Indonesian art practitioner Liza Markus notes that culture develops through accumulation. A trained sculptor, she advances the idea in her curated ongoing group show at the Ayala Museum, which explores how collective contributions to creative practices help shape a community’s identity.
The exhibit, titled Gathering Point, is part of the Asean-Korea Innovative Culture Forum 2026 on November 7, in line with the 37th anniversary of Asean-Korea dialogue relations. Hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) of the Republic of Korea and organized by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) as part of the Asean-Korea Partnership Project for Innovative Culture (PIC), the event creates a space for cultural exchange in the Philippines, as the country assumes the 2026 Asean Chairmanship.
‘To translate and expand the core discourses of the Forum into a tangible, public experience, we present the special exhibition, Gathering Point,’ writes KOFICE president Changsik Park in the event program. ‘[The] exhibition explores how material heritage, craft, and cultural knowledge accumulate and transform through human touch, intergenerational transmission, and shared responsibility-as it reinterprets the material traces of human activity as sites of living cultural intellectual property (IP) and collective memory.’
The exhibit, on view until November 13, presents the artworks of eight acclaimed Asean artists. The list includes Adam Phong from Malaysia, Ari Bayuaji from Indonesia, and Kim Joon from South Korea, along with Imhathai Suwatthanasilp and Latthapon Korkiatarkul, both from Thailand. Rounding out the lineup are three Filipino artists: Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Mark Justiniani, and Leslie de Chavez.
During the exhibit opening over the weekend, de Chavez and Suwatthanasilp featured in a panel discussion to discuss their art. The talk was moderated by Markus, the curator, who noted the artists’ peculiar choice of material in their respective practices. In the piece Hiyas: Gloria, de Chavez fashioned a stunning chandelier out of pig intestines. Meanwhile, Suwatthanasilp presents seven small sculptures using only stones and intricately woven human hair in Tiny Stupa.
De Chavez explained that working with pig intestines comes from his frequent exposure to them in his hometown of Lucban, Quezon, where it often hangs in the open air in meat shops, used as casings for the town’s famous longganisa.
‘I also work with materialities as something that embodies association with something political, something cultural,’ the artist said in the talk.
‘In a way, the materiality of the intestine somehow suggests the idea of the internal organ. In the Philippines, we have a term called ‘halang ang bituka’ or ‘evil in nature.’ I cannot help but relate it to the political condition and situation here in the Philippines, with how we describe our politicians here.’
Markus related the feeling of viscerality of pig intestines to Suwatthanasilp’s use of human hair. ‘Hair is something we adorn,’ the moderator/curator said, ‘but if you find it on the floor, sometimes it feels visceral.’
Hair is central to Suwatthanasilp’s practice. The Thai artist said her late father once had long locks. Before passing away, he had it cut, braided into four parts, and distributed to his daughters, including Suwatthanasilp, saying that it was meant to be kept even after he was gone. Given the strong association with the object, the artist then began to collect her own fallen hair and used it as an art material. For her piece in Gathering Point, she used her hair as a woven exterior to stones that she collected from her home in northern Thailand.
‘[There,] I feel like I’m close to nature and I can feel peaceful in my mind,’ Suwatthanasilp said.
She added that working with human hair involves different techniques, including sculpting it with hair gel or mixing it with acrylic color to paint on canvas-where nothing is premeditated, and the results vary every time. De Chavez shared the sentiment, saying that working with such materials ‘is a kind of problem-solving all the time.’
‘It’s not only just about exploring materials, but also asking the question of what the material is all about, what kind of history or ideas or meanings can be put in it. That kind of testing is always a continuing process for you to really understand the possibilities it could bring,’ he said.
In the exhibit program, Markus writes that the materials like what both De Chavez and Suwatthanasilp use, ‘continue to shape how we live and build, even when their origins are no longer visible.’
‘The artists in this exhibition look for these traces in the present,’ she adds.
‘Their work draws attention to the human marks in our everyday environments, revealing our continued relationship with forms of knowledge that precede us. In doing so, they invite us to recognize cultural inheritance not as something distant or disappearing, but as a living process that continues to shape the present.’