No door to slam this time

By Amanda Juico Dela Cruz

Arianna Bongato - A Pinch Salty When Everyone’s a Critic (2022), Mixed media on canvas, 48 inches x 45.5 inches
Image description: Several human figures, painted in a neoclassical style, are arranged against a white background and are looking to the right. They are dressed in formal, courtly robes and are depicted with ornaments including a feather fan and classical statues. The top right corner of this composition is interrupted by a second, smaller painting with a gold frame. The left half of the smaller painting, painted entirely white so that only the texture of its frame is discernible, is incorporated into the corner of the former neoclassical painting; its right half depicts part of a woman’s face. Wearing various hair adornments, the woman has a blank expression. 

“‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like economy, it is determined by politics … In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”

—Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

I

“I’m fat,” I said.

“You’re not,” Chelsea Boots said.

“I am…” I insisted as I recalled to myself how often he and his best friend admired how fit his best friend’s girlfriend was. She often uploaded photos of herself in a two-piece swimsuit on Facebook, photos that received overwhelming admiration in the comments section. In these photos, her tummy always looked flat. She would wear to school clothes that I wished I could wear too if only my tummy was free from rolls and my arms and thighs were not jiggly. She appeared confident and carefree. So I thought being thin beautiful was the key to being confident and carefree. To being admired.

I thought these meager exchanges that we had about being fat or not fat would be the last we would have on the subject matter. Oh boy, I was wrong! “You should workout,” Chelsea Boots brought up in between sipping his Moroccan mint tea. “You should workout,” said the girl I thought was my best friend in high school when she saw me with a serving of tuna croquettes protein and carbohydrates and a liter and a half of bottled water. She knew that was my first and last meal for the day.

I could only see Chelsea Boots’ sharp eyes as he sipped from the teacup, which seemed tiny in his slender hands. It was an incisive look. I was waiting for my White Stripes, pasta carbohydrates in basil cream sauce fats with fennel sausages protein. Chelsea Boots ordered his usual Drunken Dory, beer-battered Cream Dory protein with lemon caper sauce fats, served with rice carbohydrates. As usual, he talked to me about the nutritional compositions of the food we ate, the portions, and why certain types of, in this case, carbohydrates were better than the others. He was slim and wanted to bulk up. He was weightlifting with his ex-girlfriend, which he often talked about whenever we asked about how our days had gone. As I picked at my food, he told me about his ex-girlfriend’s progress. I could hear the traces of fondness in the way he spoke about her. I did not know how to tell him to stop telling me stories about her without allowing my insecurity to creep into my voice.

“If you’re not happy with your weight...”

But it is never just about the numbers, Chelsea Boots.

“...then you should do something about it. You don’t just whine...”

I was not whining.

"...like a baby waiting for someone else to tend to her needs.”

I never asked you to tend to my needs in the first place.

"You’re not too fat...”

“Not ‘too’ fat.” The affirmation.

"...so it shouldn’t be too difficult. I will make you do cardio first, then I will work on your...”

The memory of his voice pronouncing the piercing Is, telling me what he planned to do to me, makes me feel like the sculpture of Scylla Arianna Bongato (or Anya as I call her) excised in her painting A Pinch Salty When Everyone’s a Critic (2022). The painting is a pastiche of two paintings from the Neoclassical period, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Sculpture Gallery (1874) and Thomas Francis Dicksee’s Jessica (1867). I first encountered Anya’s painting in her first solo exhibition at White Walls Gallery in November of 2022. I was a contributing writer for the Art+ Magazine then and was on the lookout for six exhibitions to feature for the month. Anya’s imitation of the works of art by old masters, as in white men, caught my attention because they were not mere imitations. Anya erased some portions of the borrowed images with blocks of white paint, including the centerpiece in Alma-Tadema’s: a gigantic red marble labrum with the mythological creature Scylla sculpted at its base.

Her story goes like this: once upon a time, the sea god named Glaucus fell so madly and deeply in love with Scylla, then a beautiful nymph, that he went to the sorceress named Circe for a love potion. The sorceress, however, fell in love with the sea god so she poured a virulent potion into the sea where Scylla was bathing. The potion turned the beautiful nymph into a monster with twelve feet and six heads on long necks like snakes. Her loins had heads of howling dogs as if calling for a hunt. She became a sight of great terror even to herself. From her cave, she would devour anything that came within her reach.

Oh, the things jealousy can do!

I cannot remember what exactly Chelsea Boots said about his ex-girlfriend’s fitness journey. Looking back in order to write about this moment, I realize that I unknowingly treated those portions of our conversations like white noise. I knew what he was talking about, but I barely paid attention to the details. Ultimately it didn’t matter if I knew her exact stats, because hearing Chelsea Boots go on and on about her fitness journey was enough to make me feel that I should embark on one too. Beauty thinness was a currency that I wanted to get hold of to afford the kind of admiration Chelsea Boots had for fit women.

I was young, around nineteen then. Chelsea Boots was a few years older, maybe three years older than me. Truth be told, I looked up to him because I thought he knew better than I did. But I started to feel like he wanted to be in control of me whenever he tried to convince me to work out. “He is showing you that he cares in the way that he can,” his best friend told me when I confided in him my discomfort.

In the end, I resisted doing what Chelsea Boots thought was best for me. 

He ghosted me.

I found out not long after that he was back with his ex-girlfriend and long-time gym partner.

I unfriended him on Facebook.

Chelsea Boots and his ex-girlfriend broke up. He met someone new with whom he did weightlifting. The new girlfriend is now full-figured. Chelsea Boots now has six-pack abs. Don’t ask me anymore how I know.

II

Baseball Cap read up on the ethics of artificial intelligence when I challenged him: let’s say there was a robot nurse operating with AI whose job was to administer medicine to Patient A every day at n o’clock to keep them alive. Strictly one missed dose and they would die. The robot nurse had been doing a good job until one day, when n o’clock struck, Patient B was walking along the corridor through which the robot nurse (which was as wide as the corridor) would pass to get to Patient A. The robot nurse was now torn between two decisions: do its job to administer the medicine to Patient A and run over Patient B in this course of action, or wait for Patient B to get clear and be too late for Patient A. Which option should the robot nurse choose?

I posed this question when I was twenty. My twenty-nine-year-old self now sees the loopholes in the thought experiment, but it is not my intention in this essay to condemn the shortcomings of my younger self. I cannot remember anymore what he said in response, but I remember sensing how much effort he put into his answer.

My college best friend, Hoodie, could sense that I was slipping away from Baseball Cap. “You know that he’s really trying, right?” he said. “He’s even reading up on Philosophy. I can tell he really likes you.”

“I know,” I told him. What Hoodie did not know was how disturbed I was whenever Baseball Cap paraded me to his friends and called “this beautiful girl” as “mine.” I knew he did not have ill intentions, but sometimes it felt like I was a trophy that he kissed before flashing cameras.

Hoodie and I were in Agno Street within the university complex. I was indulging in stir-fried Hong Kong noodles carbohydrates with fried shark’s fin dumplings protein, while he was munching on rosemary chicken protein with potato wedges carbohydrates. We both had a cup of black gulaman carbohydrates, our favorite.

Neither Hoodie nor Baseball Cap said anything about what I ate. “Who cares what you eat? You’re beautiful regardless of your weight.” Baseball Cap would gently hold my cheeks and caress them with his thumbs. In a way, it was the assurance that I needed whenever I had difficulty choosing between a high-protein meal and a carbohydrate-rich meal.

One time, however, I slipped from my diet: White Stripes carbohydrates, fats, and protein and house-blend iced tea carbohydrates. It only hit me how many calories I consumed in one sitting when I felt full for the first time in a long while.

I have a little secret to reveal. I still feel guilty when I see my plate empty. I still feel more guilty when I give in to carbohydrates over protein. And I still feel most guilty when I allow myself to feel full. I learned recently that the name of this guilt is self-loathing.

I am most pleased with myself whenever I hear my stomach growling. This is a statement that I was only able to articulate in writing this essay because it sounded odd when I tried to say it out loud, but it made sense when I wrote it down. Partly, it made sense because the posing of myself as the writer-narrator allowed me to look at my life story with vulnerability and trust, and partly because writing allowed me to say my truths without any apology. The sound that my empty stomach makes, even though it can be embarrassing when others hear it, can be satisfying. It can be addictive. Seeking a sense of fulfillment from hearing the sound a begging stomach makes was an addiction I’d developed since I started starving myself in high school to lose weight. The girl who told me that I should work out wanted to lose weight too, so we ate nothing on recess breaks and ate as little as possible during lunch breaks. I never pulled her down because I knew how difficult our goal was—the look that would make us seem like skeletons. Anorexics. The girl who I thought was my best friend shared with me that her thoughts were of nothing but food throughout the day in school while her stomach was empty. I told her mine too. Why did she have to tell me that I needed to work out?

“I want to throw up,” I told Baseball Cap.

“Want or need?” he asked.

I was full on the White Stripes carbohydrates, fats, and protein, but not on the brink of needing to throw up. Or maybe I did need to throw up to appease myself from guilt. To save myself from self-loathing. I hated it even more that Baseball Cap was right across, his eyes fixed on me with the look that he had whenever he told me that I was beautiful.

Anya erased many of the elements in Alma-Tadema’s work, not just the red marble labrum, but also the bronze candelabrum with four ornamental oil lamps from the House of Pansa at Pompeii and the Roman bowl from the Hildesheim Treasure, as well as the more artistically and historically significant sculptures displayed within the atelier, like the bust of Pericles and the statue of Agrippina. What Anya left on her canvas are the aristocratic family dressed in Roman garbs, who now admire what she erased, and a portion of the marble cartibulum from the House of Cornelius Rufus at Pompeii. In the original, the family admires the labrum for its overwhelming size despite being surrounded by more significant and artistically valuable works.

While it felt too good to be looked at with awe, it occurred to me by the end of our relationship that it was not what I needed. I used to think that I needed a man who would show me off. It took this relationship to learn that placing me on a pedestal was no different from how the Romans looked at the labrum with awe for its grand scale. It was an empty admiration. A shallow appreciation. This was an unfortunate relationship not only for him who filled up the void created by my insecurities, but for me too as I was reduced to my looks, which would change with time. Maybe what bothered me in this relationship was the sense of being trapped in a time capsule. I felt my looks should never change.

I ghosted him. 

Baseball Cap unfriended me on Facebook.

Interlude

Two years had passed since the whole Chelsea Boots saga happened, but I only became more obsessed with losing weight. I was between a hundred and a hundred and ten pounds when I enrolled myself into a fitness program. I was not fat ugly, the trainer said, I only needed to lose a few pounds to tone my muscles. To be caught in the middle of being thin and being fat could be alienating. I was too fat for anyone to take my starvation and body insecurities seriously, but I was too thin to belong to the plus-size women who were the face of the body positivity movement.

I woke up at six every single day to prepare my gym bag. I was scheduled to meet with my trainer roughly at seven, but he would arrive half an hour late. I did not mind. I preferred to have the place to myself anyway. I got to jog around the gym to kill time. That would already be my thirty minutes’ worth of warm-up, which I was done with by the time my trainer would arrive. Under his supervision, I did cardio boxing for an hour to an hour and a half. The remaining hour was spent targeting each part of my body, one part each day: arms, abs, back, glutes, and legs. Then he would help me stretch to cool down. “So you can develop flexibility,” he told me the first time when my awkwardness might have been visible on my face.

Imagine, I lost ten pounds in the first month! After my three-hour gym workout, I would do a thirty-minute high-intensity interval training at home. I bought myself measuring cups—a quarter cup for my rice carbohydrates and a half cup for my viand preferably high-protein—and a 64 oz tumbler to monitor my water intake. I had at least two refills throughout the day as I was also taking psyllium husk fiber in the morning.

Everything was going smoothly, according to my initial target. And it would’ve continued to go smoothly if, and only if, I had continued acting as if I were a robot programmed to follow a set routine regardless of what—or who—is destroyed along the way. Focus. I started wearing a belt for my jeans, which used to cradle my love handles. I could wear body-hugging shirts without being constantly worried about my puppy belly. My jaw became prominent as well as my cheekbones. I could see my collarbones. I felt the most beautiful thin whenever I wore necklines that bared my clavicles.

My trainer and I devised a plan for me to lose a few more pounds to reach ninety-five, still a safe weight for my five foot one inch height. That was our target for the second month, but I stopped going on the fifth day of that month.

Since I started working out, I had been feeling like I was a spectacle before men’s eyes. Sweat Suit ogled my buttocks whenever I jogged around the gym. I could feel him ripping my leggings with his gaze. I wore larger shirts to cover my buttocks. They did not make me feel any better. I actually tried to convince myself that Sweat Suit was not staring at me at first, something I now cannot believe that I did. Maybe he was not looking at me, but we were the only ones in the gym apart from the two male trainers and the male receptionist; maybe he just found me beautiful, but it still had made me feel unsafe; maybe he has a wife and kids, but that would not stop men from preying on women; maybe it’s X, but it’s Y. And what hard evidence could I show if I told the gym administrators about him?

I used to come in even on Sundays, but Sundays were my trainer’s days off so Sweat Suit’s trainer would attend to my workout and cooldown stretches instead. Three Sundays, to be precise, because I needed three strikes to sense whether it was all made-up stories in my head. They were not, believe me, my young self. The other trainer had the most lecherous and audacious eyes in the gym. “Miss Beautiful,” he called me, “let’s move closer to the windows. It would be a waste if I don’t get to see your beauty.”

“Go on. Punch harder,” I told myself while doing pad work with him.

Please stop.

"I said punch harder.”

No, just stop.

“I. Said. Punch. HARDER.”

Leave. Now. PLEASE.

The stretch at the end of the workout was the worst. “Why? What are you feeling?” he asked me while gliding his hands on my thigh.

By the fifth day of the second month, my trainer had grown comfortable with me, while I grew more uncomfortable with him and with everyone else in the gym. “So you can develop flexibility,” my trainer told me when I stopped his hands from opening my legs. “That’s okay,” he said when I covered myself with my large shirt. It was not okay. I was lying down. My trainer looked up from time to time to meet Sweat Suit’s eyes. I could see them through the mirror. He raised my right knee to my chest, then guided it towards my left side, while his left hand held my right shoulder. His right hand, which was pushing my outer thigh to put pressure, slithered on my right butt cheek. I felt his fingers gliding further to places he was not supposed to wander on.

And then there was only white. I was not the labrum anymore. I heard the silence that comes with shock and asked, “Have I turned deaf?” I should have laughed at myself for thinking I could no longer hear, because I could hear the silence of a cemetery in a summer afternoon. I could smell the smoke departing from the burnt wick. A part of me died. Or I thought it did because the next thing I knew, I was being blinded by the light bouncing off my tombstone.

I was now the blocks of white paint on Anya’s work. The emptiness, ironically, could speak as much if not more than the representational figures in her art. From this emptiness I could see his sun-burnt face. The wrinkles under his eyes. The mole on the tip of his nose. His sideburns that looked like pubic hair. His dark straight lips. His eyes. The right eye had a little dash of red in its inner corner. His eyes looked dead. Remorseless. Lewd.

In Japanese aesthetics, an empty space such as these blocks of white paint is called ma. My textual engagement with these empty spaces was what I needed to recognize my rage against those lecherous men as I invited my trauma and self-loathing to sit with me again and again over a cup of tea. I needed to sit with them so I would heal from my brokenness. Otherwise, I would be too afraid to trust men again. I did not wish to lose my trust in them because I knew that there were those who still upheld what it should mean to be human.

Thinking through and writing about these spaces helped me apologize to my younger self for not walking away when she felt she was no longer safe in the space where she thought her self-loathing would be cured. She could not fight back because, I understand now, she was paralyzed by fear. The white spaces were empty for new kinds of self-love and self-care to bloom in me.

III

I was having a bottle of beer. Angry Bird was having one too. We were in the living area of his condominium unit right across the university. He leaned towards me. I met him halfway. We kissed. Was I drunk? No, not exactly. Yes, I was frisky and tipsy. I doubt he was drunk, but he was laughing, the kind that brings warmth to unfamiliar situations. He pulled me in and guided me to sit on his lap. He tried to pull up my white high-neck shirt. I stopped his hands.

“I’m fat,” I told him shyly.

He leaned back to get a fuller image of me. “You’re not.” Uh-oh. Is he Chelsea Boots 2.0?

“Look,” I gathered my rolls through my tight high-waist black lace skirt. “See?” I still had rolls despite losing weight. I did not reach the phase in my fitness program where we focused on the toning of the muscles. It had been a few months since I stopped my regime, but I could not bring myself to go to the gym—any gym—anymore.

Angry Bird pulled up his shirt. “I have rolls too,” he said, laughing at himself or maybe at my self-consciousness. He snorted. I laughed at his snort and his making fun of his rolls. How I wished I could laugh off my imperfections too. But how could I if throughout my life, I felt that people only noticed my being fat?

“You look big in those clothes,” my mother would say.

“Your thighs are huge.”

“You’re getting fat.”

Looking back, she might be saying these words to herself too as she was pressuring herself to lose the weight she gained back when she stopped her South Beach diet.

When I was in first grade, my mother enrolled me in my school’s ballet program. The grade school coordinator saw me in my bodice and tutu, and proceeded to rub my puppy belly while giggling. It was not the first time someone had noticed my puppy belly. On some days I thought this meant I was cute chubby. On other days it felt like a mockery, for example when we did jump exercises. The other kids landed gracefully with a soft thud on the wooden floor, while I sounded like an unattended bag full of books that fell from the bench or a sack of rice that slipped off from the pile. Retrospectively, I know nobody noticed, but at the time I thought everybody did. Narcissism. I stopped going to the ballet classes. Later, I moved to an all-girls’ school that ingrained in us students to become “women of substance.” Women of substance were not complacent about being beautiful thin. The pressure to be beautiful thin lingered in every classroom and corridor as if it was a ghost whose story we would scare ourselves with.

“Do you also have these?” I asked Angry Bird as I turned around enough to show him the white lines on my lower back.

“Not there, but here.” He lifted the sleeves of his shirt to show similar lines on his biceps extending to his chest. He said he also had them on the cheeks of his buttocks. I said I had them on my buttocks too, as well as dimples.

“It is normal to have stretchmarks,” he said, but I did not know this until that afternoon.

I was in fifth or sixth grade when my classmate pulled up the back of my P.E. shirt.

“What’s that?” she said so loudly that the others slowed down to eavesdrop.

“Which?” I was equally confused and frightened.

“That! Why do you have a white line on your back?”

“What?” I was scared by then.

“Is that a skin disease? That’s disgusting!”

I did not know what she was talking about. I did not even know that I had a line on my lower back. When I got home, I stripped naked and checked myself in the mirror to see what it was my classmate saw: a white horizontal line across my lower back. Another shorter line below that. My buttocks had these lines too, but they were slanted like they were scratched from inward out. They were countless of these lines and some almost blended with my skin color. There were dimples on my buttock cheeks too and on the upper thighs.

Yahoo! gave me articles on how to get rid of them, so I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I do not remember anymore which methods I tried, but I know none of the tips worked because I still have them on my body.

I never talked about stretchmarks and cellulite until Angry Bird showed me his because I thought only I had them. My science teachers did not talk about these kinds of body changes. They only talked to us about our breasts getting bigger, hips getting wider, dead egg cells exiting our body monthly, and hair growing on certain parts of our body and how they should be shaved or waxed because we were young ladies. Is this everything a woman of substance is supposed to learn?

On the marble top where the labrum is supposed to be is the portrait of Jessica by Dicksee. The portrait has been cropped, whitewashed, forcing one’s attention to Jessica’s eyes and her look of defiance. She is the daughter of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Historically, her character has been criticized, as many scholars base their reading of her character on her act of stealing her father’s casket of ducats. Alternative readings of Jessica introduce the idea of her as a runaway daughter, trying to save herself from the repressive household of her father.

With Anya flipping the portrait horizontally, Jessica is now looking back at the aristocratic family, who in turn, is looking at her as if she was the labrum. They are looking at her with great meticulousness. The other half of the portrait extends beyond the canvas as if Jessica is not part of the world of the clueless admirers in Alma-Tadema’s.

I first encountered the painting when I was beginning to learn not to give a flying fuck about how I looked. Six years had passed since I went on a fitness journey and decided not to continue it. I am not entirely sure what happened within those six years to account for this change in attitude. Maybe it was simply the wisdom that accrues with age and knowing that there are things way more important than how I look and how others see me. I spent my youth trying to earn the currency of beauty thinness because that’s what everybody was doing. But we are entering an era when we are learning to give the look that Jessica gives to the aristocratic Roman family: the look that says, “Fuck off.” The look that shows critics their opinion is worth only a pinch of salt that would dissolve in water. This was the look I did not know I needed until I saw it. It was a powerful image, urging me to translate the visual image into text, the language with which I know to tell my truths.

I felt a sense of familiarity with Angry Bird’s body. He looked toned with clothes on, but underneath them, he had a beer belly that resembled my puppy belly when I was a kid in that baby pink tutu. I have had a handful of intimate experiences after Angry Bird. I have been exposed to naked bodies, and have exposed mine to them. London Guy had a body quite similar to Angry Bird’s. Law School Guy’s body would fall under what my gay friends would call “twink,” a slang for slim build and youthful physique. The boy who, according to my friends, looked like Erwan Heussaff was huge like a bear. I am conscious of what their bodies looked like only now that I am writing about them, as writing requires putting words to images, but at that time when they stripped themselves naked, there were no words in my head with which to name them. This is the power of words: words show how everything is vulnerable to interpretation. How we caption and describe things (and people) informs how we see them.

The myth of beauty has persisted for too long. The standards may have changed, but our love for beauty and the way it functions as a currency will continue to persist unless a synthesis of the beautiful/ugly dichotomy is established. One word that I should have known when I was younger so I could have looked through its lens when I looked at bodies, including mine, is “different.” How much richer would my world have been? The body-positive movement banks on beauty in diversity. But there is still a lot more work to do to understand that even within this movement, the use of “beautiful” as an adjective for someone’s face and body can still reinforce a false dichotomy.

The beauty myth as an issue women face cannot be shut out by slamming the door the way feminists did with domesticity. They slammed the door of their homes behind them to march for their right to vote, for their right to be included in the workplace, and just recently, for their right to abortion. What do we do now with the beauty myth when it is not confined to our domesticity and when we have nowhere to march to?

A good friend of my mother told me that I should work out after gaining weight during the pandemic. While the term is self-explanatory, I was familiar with what she was talking about because I had encountered some articles about the pandemic weight gain on my Facebook newsfeed when I was confined in my home like everyone else. None of the articles clicked any switch in me. But writing about that moment now, I felt the urge to search the term on Google just to see if those who gained weight like me would still be encouraged to lose it the way I was encouraged to get rid of my stretchmarks. The results showed this: “Pandemic Weight Gain is Real,” according to UCLA Health. The other results showed “How to Lose Pandemic Weight” from Northwestern Medicine, “Pandemic Weight Gain? Here’s How To Lose It” from Orlando Health, and “What To Do When the ‘Quarantine 15’ Remains” from Yale Medicine.

“Don’t allow yourself to get fat ugly again,” my mother’s friend cautioned me. “You already lost so much weight before. Don’t gain it back. You looked good thin with your weight before the pandemic,” she added. It was probably the annoyance that comes with being more mature and busier in life, but for the first time I rolled my eyes over a comment about my weight. It dawned on me just what I did when I saw the awkward look on her face as if I embarrassed her. I stayed silent because I knew she was wrong for overstepping, but I also felt guilty for making the situation awkward.

But after the guilt, there was relief.

And after the relief, there was power.

It felt nice to roll my eyes.

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Amanda Juico Dela Cruz teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Ateneo de Manila University and the Literature Department of University of Santo Tomas. She was a fellow at the 20th Ateneo National Writers Workshop and the 8th Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing and an AB in Philosophy from De La Salle University. She has published in Art+ Magazine, Beyond the Ghetto, Plural Art Mag, and Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy. Her oeuvre of creative and scholarly works inquires from theories to write on and from the female body in the context of post-sexual revolution narratives.

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Arianna Bongato (b. 1998) is a Filipino contemporary artist based in Pateros, Philippines. She graduated Cum Laude at the University of the Philippines - Diliman with a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Arts. She has celebrated two sold-out solo exhibitions in Manila and has also participated in group exhibitions at Focus Art Fair London and Art Fair Philippines. Her works have also been auctioned at Xavier Art Fest Manila.

Her work process involves collaging appropriated imagery by way of blocking certain spaces into a new composition, thereby challenging the idea of visual economy and conformity.

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