Talaban and Hyas: Of Gems, Guts, Rituals, Potency and the Politics of Ornament

Talaban and Hyas: Of Gems, Guts, Rituals, Potency and the Politics of Ornament

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™

March 4, 2026

There is a particular pleasure in arriving late to a conversation and discovering that the argument has already begun without you. In the gallery, the air is a mixture of varnish, grain, wax, incense, and the faint, stubborn perfume of old wood and faint unmistakable organic meat; in the main room, the chairs are arranged as if for a small tribunal. A brief introduction on the artist and writer historian. Talaban, a word that encapsulates potency or "talab" at once, frames a dialogue between artist Leslie de Chavez and writer historian Eileen Legaspi‑Ramirez that is less a debate than a ritualized exchange of wounds and a smorgasbord of offerings. The event, last Thursday, March 5, 2026,  at Gajah Gallery Manila, located at NBS Park 125 Pioneer St., Mandaluyong., was billed as a conversation, but what transpired was a choreography of memory, confession, dissent, and devotion—an anatomy of how art insists on being both an uncrafting altar, accusation and an unforgettable immersion, a dynamic community narration and a  capturing potent tradition.

Leslie’s work in the exhibition Halik sa Lupa is a study in thresholds. The canvases and installations are not merely surfaces but sites where the body of history meets the body of the present. There is a devotion in the way paint is minutely layered, scraped, and re‑applied; there is dissent in the interruptions—rips, stitches, and the occasional, almost comic, insertion of domestic detritus. Eileen, with the precision of a genealogist and the tenderness of a confessor, traces Leslie’s biography through art history. She does not flatten the artist into a single narrative; instead, she multiplies the frames through which Leslie might be seen: as child, as migrant, as explorer, as director, as an insurgent, as believer, as skeptic. The conversation becomes a palimpsest, each layer legible only because the previous one has been partially erased.

There is humor in the room, the kind that arrives when grief has been domesticated into language. Eileen tells an anecdote about Leslie painting in a cramped studio where his earlier works overwhelm him. The painter had learned to move and sit amidst study works, the palette and repetitious brushstrokes. The audience imagines and relates because the image is domestic, common and therefore humanizing; we rue because the struggle is real and indifference is a better critic than many curators. Yet the imagery is edged with irony: the routine, like the artist, is indifferent to the market’s demands. This is the first lesson of Talaban—that tension and contrast are not merely formal devices but ethical positions. To place devotion, discipline beside dissent is to insist that faith and critique are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, co‑conspirators.

Leslie’s canvases are devotional objects that refuse sanctity. A painted hand might be rendered with the reverence of an icon, but the same hand is smeared with soil, as if it has just returned from the beaten ricefields. The soil is not metaphor alone; it is a material witness. It speaks of labor, of the body’s contact with the earth, of rituals that are not always recognized by institutions of high art. Eileen reads these gestures aloud, not to fix their meaning but to amplify their ambiguity. She situates Leslie within a lineage of artists who have used ritual as a form of resistance—artists who know that to kiss the ground is sometimes to protest the very ground that is being taken from you.

There is a political economy to devotion. In the Philippines, where religious ritual is woven into the fabric of daily life, devotion can be both solace and instrument. Leslie’s work navigates this ambivalence with a sly, almost mischievous, intelligence. A painting that at first appears to be a hymn becomes, upon closer inspection, a ledger of debts. Amidst a hanger of shirts that once were imagery receipts of yellowed 'panatas', rituary tickets folded, fragments of letters et al. A continuous passage and rites. The ritual is not only spiritual; it is also bureaucratic. The artist’s hand becomes a suture that binds the sacred to the mundane, the liturgical to the ledger. Eileen’s commentary is erudite without being pedantic; she reads the work as one might read a family album, a secretuous journal with the patience of someone who knows that the most telling details are often the smallest.

The irony of Talaban is that the act of framing—of curating, of writing, of speaking—can itself be an act of violence or a penitent unfolding. To frame is to exclude; to contextualize is to decide which histories will be visible. Eileen is acutely aware of this danger. Her prose, when she reads it, is both admiring and self‑critical. She acknowledges that her role is not to canonize Leslie but to make visible the tensions that the work refuses to resolve. This refusal is the work’s strength. It resists the neat narratives that institutions prefer: the triumphant arc, the marketable biography, the digestible politics. Instead, Leslie’s art insists on being messy, contradictory, and, above all, alive.

There is a pedagogy in the conversation. The audience learns not through didactic pronouncements but through the slow accretion of images and stories. Eileen recounts a childhood memory of a procession where offerings were made to the earth; Leslie responds with a description of a painting where a procession is inverted, the offerings returned to the hands that made them. The exchange is anecdotal and theoretical at once. It is as if the two are performing a ritual of translation, converting private memory into public testimony. The anecdotes are not mere ornament; they are evidence. They show how personal histories are entangled with national narratives, how devotion can be both a refuge and a form of dissent.

Humor, in this context, functions as a mode of survival. Leslie’s work often includes objects that are absurdly domestic—placed within compositions that recall altarpieces. The juxtaposition is comic because it is incongruous, but it is also poignant because it reveals the precariousness of ordinary life. Eileen’s voice, when she narrates these juxtapositions, is both amused and reverent. She treats the absurd as a form of truth‑telling. The laugh that follows is not a dismissal but a recognition: that the world is often held together by small, ridiculous sometimes irreverent things.

There is also a critical edge to the conversation. Talaban does not shy away from the structural violences that shape artistic production. Eileen speaks of patronage, of the market, structures of society, of the ways in which institutions demand legibility. Leslie, for his part, speaks of the compromises that are sometimes necessary to survive, the community that he hopes to build and moves in. The conversation becomes a negotiation between integrity and necessity. It is here that the notion of rupture becomes central. To rupture is not merely to break; it is to create a new seam. Leslie’s ruptures—literal tears in canvas, abrupt shifts in medium—are attempts to make new seams where old ones have failed. They are acts of repair that refuse to conceal the wound. 

The erudition in the room is not an exercise in elitism. Eileen’s references to art history—icons, processions, reliquaries—are deployed to illuminate, not to exclude. She draws lines between Leslie and a global history of artists who have used ritual to resist domination. Yet she is careful to localize these references. The conversation never becomes a mere exercise in comparative aesthetics; it remains rooted in the specificities of place, language, and memory. This is crucial. To speak of ritual and rupture in the abstract is to risk erasing the very contexts that give them meaning. Eileen’s writing, therefore, is both cosmopolitan and particular.

There is a poignancy to the way the audience listens. People lean forward as if to catch a secret. The room is quiet in a way that is almost religious. Yet the silence is not reverent in the conventional sense; it is attentive. The listeners are not passive recipients but active witnesses. They are being asked to hold contradictions: to admire and to critique, to love and to resist. This is the ethical demand of Talaban. The very potency. It asks us to be generous without being gullible, to be critical without being cruel.

Anecdotes accumulate like offerings on an altar. Eileen tells of a time when Leslie painted over a family photograph because the image had become too painful to look at. The act of painting over is not erasure but transformation. The photograph is not destroyed; it is reconfigured. The painted surface becomes a palimpsest where memory is both preserved and altered. This anecdote encapsulates the central paradox of the exhibition: devotion and dissent are not opposites but companions. To kiss the ground is sometimes to mark it with protest.

The humor in the conversation often masks a deeper sorrow. When Eileen jokes about the absurdities of the art world, there is a shadow of fatigue. The laughter is a way of refusing despair. Leslie’s work, too, contains this duality. A stitched canvas might be playful in its bricolage, but the stitches are also sutures that hold together a life that has been torn. The irony is that repair can be both beautiful and necessary. The artist’s hand becomes a healer’s hand, and the gallery becomes a clinic where wounds are displayed not for voyeurism but for communal care.

There is an anecdotal moment that lingers: after the formal conversation, an artist approaches Leslie with a question about making work that is both political and tender. Leslie replies with a simple, almost mischievous, instruction: “Make something that will make your community proud and your elitists uncomfortable.” The line is funny because it is blunt; it is poignant because it captures the dual audience of much contemporary art—the intimate and the public. To create for both is to accept that art will always be in tension and a continuous narration.

Hyas: Gloria

If an artwork could cough up a history lesson, a family recipe, and a diplomatic cable all at once, Leslie de Chavez’s Hyas: Gloria might be the polite, slightly scandalized sound it would make. The piece insists on being many things at once: a chandelier, a harvest offering, a political cartoon in three dimensions, and a memory of flies. How else should we read an object that dresses the Cultural Center of the Philippines in pig intestines and calls it ornament? What does it mean when the luster of rare shells is replaced by the translucent membrane of something once inside a body of an animal? Is this sacrilege, anthropology, or simply very good theater?

At the heart of the work is a linguistic pivot: Hyas, Tagalog for “gem,” which folds into the Pahiyas festival’s etymology of decoration and adornment. The title alone performs a small act of translation and revaluation. It asks us to consider what counts as a gem, and who gets to decide. Is a gem still a gem when it is made from the quotidian and the perishable? When the “gems” are pig intestines, when the chandelier borrows its silhouette from the Cultural Center’s high modernist aspirations and its materials from Lucban’s leaf-shaped rice batter, the question becomes less about taste and more about the politics of value. Who polishes prestige, who adorns the imitation crystals and who dries the skins in the sun?

There is a delicious, almost comic dissonance in the collision of the monumental and the modest. The Cultural Center’s chandeliers are emblems of national aspiration, of a certain midcentury modernist confidence that culture could be a talisman of refinement and power. De Chavez’s chandeliers, however, are not made of faux crystal and hammered brass alone; they are sewn from the vernacular, from the longganisa casings of Lucban, from the very stuff of communal feasts and backyard economies. The work stages a reversal: the elite’s ornament is remade from the materials of everyday life. Is this a leveling? A mockery? A reconciliation? Perhaps all three.

Satire is often thought of as a verbal art, but Hyas: Gloria proves that satire can be tactile. The pig intestine, with its membranous translucence, carries a thousand associations at once: the domestic, the sacred, the profane, the bureaucratic. It is at once the casing for a beloved regional sausage and a metonym for political corruption—“pork barrel” spending—where the pig becomes shorthand for excess and greed. The material’s history of use—preserving books in Japan, wrapping Muslim religious texts in Simunul—adds another layer: the intestine as a preservative, a protector, a skin that keeps knowledge from the elements. How strange and how apt that the same material can be both a vessel for nourishment and a wrapper for scripture. What does it mean to preserve a book in the same way you preserve a memory of a feast?

There is an anecdotal tenderness in the artist’s recollection of skins drying in the open air, attracting flies. That image is both intimate and public: a domestic scene that is also a communal spectacle. It is the kind of memory that resists neat categorization—part culinary history, part childhood impression, part ethnographic note. The flies are not merely pests; they are witnesses. They testify to the reality of labor, a performance to the sensory world of smell and sight and touch that undergirds any polished narrative of national culture. Can an imitation crystal chandelier that remembers flies still be called glamorous? Must glamour always be clean, antiseptic, and distant?

The rhetorical force of the piece lies in its ability to ask questions without offering tidy answers. It invites us to interrogate the relationship between ornament and flesh, between display and consumption. When flesh becomes ornament, what happens to the boundary between subject and object? When the body’s interior is repurposed as decoration, do we feel a kind of ethical vertigo, or do we recognize a continuity with centuries of human practice—of using every part of an animal, of turning necessity into beauty? Is ornamentation always a betrayal of the thing it adorns, or can it be a form of homage?

There is also a geopolitical wink embedded in the materials’ provenance. The intestines that link Tokyo and Simunul suggest a history of exchange that is not simply colonial or postcolonial but circulatory and messy. Objects, like people, travel in unexpected ways. A material used to preserve Japanese books finds itself in a Filipino chandelier; a local sausage casing becomes a global commentary. The work thus resists a linear narrative of influence and instead proposes a braided history—one in which trade, ritual, and improvisation tangle together. How often do we imagine cultural artifacts as neat, single-origin products when they are, in fact, palimpsests?

Humor in Hyas: Gloria is not slapstick; it is sly and humane. The piece seems to laugh at the very idea of high culture’s self-seriousness. There is a gentle mockery in presenting the CCP’s chandeliers—icons of national prestige—as objects that could be made from the same materials used to stuff sausages. Yet the laughter is not cruel. It is a laughter that recognizes the absurdity of hierarchies that separate the “refined” from the “vernacular.” It asks: why should the materials of power be more noble than the materials of daily life? If a chandelier can be made of pig intestines, perhaps prestige is less about substance and more about narrative.

The essayistic impulse in responding to this work is to map its many resonances: culinary, religious, political, and aesthetic. But there is also a rhetorical strategy at play: the piece uses the familiar form of the chandelier to disarm us, then fills that form with unfamiliar content. The familiar invites us in; the unfamiliar forces us to stay. It is a pedagogical move—one that teaches by surprise. How many artworks could we better understand if they first made us comfortable and then unsettled us?

There is a humane core to the work that resists cynicism. The intestines are not presented as grotesque for shock value; they are shown as materials with histories, uses, and meanings. The artist’s memory of skins drying in the sun is not an attempt to exoticize poverty but to acknowledge the lived reality of many communities. The piece asks us to see dignity in the ordinary, to recognize that ornament can be a form of care. When a community adorns its festival with rice batter leaves, is that not also an act of devotion? When a family dries sausage casings in the sun, is that not also a ritual of sustenance?

The rhetorical questions multiply because the work refuses closure. It is not a manifesto; it is a provocation. It asks us to consider whether national culture should be a polished display or a messy, inclusive archive. It asks whether the materials of art must always be rarefied, or whether they can be drawn from the kitchens and markets of everyday life. It asks whether the line between the sacred and the profane is as fixed as we imagine. And it asks, perhaps most insistently: who gets to decide what is worthy of being called a gem?

There is an ethical dimension that cannot be ignored. Using animal parts in art raises questions about consumption, waste, and respect. De Chavez’s work does not shy away from these questions; it foregrounds them. The pig, as symbol and substance, forces us to confront our own complicity in systems of consumption. The term “pork barrel” is not merely a pun; it is a historical fact that ties the animal to political corruption. By making the pig literal ornament, the artist makes the metaphor corporeal. How comfortable are we with that literalness?

Finally, the piece is a lesson in translation—linguistic, cultural, and material. Hyas translates “gem” into a local practice; the chandelier translates national aspiration into domestic labor; the intestine translates the interior of the body into the exterior of display. Each translation is imperfect, partial, and generative. The work asks us to be translators too: to read across registers, to hold contradictions, to appreciate the humor and the pathos in equal measure. Can we learn to translate without erasing?

If there is a single, modest claim to make about Hyas: Gloria, it is this: the work insists that value is not inherent but made. Gems or hiyas are not simply found; they are named, hung, and narrated into being. The artist’s choice to use pig intestines is not merely a shock tactic; it is a deliberate revaluation of what we call precious. In doing so, the piece invites us to reconsider our own hierarchies of taste and worth. It asks us to imagine a world where the chandelier and the longganisa casing share a shelf, where the Cultural Center and the kitchen are in conversation, and where ornament is a language of both critique and care.

So let us ask, one more time, with a little more humility: if a gem can be made of skin, what else might we have been misnaming all along? If a chandelier can remember flies, what histories have we been sweeping under the rug? If ornament can be both political and tender, can we learn to look at our own lives as objects worthy of such complicated adornment?

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Disconfirming the Alternative

The alternative to the reading offered in Talaban would be to treat Leslie’s work as either purely devotional , banal or purely political—to insist that the pieces are either sanctified relics or agitprop. This binary is seductive because it simplifies interpretation, but it fails the evidence. The work’s materiality—soil, stitches, a chandelier, a golden bull, performances, community narratives, domestic objects—refuses such reduction. If one were to claim that the exhibition is merely devotional, one would have to ignore the ruptures, the ledgered receipts, the hanging glass coffin, the explicit gestures of dissent embedded in the compositions. Conversely, to label the work as merely political would be to overlook the tenderness, the ritualized gestures, and the ways in which devotion functions as a form of care.

To disconfirm this alternative is to show that the premises underlying it are false. The false premise is that devotion and dissent are mutually exclusive categories. Leslie’s practice demonstrates that they are entangled. The evidence is in the seams: the painted hands smeared with soil, the reliquary that contains a bus ticket, the anecdote of the paper effigy soon to be burned. Each of these details contradicts the binary. They show that ritual can be a form of resistance and that dissent can be devotional.

Moreover, the alternative assumes a single audience and a single intention. Leslie’s work, and the conversation with Eileen, reveal multiple audiences and layered intentions. The pieces speak to family, to community, to institutions, and to markets simultaneously. They are polyvalent by design. To insist on a singular reading is to impose a frame that the work actively resists. The disconfirmation, therefore, is not merely rhetorical; it is empirical. The work’s materials, gestures, and contexts provide the data that falsify the binary.

In the end, Talaban as in Hyas asks us to live with contradiction. It refuses the comfort of neat categories and invites us into a space where devotion and dissent can coexist, where ritual can be a form of rupture, and where humor can be a strategy of survival or a chandeleir at the end of the road. To disconfirm the alternative is to accept complexity as the only honest response to art that refuses to be domesticated.

Footnote:

Thursday, March 5, 2026, from 2 pm - 4 pm at Gajah Gallery Manila, NBS Park 125 Pioneer St., Mandaluyong.

“Talaban,” tension and contrast, frames a dialogue where writer Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez traces the artist’s biographical narrative with art history; situating the ongoing exhibit at Gajah Gallery "Halik sa Lupa" between devotion and dissent, ritual and rupture. "

Eileen Legaspi‑Ramirez is a Filipino writer‑researcher and art historian who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman, known for work on grassroots historiography, curatorial practice, performance studies, and socially engaged art. 

- She has written essays and papers on archives, memory, place‑making, and curatorial practice; examples include pieces on archives “talking back,” countermapping, and museum/community relations published in journals and edited volumes. 

- Legaspi‑Ramirez is active in public programming and has delivered talks for Philippine cultural organizations and galleries; for example, she was scheduled to speak on Purita Kalaw‑Ledesma and Lydia Arguilla for an Ateneo Art Gallery ArtSpeak session. 

While the artist...

Leslie de Chavez is a prominent contemporary Filipino artist (b. 1978) known for paintings, installations, and time‑based works that interrogate colonial history, religion, cultural imperialism, and Philippine politics; he lives and works in Quezon province and has exhibited widely in Asia and beyond. 

Artistic practice and themes

- Approach: De Chavez deconstructs canonical texts, icons, and historical narratives to expose power relations and contested memories in the Philippines; his work balances iconoclasm with a reflective, often poetic sensibility.   

- Signature methods: Reworking master images and symbols, layering materials (e.g., gold leaf), and combining painting with installation and performative elements to create charged, dialogic works. 

Notable exhibitions and recognition

- Solo and group exhibitions across the Philippines, China, Korea, Singapore, the UK, and Switzerland.   

- Participated in major events such as the Singapore Biennale (2013) and the Asian Art Biennale (Taiwan) among others.   

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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ 's connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.

​As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.

​Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders​His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.

​Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.

​Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.

​Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan’s art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.

Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational. 

 

I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.    

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and comments at

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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.

Recent show at ILOMOCA

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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philantrophy while working for institutions simultaneosly early on. 

The Independent Curatorial Manila™ or ICM™ is a curatorial services and guide for emerging artists in the Philippines. It is an independent/ voluntary services entity and aims to remains so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.