‘A Knowing’ Exhibition Bridges Generations and Feminist Power
Sweeping through Manila’s gallery scene like a well-placed highlighter over the history of feminist artistry, ‘A Knowing’ is the exhibition everyone’s talking about this week. Hosted at a major gallery, the show gathers three formidable women artists, Geraldine Javier, Emily Cheng, and Citra Sasmita, into one intergenerational showcase that’s positively pulsing with energy and ancestral wisdom. Imagine: three creative voices, distinct yet harmoniously interwoven, echoing across decades, continents, and the stories of womanhood itself.
According to Tatler Asia, the exhibition stands out for its fearless embrace of diversity, making visible the lineage of feminist expression from the Philippines to broader Southeast Asia. The trio’s works, ranging from Javier’s haunting embroidered canvases to Cheng’s transcendent mixed-media abstractions and Sasmita’s deeply symbolic Balinese iconography, each channel a knowingness, both learned and inherited. This is not just an art show; it’s a living archive of resistance, renewal, and radical tenderness.
Celebrating queer wisdom and feminist legacy
What makes ‘A Knowing’ shine brightest, especially for our Filipino LGBT+ fam? It’s the way it highlights art as an act of intergenerational dialogue, one that fiercely resists erasure. The exhibition’s curation feels like a tender conversation between Lola’s tales shared on a sultry night and the fiery, often glitter-bombed, activism roaring at modern Pride marches. We see this especially in Javier’s pieces: she stitches trauma and hope into her textiles, drawing from histories of queer struggle and maternal myth, reminding us that every thread is a memory and a protest.
Cheng’s works, on the other hand, are pure visual poetry. With sinuous shapes and generous washes of color, they evoke the shifting boundary lines of gender and belonging, inviting us into spaces that refuse definition. Sasmita’s elaborate paintings draw on Balinese feminist traditions, nodding to the sacred and the playful, the hidden and the loud, echoes of lives lived in the margins but never out of sight.
Artie’s Picks: Scenes not to miss
Don’t leave without seeing Javier’s “Silent Kinships”, a mix that electrifies the gallery with its patchwork of pain and pride. And Cheng’s “Generous Light”, which seemed to shimmer with the music of resilience, as if the canvas itself was humming a hymn of queer solidarity. Sasmita’s “Mother Spirits” offers an otherworldly grace, blurring myth and autobiography in a way only she can.
A knowing celebration for all generations
If you’re craving art that listens, answers back, and flirts with the boundaries of identity, ‘A Knowing’ is the show to see before clocking out your Thursday Zooms. It’s proof that feminist power blossoms best when rooted in history but reaching boldly toward the future, just as our LGBT+ evolution continues, one knowing moment at a time.Explore more about the show here.
