Art exhibits to see this April
We’re starting off with a busy summer for Philippine art. This list sprawls like a restless tropical summer—moving from a project that shows how social media can bolster art when the work is truly strong (seen in Geloy Concepcion’s institutional show at the Ateneo Art Gallery) to a raucous, riotous group show at Modeka that feels like one hell of a party, and the material innovations of Chino Yulo, who somehow makes steel seem soft.
Geloy Concepcion, “Things You Wanted to Say But Never Did” at Ateneo Art Gallery
What are the things you wanted to say but never did? It’s a question many of us have sat with, and one that Filipino photographer and visual artist Geloy Concepcion has turned into a poignant, powerful project.
You may have probably already seen a few of them online—blurry outtakes that seem to catch real life mid-breath, overlaid with people’s confessions, fears, and deep secrets.
Born in Manila and now based in the US, Concepcion first posed the question on social media in 2019. He began inscribing senders’ words onto his film photographs, expanding to found photographs from California flea markets and images submitted alongside the letters. The project was also done when Concepcion moved to the US and struggled with immigration delays—and then later on, during the isolation of the pandemic.
From words like “I wish you were here to witness the person I turned out to be” to “Will I ever make it?” in a seemingly endless time of unrest, Concepcion’s work honors what makes us uniquely broken but also universally human.
Nearly 300,000 messages and 3,000 published notes later, the project has expanded into a substantial archive and will now be presented in an exhibition context with the Ateneo Art Gallery.
“Things You Wanted to Say But Never Did” runs from April 18 to July 12 at the Ateneo Art Gallery
Group exhibition, “Better to Reign in Hell Than Serve in Heaven” at Modeka Art
Hell might be the more honest address in the artist’s pursuit of “interdisciplinary rebellion,” as the show’s exhibition notes call it. Curated by Pow Martinez, this group exhibition gathers Argie Bandoy, Arvin Nogueras, Marija Vicente, Paul Mondok, Pow Martinez, Robert Langenegger, Timmy Harn, and Victoria Keet, all of whom share a restless, rule-breaking energy in their practices.
With collective refusal to settle for the safety of convention, they work across disciplines and draw from popular culture, underground scenes, and art historical canons, pushing and mutating familiar forms to their limits.
The show arrives at our particular moment today, “where war is livestreamed, and empathy is incinerated.” And “violent earnestness and authenticity could be the key to salvation.”
If heaven means “acceptance, safety, insurance, the promise of belonging,” then perhaps hell, with all its desolation but also liberation, is where the real, groundbreaking work gets done.
“Better to Reign in Hell Than Serve in Heaven” runs from March 19 to April 11 at Modeka Art
Trek Valdizno, “Fata Morgana” at The Drawing Room
A fata morgana is a kind of mirage attributed to Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress who, legend says, created floating castles in the Italian straits. It’s also a term used for the real-life optical illusion that makes distant objects appear distorted or suspended between sea and sky.
“Fata Morgana” is an apt title for Trek Valdizno. His painting practice of over three decades has been preoccupied with this gap between what we see and what is actually there, and in “Fata Morgana,” he creates visions that pull you in, precisely because they can’t be fully grasped.
“Fata Morgana” runs from March 14 to April 18 at The Drawing Room
Andie Remulla, “Nocturne: A Call Through the Dark” at Midcentury Manila
The deep ocean and the darkness of outer space have lots in common, as they are both vast, largely unseen, and teeming with life forms that seem almost too strange to be of this world.
In her first solo exhibition, underwater macro photographer Andie Remulla finds her subjects in that strangeness: the wunderpus, nudibranchs, and jellyfish she captures are “juvenile, larval, pre-metamorphosed; curious and whimsical in the vastness of space… the emissaries of Earth,” as A. Perfecto writes in the exhibition notes.
“Nocturne: A Call Through the Dark” opened on March 21 at Midcentury Manila and is currently ongoing
Group exhibition, “Residue of Behavior” at Faculty Projects
Here, home goes beyond the place we inhabit to become a record of everything done inside it, as “an accumulation of actions and memories… carrying traces that persist even after the artist moves on,” writes curator and Lifestyle.INQ contributor Patrick de Veyra.
De Veyra quotes Sarah Sze as a jump-off point about how, with contemporary art, “you can see in an object the residue of behavior.”
The works here trace that residue across objects, architecture, and lens-based imagery. Residue, then, runs in both directions, through the human imprint left on the physical world, and the persistent memory of the objects and spaces that come to embody what we call home.
A part of Faculty Projects’ “Format” 2026 program, the exhibit features works by Micaela Benedicto, Miguel Lorenzo Uy, Renzo Navarro, Lee Paje, Jason Montinola, Rando Onia, Bryan Kong, ESL Chen, Sarah de Veyra-Buyco, Pat Frades, Janice Liuson-Young, Victoria Montinola, Isaiah Cacnio, Simon Te, and Julieanne Ng.
“Residue of Behavior” runs from March 25 to April 17 at Faculty Projects
Tiffany Lafuente, “The Fun Stuff” at Mo_Space
Critic Carlomar Arcangel Daoana puts it well in Tiffany Lafuente’s exhibition notes for “The Fun Stuff,” writing, “human nature always rests, provocatively, on the surface.”
Set in opulent interiors, La Fuente’s figures perform rituals of civility with comic precision, though they occasionally “tilt toward violence, perversion, or exquisite boredom—always, however, in style,” as Daoana notes.
The artist has long painted the domestic sphere, and here she turns it inside out, commenting on items of wealth that act as status symbols for identity. Here you’ll see references to groundbreaking artists like Ai Weiwei, but shattering a Han Dynasty vase in a Super Mario setting. In another meta-painting, a painting of a smaller painting of Pikachu’s body, substituting the luncheon meat of a Spam musubi. It seems like all the mundane elements in Lafuente’s canvases are sneakily up to something.
“The Fun Stuff” runs from March 21 to April 19 at Mo_Space
Jenifer K Wofford, Jake Verzosa, Aze Ong, “Play” at Silverlens Manila
The basketball court might be one of the most quintessential Filipino spaces, and yet, it arrived here via American colonialism. In “Play,” three artists use the ubiquitous ball sport as a starting point for thinking about how places are made, inherited, and reimagined.
Jake Verzosa’s photographs of courts scattered across the archipelago are often without people, but carry the deeply ingrained material textures of daily life. Jenifer K. Wofford stretches the same subject across the Pacific, connecting the Filipino court to Morro Bay, the historic site of the first Filipino landing in America, through landscape paintings and abstractions that blur the court into fields of warm color.
Meanwhile, Aze Ong continues to work with fiber and sculpture, giving physical form to the idea that this space has been woven into the fabric of how Filipinos transform the space by “catching dreams, shooting for stars, and weaving brighter futures,” as Pie Tiausas writes in the exhibition notes.
“Play” runs from April 11 to May 16 at Silverlens, Manila
Chino Yulo, “Dreams” at Brixton Art Space
For his 13th show at Brixton Art Space, Chino Yulo remakes the gallery into something like a bedroom, but not quite. Working with hammers, nails, and a blowtorch, Yulo “softens the hard and hardens the soft,” creating pillows cast in stainless steel, dented as if slept on, as well as nudes rendered through shattered glass, with silhouettes dependent on light and fracture. A single bolt of lightning runs through the installation, bringing it all together.
“Dreams” is on view from March 28 onwards at Brixton Art Space
