Featuring selected outputs from last year’s KLFI Art Criticism Writing Workshop, we present this critique by Jan Marvin A. Goh on Dengcoy Miel’s “Mga Kathang Ipis” exhibited at BenCab Museum from August 9 to October 12, 2025.

Jan facilitates Art Appreciation and serves as a member of the Art Appreciation Core Team at the University of Santo Tomas Manila.

Should have been Ipis not Isip: A Review of Dengcoy Miel’s Kathang Isip Ipis (2025)

by Jan Marvin A. Goh

The exhibition title, Mga Kathang Ipis, immediately calls Kathang Isip to mind. The substitution occurs almost reflexively, often before the viewer enters the gallery. The museum receptionist made the same mistake, and many visitors repeated it. Participants in our Art Criticism Workshop fell into the same pattern. The recurring error reveals the force of linguistic habit. The tongue returns to Isip because the word occupies a more familiar place in everyday speech. The near rhyme between Ipis and Isip reinforces that impulse and initially lends the title a playful quality. That moment of amusement quickly gives way to uncertainty. Once the exhibition comes into view, the verbal slip no longer appears accidental. The works heighten minor deviations in order to unsettle perception, and the title functions as the first disturbance. A lingering question follows: did the curator anticipate this recurring mistake and deliberately construct the title as a linguistic trap? The exhibition encourages that suspicion because each work introduces subtle irritants that unsettle the habits through which viewers ordinarily make sense of what they see.

One must look toward the broader sensibility that defines DengCoy Miel’s artistic practice. His work emerges from a productive friction that challenges both perception and conscience. Across earlier exhibitions, his paintings have drawn their force from humor, historical trauma, and forms of local memory that persist beneath vividly colored surfaces. Philippine Barokue (2016) offered an early articulation of that direction. Jose Tence Ruiz interpreted the exhibition’s title as a deliberate collision between the European Baroque and the Filipino pop culture figure Barok. That convergence of visual excess and cultural roughness produced an unmistakably local artistic language. Alfred Yuson recognized a related dynamic when he described Miel’s work as a union of Social Realism and Surrealism. Yuson observed that Miel’s brushwork projected visual ease while concealing a sharp critical edge. Miel himself clarified the method behind that effect. He explained that each painting matured through successive layers of color over several months, a process that affirmed patience and gradual formation as defining features of his practice.

As Miel’s career developed, Cuentos Interruptus (2019) expanded his engagement with history. Neil Doloricon described the exhibition as a careful exploration of the unrealized possibilities that surrounded the 1896 Philippine Revolution. Sacred Shores (2024) redirected that inquiry toward questions of national sovereignty and the repeated violence that has marked Philippine history. Against that trajectory, Mga Kathang Ipis (2025) assumes sharper definition. The exhibition constructs a space where ordinary objects acquire unexpected gravity and neglected presences return the viewer’s gaze. Within that encounter, the tension between Isip and Ipis emerges as the exhibition’s conceptual axis. The wordplay exceeds the level of linguistic wit and develops into a sustained artistic proposition. Miel invites a mode of perception that unsettles habitual ways of seeing and exceeds the thematic arrangements that the exhibition space appears to establish at first glance.

Where the Faint Ghost of Isip Hovers

Certain canvases remain within the domain of Isip. Form and concept guide the viewer toward memory, historical consciousness, and the quiet habits that language leaves behind. Familiarity offers an initial point of entry, yet each image introduces a subtle disturbance. Meaning gathers before it slips away. Recognition never settles into certainty because every composition preserves a quiet instability that continues to provoke reflection.

Fig. 1. PASILYO NG ALA-ALANG IIWANAN

PASILYO NG MGA ALA-ALANG IIWANAN gives that sensibility its quiet architectural form. A Delftware planter, dense with cascading foliage, occupies the foreground with unexpected authority. Vines spill across the ledge and quietly interrupt the corridor that stretches toward an empty wooden chair withdrawn into shadow. The eye lingers between those two points, where lush growth encounters an interior marked by absence. The passage itself becomes the painting’s true subject. The imported ceramic vessel recalls a distant cultural lineage, yet the living plants have long since folded it into the rhythms of ordinary domestic life. The title deepens that quiet displacement. The corridor ceases to function as a simple interior. It becomes a threshold where memory neither departs nor returns, but remains suspended between both. Miel entrusts remembrance to humble objects rather than monumental symbols. Space itself learns to remember. Silence acquires the density of lived time.

Fig. 2. STUDIO

STUDIO extends the meditation on Isip into the intimate theater of artistic creation. A disembodied hand appears from behind a blank canvas, while Miel places his own head at the lower edge of the composition. The body never fully enters the room since the painter’s consciousness disperses across the studio, where vision, memory, and gesture remain suspended before they recover their unity in paint. The untouched canvas occupies the visual center, yet it offers nothing to the eye. Rather than receive an image, it withholds a central focus. The surrounding interior unfolds as a liminal archive where artistic consciousness gathers its material. A Bulul figure faces a Delftware planter. An imposing cabinet recalls the display furniture of seventeenth-century Europe, although its painted panels drift toward the lyricism of Chinese landscape painting. A crowned devotional figure rises between two candles, where folk piety brushes against theatrical artifice. None of these objects submits to a singular historical lineage. Each carries the residue of another world, although none remains confined to its place of origin. The studio becomes less a site of production than a place of negotiation, where inherited histories suspend their fixed identities before they assume another life in paint.

Fig. 3. CHISMOSA PANOPTICON

The domain of Isip gradually abandons quiet meditations on memory and turns toward sharper social tensions. CHISMOSA PANOPTICON ruptures that stillness with a concrete wall crowned by broken glass. Each shard contains a human eye. What should deter intrusion instead invites relentless surveillance. The barrier no longer protects private space. The barrier watches. A face rises just above the wall, although the broken glass conceals much of its presence. The figure peers across the partition with anxious curiosity, yet the embedded eyes deny any stable distinction between observer and observed. Every glance returns another gaze. Miel transforms an ordinary neighborhood fixture into an unsettling meditation on social vigilance. Gossip no longer resides in speech alone but acquires a material form that polices everyday life with quiet persistence.

Fig. 4. LABANDERA, LA BANDERA, LABAN!

LABANDERA, LA BANDERA, LABAN! draws the domain of Isip toward the contested terrain of national memory. A woman scrubs the Philippine flag beneath the flow of a hand pump, yet flames continue to consume the fabric. Cleansing fails to extinguish the fire. Every stroke of labor exposes a wound that refuses purification. The painting adopts the saturated language of commercial advertising. A detergent bottle bears the label Manifest Destiny, and the promise of spotless renewal collapses into irony. The slogan invokes an imperial doctrine that once justified conquest, while the product itself offers a fantasy of historical erasure. Miel refuses that promise. Water cannot erase the burns that mark the flag. Labor cannot restore an innocence that history has already consumed. The domestic act assumes political force. Care for the nation passes through ordinary hands, although the marks of colonial violence remain visible upon the cloth they struggle to preserve.

Where the Dominion of Ipis Clings

By this point, the slip of the tongue no longer appears accidental. The exhibition has quietly prepared the passage from Isip to Ipis. Reflection yields to instinct. Recognition gives way to unease. Several works no longer seek contemplation through historical memory. They confront the senses through material weight. Pigment grows thick and opaque. The surface resists the eye, while distorted faces erode the comfort of recognition. Ordinary life acquires an abrasive texture that unsettles without spectacle.

DEBOTO OR DEBOTE marks that transition with unsettling force. A bottle of Ginebra occupies the place of a devotional image, while votive candles and a hanging bulb cast an uncertain glow across the cramped interior. Men crowd the improvised altar with expressions that recall the exaggerated physiognomies of Bartolomeo Passerotti, although Miel drives those features toward something grotesque and nearly cadaverous, if not zombified. One man clasps a rosary. Another reaches toward the bottle with parted lips. Devotion and addiction occupy the same ritual space without clear distinction. The exposed light bulb assumes the role of a counterfeit halo, yet its weak illumination offers no promise of revelation. Faith survives in the gestures of the devotees, although the sacred object has yielded to intoxication. Miel exposes the fragile structures that persist when transcendence falls silent and ritual alone remains.

Fig. 6. PRUSISYON NG MGA LASING

A similar exhaustion anchors PRUSISYON NG MGA LASING. Movement fills the frame, yet no arrival awaits the subjects. A Pale Pilsen bottle rises with the absolute authority of an improvised procession icon. Amber light spreads like a painful bruise across clustered bodies of an ordinary crowd. Faces visibly split between transient cheer and total depletion. Candles sealed inside empty bottles mimic the posture of prayer, but the scene releases only a deep exhaustion, and it conjures a vision of belief as mere endurance sustained through ritualized piety. It is a force that persists long after its semantic value dissipates, much like the evaporated spirit of cheap liquor.

Fig. 7. EXPERIENCED KATIPUNERO

The dominion of Ipis eventually reaches the nation’s heroic archive. EXPERIENCED KATIPUNERO returns the revolutionary to the present, although the encounter offers no comfort. Deep fissures cut across the face until flesh resembles scorched earth. The eyes withdraw into darkness, while the vivid red scarf refuses the exhaustion that has consumed the body beneath it. History has preserved the uniform. History has abandoned the man. The painting refuses commemoration. Heroism no longer resides in triumph or sacrifice. Heroism survives as attrition. The Katipunero remains upright because the nation continues to summon his image, even after time has stripped away the promise that once animated it. Miel leaves the viewer before a figure who no longer embodies victory but leaves a figure who endures instead as the scar that history cannot heal.

KATIPUNERO DESNUDO carries the dismantling of the heroic image to its final threshold. The uniform rests upon a chair like an abandoned skin. A naked revolutionary confronts the viewer with only a Katipunan hat, a rifle, and a bolo suspended before his body. Every familiar emblem remains within reach, yet each one has lost the authority to define the figure who stands before them. Heroism returns to flesh, where vulnerability precedes every monument. The baroque crimson curtain recalls Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, where sanctity yields to the undeniable weight of mortal existence. Miel invokes a similar gravity. The revolutionary stands outside the comforts of patriotic spectacle and enters the fragile condition of an ordinary body. Memory therefore seeks its measure in exposed skin rather than ceremonial attire. Beneath the symbols that history has cherished stands a man who bears the full cost of the nation that continues to remember him.

This physical vulnerability extends into the mythical realm. In KATIPUNERONG NUNO SA PUNSO, the revolutionary crosses into the domain of local folklore and returns diminished rather than monumental. A colossal Kapre looms above him, its immense face suspended between curiosity and appetite. Beneath that gaze, the Katipunero appears as a barefoot nuno who clutches his hat with quiet apprehension. The republic’s hero suddenly enters a world where older powers hold dominion. Along the earthen mound, a line of ants bears a discarded boot with the solemn rhythm of a ritual offering. Their patient procession transforms the remnants of history into an obscure ceremony. The looming Kapre recalls the terrible expectancy of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, yet Miel withholds the moment of consumption. Terror lingers in suspension. Folklore, colonial memory, and the natural world converge within a single field, where the nation relinquishes its claim to permanence before older myths and humbler forms of life.  

Ipis emerges where the architecture of certainty begins to erode. Every promise that once organized the world gradually yields to the stubborn persistence of what remains. Faith continues after revelation withdraws. Heroism endures after history relinquishes its monuments. Memory abandons the security of origin and settles instead upon the vulnerable surface of the body. Existence acquires a different gravity under these conditions. Survival ceases to anticipate redemption. Survival becomes its own irreducible horizon. Miel reveals a world sustained less by hope than by the quiet insistence of lives that continue after every grand narrative has spent its claim upon them.

“Bagabag” in Bagabag

BAGABAG gathers the exhibition into a final image where the distinction between Isip and Ipis relinquishes its hold. An immense back fills the canvas until the body assumes the scale of a landscape. The turned head withdraws from the viewer, while the skin parts into incandescent fissures that glow like volcanic seams beneath the earth. Small creatures cling to the flesh, shelter within those openings, or drift toward another wound with patient resolve. Their forms refuse certainty. They resemble parasites, yet their curled bodies carry the quiet poise of embryos. One folds inward. Another stretches toward the light. Another seems to rise from the wound itself, as though the flesh had begun to dream another life. Every incision wavers between injury and genesis.

Fig. 12. BAGABAG

The body yields its familiar boundaries. Flesh becomes terrain. Wounds become dwelling places. Anguish relinquishes the character of interruption and assumes the slow rhythm of habitation. Thought inscribes itself upon the skin, while memory abandons the permanence of monuments and enters the vulnerable grammar of scars. BAGABAG refuses every clear distinction between affliction and vitality. Each wound shelters the possibility of emergence as much as the mark of injury. Miel leaves the viewer before a body where history, consciousness, and desire occupy the same living surface. Endurance reaches its deepest register here, beyond triumph, beyond consolation, where existence persists with the quiet gravity of a world that continues to bear life through its own brokenness.

Works Cited

1. Doloricon, Neil. “Cuentos Interruptus: DengCoy Miel’s Alternate Universe.” Manila Standard, 30 Aug. 2019, https://manilastandard.net/?p=303684.
2. Garing, Thea. “Excerpt.” Mga Kathang Ipis: Exhibition Catalog, curated by Prudencio “DengCoy” Miel, 2024.
3. Ladrido, R. C. “Dengcoy Miel Tackles West Philippine Sea in ‘Sacred Shores’ Exhibit.” VERA Files, 20 July 2024, https://verafiles.org/articles/dengcoy-miel-tackles-west-philippine-sea-in-sacred-shores-exhibit
4. Ruiz, Jose Tence. “‘DengCoy’ Miel holds first one-man exhibit.” INQ, 2 May 2016, lifestyle.inquirer.net/227850/dengcoy-miel-holds-first-one-man-exhibit/
5. Yuson, Alfred A. “Art That Toggles Between Power and Delusion.” The Philippine Star, 17 Dec. 2018, https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/arts-and-culture/2018/12/17/1877481/ art-toggles-between-power-and-delusion

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this critique are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation, Inc. (KLFI).

Images accompanying this critique sourced by the author are used here for educational purposes only. KLFI does not claim ownership of these images, all rights remain with their respective owners.