An Aging Double
Various Artists
Jan Balquin, Lesley-Anne Cao, Jed Gregorio, Lou Lim, Veronica Peralejo, Jel Suarez, Miguel Lorenzo Uy
Jan Balquin, Lesley-Anne Cao, Jed Gregorio, Lou Lim, Veronica Peralejo, Jel Suarez, Miguel Lorenzo Uy
07 May – 05 June 2022
Curated by
Gary-Ross Pastrana
07 May – 05 June 2022
MO_Space is pleased to present An Aging Double, a group show featuring the works of Jan Balquin, Lesley-Anne Cao, Jed Gregorio, Lou Lim, Veronica Peralejo, Jel Suarez, and Miguel Lorenzo Uy, organized by Gary-Ross Pastrana.
Jorge Luis Borges’s short story entitled “On Exactitude in Science” tells of an Empire that took the art of mapmaking to such extremes in terms of detail and precision that a map of one city had to be the size of the city itself, reflecting every element to scale. To this, Baudrillard muses how “an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing,” covering the very thing it was meant to represent. The problem with a map of this magnitude is articulated further in yet another story, this time by Lewis Carroll. Here, the all-encompassing map was said to have never been unfolded and laid out in full, as people feared it would end up covering the whole country, blocking out the sun. In the end, the people came up with an interesting solution: since it already contains all the required details, why not just use the country itself as its own map?
Beyond the desire to map, these stories reveal a shared compulsion to translate and create copies with the utmost fidelity. In turn, through a selection of paintings, videos, objects, and photographs, this exhibition attempts to bring together varying viewpoints to shed light on this impulse to copy, mirror, and mimic; to translate, recreate, or reenact.
Foregoing mere fidelity, even the crudest map should at least help us get somewhere, whether towards learning a new skill, capturing a fleeting image, or navigating unfamiliar terrain.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Dealing with concepts of value, materiality, and banality, Jan Balquin works across different media ranging from paintings to collage. Exploring conventional notions of material and subject matter vis-a-vis unconventional imagery and simulacra, her recent paintings expand into sculptural forms that interrogate the qualities of the blank canvas as an object.
An alumna of the Philippine High School for the Arts, Balquin (b.1989) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, having received a grant to pursue her thesis.
Lesley-Anne Cao is a visual artist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Her practice is a series of divergent processes that explore the interplay of materiality, exhibition making, and fiction. Her work makes use of recognizable materials — books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money — towards the actualization and presentation of fictional objects and environments.
Cao holds a BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts - Diliman. Recent exhibitions include Hard and soft prayers at The Drawing Room Gallery (2021) and Cast But One Shadow at the U.P. Vargas Museum (2021). She has been granted artist residencies in Taiwan and Finland and has also presented work in Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.
Jed Gregorio (b. 1990) is a Filipino artist who lives and works in Manila, Philippines. His broad artistic practice encompasses photography, filmmaking, installation, and performance. Often informed by themes of politics of religiosity, masculinity, and post-Internet art histories, Gregorio’s free-ranging poetics manifest as serial and anthological projects that span multiple platforms, exhibitions, and diffusions, each operating in a hermeneutical cosmology developed through hyperfictional and multimedia strategies — from discrete works in assemblage and sculptural installation, to spatially expansive milieu constructed with images, objects, sound, and light. Gregorio graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Major in Communication, from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2011.
Lou Lim (b. 1989) invests in the connection between the corporeal and the spiritual, between materiality and notions of permanence, between objects and visual imagery, and in what these relations articulate. Her works examine and appropriate the processes of different art forms to further investigate sculpture, creating new contexts for the familiar by exploring ideas and potentialities of surface and touch.
Lim earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and has been actively exhibiting work since 2011. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations “For the Land that Laments” at Silverlens Galleries and “Rest” at CCP in 2022. She was resident at Palais de Tokyo in Paris under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC 2015-2016 program. This participation resulted in a collaborative performance at the Opera Garnier and in group exhibitions at ICA Singapore and the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, as well as in a publication with INA [Institut National Audiovisuel]. She was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards 2021.
Veronica Peralejo (b. 1989) majored in painting and graduated with honors from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2010. But she quickly shifted to 3D creations, as seen in her installation pieces for her first solo exhibit in 2015 at Art Informal—Pocket Universe, which was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards. She created sculptures of the microscopic images of parasites, cells, and other miniscule details. Peralejo also uses other materials, such as yarn, plastic tubes, speaker wires, and clotheslines for her works.
Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.
Images occupy new topographies. Compositions are densely populated by slices of color and texture—forms hinting at histories yet decidedly hovering outside time. Their contours similarly evoke nature’s harder relics such as stones and marbles baring their jagged edge. Suarez approaches collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting and responding to a visual phenomenon by restating images as open codes and new texts in the process of becoming.
Suarez has been exhibiting her works since 2014, and has participated in art fairs in Manila (ALT Philippines 2020; Art Fair PH 2016-19), Hong Kong (Art Central HK 2017), and Singapore (AAF SG 2014). She was an artist-in-residence of Larga (Negros Occ, PH) in 2019, and at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017.
Her solo exhibitions with West Gallery (2018) and MO_Space Gallery (2019) were shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.
Miguel Lorenzo Uy (b. 1993) lives and works in the Philippines.
As society continues to rapidly change, his artistic practice follows the phenomena that accompany it, exploring the roles and paradoxes of technology, media, culture, and globalization within the struggles of individuality, identity, and independence. The themes in his work stem from the social context in which he is situated, raising questions that address immediate concerns surrounding religious beliefs and conventions, media consumption and production, and the volatile possibilities of futures yet to unfold.
His practice traverses and intersects across multiple mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, sound, and installation. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2025), S.E.A. Focus, Singapore (2024), and his 2021 solo exhibition I Am That I Am was shortlisted for the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.
He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Arts from De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Dealing with concepts of value, materiality, and banality, Jan Balquin works across different media ranging from paintings to collage. Exploring conventional notions of material and subject matter vis-a-vis unconventional imagery and simulacra, her recent paintings expand into sculptural forms that interrogate the qualities of the blank canvas as an object.
An alumna of the Philippine High School for the Arts, Balquin (b.1989) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, having received a grant to pursue her thesis.
Lesley-Anne Cao is a visual artist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Her practice is a series of divergent processes that explore the interplay of materiality, exhibition making, and fiction. Her work makes use of recognizable materials — books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money — towards the actualization and presentation of fictional objects and environments.
Cao holds a BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts - Diliman. Recent exhibitions include Hard and soft prayers at The Drawing Room Gallery (2021) and Cast But One Shadow at the U.P. Vargas Museum (2021). She has been granted artist residencies in Taiwan and Finland and has also presented work in Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.
Jed Gregorio (b. 1990) is a Filipino artist who lives and works in Manila, Philippines. His broad artistic practice encompasses photography, filmmaking, installation, and performance. Often informed by themes of politics of religiosity, masculinity, and post-Internet art histories, Gregorio’s free-ranging poetics manifest as serial and anthological projects that span multiple platforms, exhibitions, and diffusions, each operating in a hermeneutical cosmology developed through hyperfictional and multimedia strategies — from discrete works in assemblage and sculptural installation, to spatially expansive milieu constructed with images, objects, sound, and light. Gregorio graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Major in Communication, from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2011.
Lou Lim (b. 1989) invests in the connection between the corporeal and the spiritual, between materiality and notions of permanence, between objects and visual imagery, and in what these relations articulate. Her works examine and appropriate the processes of different art forms to further investigate sculpture, creating new contexts for the familiar by exploring ideas and potentialities of surface and touch.
Lim earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and has been actively exhibiting work since 2011. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations “For the Land that Laments” at Silverlens Galleries and “Rest” at CCP in 2022. She was resident at Palais de Tokyo in Paris under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC 2015-2016 program. This participation resulted in a collaborative performance at the Opera Garnier and in group exhibitions at ICA Singapore and the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, as well as in a publication with INA [Institut National Audiovisuel]. She was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards 2021.
Veronica Peralejo (b. 1989) majored in painting and graduated with honors from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2010. But she quickly shifted to 3D creations, as seen in her installation pieces for her first solo exhibit in 2015 at Art Informal—Pocket Universe, which was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards. She created sculptures of the microscopic images of parasites, cells, and other miniscule details. Peralejo also uses other materials, such as yarn, plastic tubes, speaker wires, and clotheslines for her works.
Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.
Images occupy new topographies. Compositions are densely populated by slices of color and texture—forms hinting at histories yet decidedly hovering outside time. Their contours similarly evoke nature’s harder relics such as stones and marbles baring their jagged edge. Suarez approaches collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting and responding to a visual phenomenon by restating images as open codes and new texts in the process of becoming.
Suarez has been exhibiting her works since 2014, and has participated in art fairs in Manila (ALT Philippines 2020; Art Fair PH 2016-19), Hong Kong (Art Central HK 2017), and Singapore (AAF SG 2014). She was an artist-in-residence of Larga (Negros Occ, PH) in 2019, and at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017.
Her solo exhibitions with West Gallery (2018) and MO_Space Gallery (2019) were shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.
Miguel Lorenzo Uy (b. 1993) lives and works in the Philippines.
As society continues to rapidly change, his artistic practice follows the phenomena that accompany it, exploring the roles and paradoxes of technology, media, culture, and globalization within the struggles of individuality, identity, and independence. The themes in his work stem from the social context in which he is situated, raising questions that address immediate concerns surrounding religious beliefs and conventions, media consumption and production, and the volatile possibilities of futures yet to unfold.
His practice traverses and intersects across multiple mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, sound, and installation. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2025), S.E.A. Focus, Singapore (2024), and his 2021 solo exhibition I Am That I Am was shortlisted for the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.
He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Arts from De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde.
Related Exhibitions
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