Insider Spotlight
On view through Feb. 14, 2026, the exhibitions bring together two distinct practices that examine materiality, lived experience, and social history within contemporary Philippine art.
“Merging" marks Lou Lim’s third solo exhibition with Silverlens. The works originate from a meticulous process involving two separate canvases, each receiving an underpainting of a sunlit sky.
A machine-cut vinyl stencil, tracing the intersecting lines of human skin seen up close, is laid over the surface as a masking layer. Paint accumulates on the stencil until it gains physical body, after which a darker sky is painted across the entire canvas.
Once dried, the stencils are peeled away and the built-up paint is extracted and combined into a third artwork, leaving the original canvases bearing traces of both light and shadow.
Why it matters
Lim’s practice deliberately collapses the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Rather than treating completion as an endpoint, she approaches the finished canvas as a site for extraction and transformation.
Her work sustains tension between opposing forces such as additive and subtractive, surface and depth, and body and landscape, resulting in a process-driven approach anchored in material experimentation.
Running alongside “Merging" is “Kahapon Muli Bukas", Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
At its core is the return of “Filipina DH", a landmark installation first exhibited in 1995 that confronted the conditions faced by Filipina migrant domestic workers.
The work is composed of personal objects such as battered suitcases, uniforms, Catholic paraphernalia, and a blouse inscribed with the word dignidad, many of which were donated by migrant workers themselves.
Between the lines
Both exhibitions are framed as extensions of long-term artistic inquiry and as responses to unresolved social histories, based on details outlined by Silverlens Manila in two separate press releases for the concurrent shows.
After traveling internationally in the late 1990s, “Filipina DH” returns to Manila nearly 30 years later. Its disappearance and reemergence mirror the displacement endured by the women it honors.
The installation is presented alongside Endaya’s more recent mixed media works addressing themes that include migration, religious oppression, climate catastrophe, and women’s resistance across Philippine history.
What’s next
Founded in 2004, Silverlens operates galleries in Manila and New York and is recognized as one of Southeast Asia’s leading contemporary art spaces.
With these concurrent exhibitions, the gallery continues to foreground process-driven and socially engaged practices within the global contemporary art dialogue. —Princess Daisy C. Ominga | Ed: Corrie S. Narisma
