taking after Post-colonialism, I sought to visualise the oppressive experience of assimilation using an explicit Filipino iconography, inspired by Marikit Santiago’s likewise unapologetic expression of culture. Just as Remedios Varo’s Personages and Vincent Fantauzzo’s Heath use non-human figures and duplications to re-imagine the “true” self-portrait as the self slightly askew, I depict the subject and her doppelganger in lechon masks, further elaborating on the complex diasporic experience and posing the question: is it better to conform to the monolith for a chance at belonging to an imaginary “homeland”, or to reject this generalisation, inadvertently submitting to Western assimilation? The painting’s slightly Impressionist style prevents the eye from latching onto explicit detail, a motion blur effect that lends itself to the use of oil paints, symbolising ambiguity, instability and indecision. Through this loss of clarity, the act of painting itself is revealed as a vessel for fantasy and false memory: an imagined pictorial space for enacting the subconscious.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Using the language of street memorials and altars, this textile and installation work aims to process the everyday through a lens of commodity, drawing on the intersection between ritual objects of the past and present. The work trains attention on the images and objects we choose to surround ourselves with—inspired by the decoration of personal spaces such as bedrooms—to question society’s value of certain objects over others and the manifestation of adoration within space. Centring specifically on childhood toys and ‘mascot characters’, Altar investigates notions of worship and desire under manipulation of the market. Evoking conceptual likeness to Stephanie Metz’s Teddy Bear Unnatural History series, the work’s soft sculptures capitalise on wool as a tender, comforting material, its animalistic connotations eliciting humanity’s deeper, more primal instinct to nurture. Paired with the sculptures’ bright colours and recognisable kawaii iconography, a design choice which owes itself to Takashi Murakami and the Superflat movement, Altar pushes consumer desire to the limit, mirroring subtle yet sinister materialistic rhetoric. Kitsch and gaudy, the altar itself speaks to a dollar-store pop aesthetic, embellished with stereotypical images of girlhood and topped with a collection of mass-produced offerings. Blurring the line between cult and fandom, this exploration of space—informed by Thomas Hirschhorn’s Altars and Truc Truong’s I Pray You Eat Cake—seeks to immerse the viewer, crowning them disciples and inviting them into this environment of modern ritual practice.