The Orchid Pavilion presents a new body of work by Wawi Navarroza, on view Aug. 29-Oct. 3, 2026.
Taking literature and poetry as points of departure, Navarroza turns to the Philippines’ layered past, looking beyond its broad strokes—heroes, events, and unified narratives—to the details within them. She approaches history through a sensorial lens, imagining the worlds inhabited by the people we now call Filipinos during the time of the Manila Galleons. Throughout the exhibition, she uses her body as a medium, inhabiting different identities and bringing the past into the present. Her tableaux conjure visions of Manila as a bustling, cosmopolitan entrepôt, where disparate people, languages, and traditions converged and left their traces on the city.
The works do not attempt to illustrate history. Instead, they propose ways of imagining it. Blue-and-white porcelain evokes networks of trade connecting distant worlds; Guanyin and Madonna sculptures reveal the movement and transformation of religious imagery. In Plural and Polymodal Riddle, Navarroza turns her attention to the present, questioning the labels and categories through which identities continue to be assigned. Drawing on colonial visual typologies, from the Boxer Codex to tipos del país and costumbrista paintings, she poses with attributes associated with each label, indicated on pageant-style sashes. The works question not only the identities imposed upon us, but also the gaps in our understanding of the histories from which they emerged.
Her process is investigative and rigorous, while her presentation is instinctive, lush, and abundant. Familiar objects draw us in, connecting the distant to the everyday, and offering points of entry into histories that continue to shape how we see ourselves.—Yael Buencamino
‘The Orchid Pavilion,’ Part I of the trilogy ‘The Double-Naveled and Triple-Tounged: A Tropical Gothic Troika,’ is on view from 29 August to 3 October 2026.
Work by MM Yu
Also on exhibit is MM Yu’s sum of its parts, an interplay between canvas and camera. The exhibition runs from August 29 to October 3, 2026.
It is photographer and painter MM Yu’s response to an art ecology that operates on constant making. In the present series, consisting of reassembled canvases and photographs, she turns to the material surface as her primary apparatus.
Through modularity, the paintings continue to employ her dripping technique with pigment, while the canvas itself becomes her main device for exploration. She attempts to find new configurations for her works, breaking them into separate components to swap, flip, or recombine, creating new relationships in their form. Consequently, it figures as a manner of circumventing gravity’s constraints. Wet paint is bound to flow downward, so it is only in their aftermath that the artist maneuvers them into twists, obliques, and disjoints.
Paintings largely comprise the exhibition, but the incorporation of photographs notably surfaces parallels between Yu’s painting and photographic practices. Untitled Pantone, a collection of over 500 pictures taken from visual elements of urban environments, demonstrates the interface of the two media by serving as mutual references of each other’s color palettes. Meanwhile, in terms of disjuncture, she regards her images as taken through fortuitous encounters with city scenes, while her paintings teeter between chance and calculation through a measured release of pigment into gravity’s indefinite forms.—Chesca Santiago
Silverlens Manila is at 2263 Chino Roces Ave, Ave, Makati City, 1231 Metro Manila, tel. nos. (02) 8816-0044 and +63917-5874011, email inquiry@silverlensgalleries.com, www.silverlensgalleries.com.
