Filipino Mythologies & Feminist Rituals at AsiaNOW 2024

This year’s 10th edition of AsiaNOW reaffirms its commitment to showcasing voices from across Asia and offering a platform for pushing boundaries on the European stage.

Words Pio Angelo Ocampo
Photos courtesy of
October 30, 2024

Roberto Feleo. Life from Death, 2024. Shoe varnish on carved and modeled wood. 96.4 x 78.8 x 5 cm. © Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room

For its milestone anniversary, AsiaNOW’s 2024 program at La Monnaie de Paris reflects dialogues on cultural identity, history, and community engagement—dialogues championed by Filipino artists like Roberto Feleo and Eisa Jocson. Their works—presented by The Drawing Room and The Columns Gallery respectively—engage in a profound dialogue around myth, ritual, and labor. By channeling cultural narratives and transformative performances, Feleo and Jocson illustrate what art historian Patrick Flores describes as the “polytropic” nature of Filipino artistry: adaptability that merges the spiritual, historical, and social to expand cultural identity beyond traditional boundaries.

Monnaie de Paris, 17-20 October 2024. © Lionel Belluteau

In The Drawing Room’s booth at the Salon sur Seine, Feleo’s installations invoke Philippine mythology as a “polytropic” terrain, drawing viewers into a universe where life, death, and the afterlife are inseparably connected. His intricate works map this mythological cosmos, from the black river Gimukdan, the spirit path to the underworld, to Pinteng, the warrior descending from the Skyworld to incite battle among the living. In these works, Feleo merges the sacred and the everyday, weaving a cyclical narrative of death and rebirth that mirrors cultural heritage with the polytropic: an artistic quality of moving through and adapting across complex, overlapping worlds. Feleo’s themes honor ancestral roles, including that of the Babaylan who bridges the human and spiritual realms—demonstrating the evolutionary capacities of myths while retaining their profound historical roots.

Eisa Jocson & Venuri Perera. Magic Maids: Sweeping Sisters (a performance art). Photo by Pio Angelo Ocampo.

Eisa Jocson’s performances, Magic Maids: Sweeping Sisters and Becoming White, embrace this same polytropic quality. Jocson expands the mythic landscape to engage with feminist resistance and affective labor. Presented by The Columns Gallery for AsiaNOW, Magic Maids, a collaborative piece with Sri Lankan artist Venuri Perera, reclaims domestic labor as a space of ritualized resistance. Through dance and performance, they reframe the broom as a tool of solidarity, linking the witch hunts of Europe’s past with the contemporary invisibility of care work performed by women from the Global South. In Jocson’s polytropic style, mundane labor becomes a feminist gesture, reclaiming agency in spaces historically associated with subservience.

Furthering this critique, Jocson’s Becoming White examines the performance of happiness as labor. By embodying Disney’s Snow White, Jocson reflects on the racial biases and labor hierarchies that often relegate Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong to lesser-known supporting roles. First showcased at the Bangkok Art Biennale, Becoming White integrates video, archival materials, and sound, critiquing the “polytropic” conditioning of Filipinos as subservient, affective laborers. Here, Jocson reveals the conditioning of Filipino migrant workers who are cast in stereotypical roles, stripped of identity, yet trained to perform emotional labor for a global audience.

Eisa Jocson. Becoming White, 2018. Installation with two self-casted sculptures, hand-painted acrylic on fiberglass, and wigs.  Snow White Costume Cultural Center of the Philippines. 13 Artist Awards 2018-2019. Photo by Pio Angelo Ocampo as seen in The Columns Gallery booth at AsiaNOW 2024.

Through these deeply resonant works, Feleo and Jocson transform AsiaNOW into a celebration of Filipino polytropy—art that transcends historical confines and resists silence. As cultural archetypes and contemporary critiques converge, AsiaNOW becomes a platform where the multifaceted realities of Filipino artistry carry forward stories of a culture that defies easy categorization. At AsiaNOW 2024, Feleo and Jocon remind us that Filipino art is not confined by one story or place; it is, as Flores suggests, polytropic—moving, adapting, and engaging in an ever-expanding dialogue with the world.

Magic Maids will tour various locations, sharing its message through a performance that intertwines dance, ritual, and acts of resistance. Follow The Columns Gallery’s link here for dates and more details.

Author’s bio note:

Pio Angelo Ocampo’s practice stems from arts and culture writing, research, project management, and curatorial collaborations. He’s finishing his MBA in Contemporary Art at IESA Arts & Culture in Paris, France.