Filipino artist Leslie de Chavez transforms rituals and objects of devotion into paradoxical meditations on abundance and deprivation, faith and spectacle, technology and tradition.
In his latest solo exhibition, A Kiss on the Ground (Halik sa Lupa), artist Leslie de Chavez returns to his hometown of Quezon province as both witness and interlocutor. Curated by Joyce Toh under Gajah Gallery Singapore, the exhibition comprises mixed media installations, paintings, and sculptural works that draw from traditions in the Philippines, celebrations of thanksgiving in various forms, including the Pahiyas harvest festival, Holy Week rites, and the parade of Higantes (giants).
Through these culturally-rooted works, de Chavez depicts the ways in which faith, excess, and resilience are inextricably linked with the collective psyche of a people shaped by both abundance and inequity.
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About Leslie de Chavez
Manila-born artist Leslie de Chavez is widely recognized for his explorations of history, cultural imperialism, religion, and contemporary life. Through his deconstructions of master texts, icons, and symbols of the times, he balances critique with an affirmation of art’s relevance and responsibility to its social context.
De Chavez has presented numerous solo exhibitions across the Philippines, China, Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, and has participated in major international exhibitions such as the Singapore Biennale (2013), Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan (2011), Nanjing Triennial in China (2008), and the Pocheon Asia Biennale in South Korea (2007). A two-time recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards (2010 and 2014), he is also the founder and director of Project Space Pilipinas, an artist-run initiative based in Lucban, Quezon, where he currently lives and works.
About A Kiss on the Ground
The glittering splendor of De Chavez’s pieces is meant to seduce through vivid hues, gilded surfaces, and monumental forms. Beneath exuberant iconography lies a call to examine and probe the paradoxes at the heart of Filipino devotion: reverence and indulgence, sacrifice and spectacle, piety and performance. These tensions are what tie these pieces together, mapping conflicting realities and ideals like faith, power, wealth, desire, tradition, and modernity.
The artist’s incisive yet empathetic vision reveals the dissonance between the abundance of the land and the deprivation of those who labor upon it. Take, for example, his mixed media piece “Lagapak ng Pangakong Katubusan” (“Fall of Promised Deliverance”): 12 machine-sewn cadaver bags made from National Food Authority rice sacks, hung on metal hooks, each tier increasing in weight. The body-like forms suggest both sustenance and death, a grim reminder of farmers silenced and killed during the Duterte administration.
Religious iconography abounds in A Kiss on the Ground. The artist’s gold-leaf on papier-mâché, wood, iron, and fabric sculpture “Ginintuang Pangitain” (“Gilded Phantasm”) is a nod to the golden bull worshipped in pagan, pre-Christian societies: a symbol of power, wealth, and celebration, yet also a warning of the idolatry and excess it’s often associated with in the Bible.
Several works in the exhibition also explore the intersections of technology and faith. “La Paz Supper,” for instance, reimagines Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” through an acrylic-on-canvas painting derived from de Chavez’s AI-assisted reworking of the original masterpiece. Described by curator Joyce Toh as a “deliberate act of re-stranging,” the work reflects on the image’s ubiquity in Filipino homes—an emblem of devotion that simultaneously reveals the country’s deeply ingrained colonial inheritance of Catholicism.
In the mixed media work “Ang Alindog ng Hiwaga Para sa Kaluwalhatian ng Kaluluwa” (“The Allure of Mystery for the Splendor of the Soul”), a carved mahogany figure of Jesus Christ, the Senyor, is surmounted by a suspended vitrine. Together, they evoke the Holy Week processions of Lucban and other parts of the Philippines.
Embedded with rolled slips of paper resembling nails, the Senyor holds the prayers, petitions, and words of gratitude from the Lucban community. In the gallery, de Chavez brings this ritual to visitors, inviting them to write their wishes on slips of paper and inserting them into holes on the figure of Christ—transforming the material into the immaterial, and shaping belief into an ongoing, collective act.
This participatory element extends to the process. Several works were created in collaboration with the people of Lucban, from grandparents to children who helped craft the Higantes and the golden bull. Other works took shape through cross-border collaboration at Gajah Gallery’s Yogya Art Lab (YAL) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where artisans and technicians expanded de Chavez’s material range and scale. These shared acts of creation serve as contemporary rituals in themselves, reaffirming community and re-enchanting the very ground from which they arise.
What A Kiss on the Ground ultimately showcases is how rituals and rites are both anchors and mirrors for de Chavez: ways of creating belonging, negotiating continuity, and revealing the human contradictions beneath ceremonial grace.
“A Kiss on the Ground” runs until November 30, 2025 at Gajah Gallery Singapore, which is located at 39 Keppel Rd, #03-04. Gajah Gallery is open 11 AM to 7 PM from Monday to Friday, and 12 PM to 6 PM from Saturday to Sunday.
Photos courtesy of Gajah Gallery.
