Filipino Ladies in Sunday Dress
dated 2007
mixed media on canvas
37" x 36" (94 cm x 91 cm)
Accompanied by a certificate issued by The big & small art co. Gallery and signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot




In all its absurdity, there is something haunting about the works of Joven Mansit. While the colonial images of the Filipino we find in his works are familiar, they strike the viewer less with a sense of nostalgia and more with an eerie familiarity. Even as he deploys a graphically absurd manipulation of pictures referenced from late 19th century and early 20th century photographs, the result is a sense of humor subdued by the ghostly and traditional render in oil of a faded historical past—now distorted and grotesque. And yet, for all the graphic distortion employed in Mansit’s paintings, they nonetheless bear truths which, eerily, seem to ring truer than the original turn-of-the-century pictures he references.In this mixed media work, Mansit references a turn-of-the- century photograph of the same name: Filipino Ladies in Sunday Dress. While the original photograph captures two Filipinas garbed modestly in period clothing, Mansit’s contemporary take is an undressing of truth. He redresses one of the women in a revealing baro’t saya and turns the image into that of a temptress who seduces comically with a sliced papaya as the forbidden fruit of temptation. The truth is thus bared: that such images akin to the modest Maria Clara ideal are not as innocent as they are purported to be. Instead, they merely constitute part of a grander picture of colonial and patriarchal myth-making that paints the Maria Clara ideal of a Filipino lady—that is, a woman who is perfectly respectable exactly because of their allegedly modest and submissive character.The criticality of Mansit’s paintings can be attributed to the allegorical play of images at work. The original photographs he references are allegories in themselves, deliberately underhanded in their intentions, in how they paint the Filipino natives in the grand scheme of history and things. Through Mansit’s contemporary technique, he adds another layer of allegory by referencing and then re- presenting this ‘historically canon’ image of the Filipina. By using an image from the colonial spectacle against itself, Mansit puts forward a new picture that is both disturbingly off and familiar—or rather, more accurately, it disturbs because the artist puts forward a critical truth that disturbs a colonial one. (Pie Tiausas)

In all its absurdity, there is something haunting about the works of Joven Mansit. While the colonial images of the Filipino we find in his works are familiar, they strike the viewer less with a sense of nostalgia and more with an eerie familiarity. Even as he deploys a graphically absurd manipulation of pictures referenced from late 19th century and early 20th century photographs, the result is a sense of humor subdued by the ghostly and traditional render in oil of a faded historical past—now distorted and grotesque. And yet, for all the graphic distortion employed in Mansit’s paintings, they nonetheless bear truths which, eerily, seem to ring truer than the original turn-of-the-century pictures he references.In this mixed media work, Mansit references a turn-of-the- century photograph of the same name: Filipino Ladies in Sunday Dress. While the original photograph captures two Filipinas garbed modestly in period clothing, Mansit’s contemporary take is an undressing of truth. He redresses one of the women in a revealing baro’t saya and turns the image into that of a temptress who seduces comically with a sliced papaya as the forbidden fruit of temptation. The truth is thus bared: that such images akin to the modest Maria Clara ideal are not as innocent as they are purported to be. Instead, they merely constitute part of a grander picture of colonial and patriarchal myth-making that paints the Maria Clara ideal of a Filipino lady—that is, a woman who is perfectly respectable exactly because of their allegedly modest and submissive character.The criticality of Mansit’s paintings can be attributed to the allegorical play of images at work. The original photographs he references are allegories in themselves, deliberately underhanded in their intentions, in how they paint the Filipino natives in the grand scheme of history and things. Through Mansit’s contemporary technique, he adds another layer of allegory by referencing and then re- presenting this ‘historically canon’ image of the Filipina. By using an image from the colonial spectacle against itself, Mansit puts forward a new picture that is both disturbingly off and familiar—or rather, more accurately, it disturbs because the artist puts forward a critical truth that disturbs a colonial one. (Pie Tiausas)