This catalogue is published in conjunction with an aging double, a group exhibition by Jan Balquin, Lesley-Anne Cao, Jed Gregorio, Lou Lim, Miguel Lorenzo Uy, and Issay Rodriguez. Curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana, held at A+ WORKS of ART, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 13 September to 4 October 2025.
First staged in Manila, the exhibition returns for a second act, like a delayed echo finally finding its way back. It was on view at MO_Space from 7 May to 5 June 2022.
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 this spirit, An Aging Double, featuring works by Jan Balquin, Lesley-Anne Cao, Jed Gregorio, Lou Lim, Issay Rodriguez, and Miguel Lorenzo Uy, opens at A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur, organized by Gary-Ross Pastrana. The exhibition takes its cue from Jean Baudrillard’s reflection that “an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing,” itself inspired by Borges’s tale of an empire whose desire to create a faithful map became as vast as the territory it described. First staged in Manila, the exhibition returns for a second act, like a delayed echo finally finding its way back. Through a new set of drawings, paintings, sound, video, and site-specific installations, this iteration further reflects on our shared impulse to map, trace, copy, mirror, and 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.
GARY-ROSS PASTRANA , Curator
LESLEY-ANNE CAO
A neck or a wrist (Silver, 60.18m)
2025
Stainless steel chain, rubble
Dimensions variable
LESLEY-ANNE CAO
A neck or a wrist (Silver 1)
2025
Stainless steel chain
Dimensions variable
A neck or a wrist by Lesley-Anne Cao continues a thread of spatial and material inquiry through the use of a silver chain. This site-specific work includes a closed loop that traces the perimeter of the gallery. This gesture extends from two earlier works, Whistler (2017), in which the artist, wearing a suit of wind chimes, walked the perimeter of a gallery space while being recorded by a centrally placed microphone. That performance, which took place during the final exhibition at the venue, also curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana, rendered the act of walking into a sonic drawing. In this iteration, the silver chain becomes both line and boundary, drawing attention to the limits and memory of the space through sounding, walking, tracing, drawing, mapping.
The process begins with a large-scale painting: a close-up of skin, textured with thick strokes. Once dry, the surface of the painting is cast in silicone, which serves as a matrix or printing plate. The work is created by laying unprimed linen over the matrix, which is charged with oil paint, and applying pressure across its surface. This process is adapted from the intaglio printmaking method, where the sunken areas hold the ink - in this case, the oil paint. Instead of etching or engraving a design onto a printing plate, like copper, the printing plate is made by casting the surface of a painting. The resulting work carries the impressions and traces of the original painting. This piece explores the dual nature of existence - the material and immaterial, the body and spirit.
2025
2025
20 x 35 in
Abstraction (after Cosmic Dance RGB 1 and 2) by Miguel Lorenzo Uy, initiates a meditation on self at both molecular and cosmic scales. The artist extracts their own DNA protein from saliva using common household materials (table salt, detergent, rubbing alcohol) and films the suspended material in a test tube. Through the addition of food coloring and shifting light, the resulting footage resembles deep space, offering a coincidental yet uncanny resemblance to the structure of the universe. Edited into a dreamlike triptych, the work gestures toward the cyclical nature of existence (creation, preservation, and destruction) framed through the metaphoric lens of the “cosmic dance.”
The paintings in the series extend the project’s philosophical inquiries into the realm of mark-making and material. Using the DNA protein’s captured image as reference, the artist turns to painting as both self-portrait and ontological question. Each canvas floats between legibility and dissolution, suggesting that the body, like the universe, resists fixed representation.
I wanted to create a film about how we consume media and how it forms our beliefs. How to make life-giving bread is a silent instructional video showing the process of making simple bread. The video shows every step of making the bread (even the rising of the yeast) in real time. There’s also this injection of a familiar trope of the bread as a holy symbol, and I wanted to strip/obscure the identity of the actor down to the three primary colors of the screen (red, green, and blue). There’s also this quality of juxtaposing with today’s information design where most information is compressed to a form that’s most efficient to consume.
Regarding the presentation of the piece, I consider it more as a material and modular piece, meaning that the number of screens and configuration of layout can change, but with a simple rule that every video must be played simultaneously.
The work approximates the nucleus of a hive, something usually closed and hidden, now opened and transformed through materials that carry sense of touch and meaning.
Jed Gregorio’s FAUN: Ébauche d’un portrait de jeune homme en trois actes (Sketch for a Portrait of a Young Man in Three Acts) reinterprets the amalgamated work of three prominent male figures in the Western canon of modernism: Vaslav Nijinsky, Claude Debussy, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1912, Nijinsky choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun for the Ballets Russes, first performed in Paris. The dance was set to Debussy’s orchestral score Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, composed in 1894, which was inspired by Mallarmé’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun, published in 1876. In Gregorio’s Faun, this gesture of transposition in contemporaneous experience is held against mirrors of sex, dance, poetry, translation, and music. As an experiment, Faun presents the lone figure of the young man and his ontological fallibility as he confronts the behemoth of art history as well as the paradoxes of beauty and terror, familiarity and foreignness, and defeat and hope.
Manila, Philippines
7 May – 5 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 short story “On Exactitude in Science” tells of an Empire who 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 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 will 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 to this impulse to copy, mirror and mimic, to translate, recreate o reenact. If we forego mere fidelity, the idea of a map should at least help us get somewhere, whether towards learning a new skill, capturing a fleeting image or navigating an unfamiliar terrain.
– GARY-ROSS PASTRANA , Curator
JED GREGORIO
FAUN: Ébauche d’un portrait de jeune homme en trois actes
(Sketch for a Portrait of a Young Man in Three Acts), 2022
Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
Installation
Photographs
Poetry (Sketch
a
Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
Again, 2022. Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
LESLEY-ANNE CAO
The opposite of omniscience (30 seconds, 2 years, 3 minutes), 2022
Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
Between setting and rising, 2022
Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
Still life, 2022
Installation view: An Aging Double, 2022, Mo_Space, Manila
Photographs courtesy of Mo_Space
JAN BALQUIN
Jan Balquin (b. 1989, Philippines) is a contemporary visual artist who works across painting, sculpture and collage. Her artworks explore conventional notions of materiality and subject matter, often aiming to reconfigure more established forms of art. Since graduating with a Fine Arts major in Studio Art from the University of the Philippines Diliman, she has presented ten solo exhibitions at innovative galleries such as MO_Space in Manila and the West Gallery in Quezon City.
LESLEY-ANNE CAO
Lesley-Anne Cao (b. 1992, Philippines) explores the interplay of materiality, language, and art making. She works with self-produced and found objects, images, and text — often involving collaborators in different fields such as music, literature, crafts and digital technologies — alongside mutable materials, machines, and environmental elements. With an intuitive and process-driven approach to installation, sculpture, video, and text, Cao’s work explores transformations in recognizable forms, environments, and narratives.
She has held solo exhibitions “The hand, the secretary, a landscape” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2018) and “A song plays from another room” at MO_Space Gallery (2021), among others. She has been granted artist residencies at Gasworks, London (2023) and HART Haus, Hong Kong (2024). Some of her exhibitions include “Moments of Delay” at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2025), “Weather-world” at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2024), “Nothing human is alien to me” at A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur (2023), and the New Cinema Competition shortlist at the 15th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Berwick-upon-Tweed, UK (2019). She completed her BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2014.
Lou Lim (b. 1989, Philippines) 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 the processes and methods of different art forms to further investigate sculpture, creating new contexts for the familiar by exploring ideas and potentialities of surface and touch. Part of her methodology involves appropriating the medium of painting in creating or extracting sculptural forms, and vice versa: simulations of skin, the embodiment of phenomena such as horizons.
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, “Hands Flower” at Mo Space in 2023 and “Eternity in Fragments” at West in 2025. 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.
Gregorio is
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
LORENZO UY
Miguel Lorenzo Uy (b. 1993, Philippines) works with different mediums from painting to photography and sculpture to video. As society continues to rapidly evolve, his artistic practice follows the phenomena that go with it as well, currently exploring the role and paradoxes of technology, media, and globalisation within the struggles of individuality, identity, and independence. The themes found in his work stem from the society in which he lives in, forming questions that address immediate concerns with regard to (religious) beliefs and conventions, (media) consumption and production, and the volatile possibilities in the future that have yet to unfold.
His works shift between different mediums: from painting to photography, sculpture to video, and digital to installation. His 2021 solo exhibition ‘I Am That I Am’ was shortlisted in the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Art.
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ
Issay Rodriguez’s (b. 1991, Philippines) practice revolves around projects that deal with themes of humanism and ecology. By working on research and community engagements enabled by artist residencies and inter-disciplinary collaborations, she is able to look into projects that explore human emotions and values that can be explained or expressed through art and technology. Rodriguez uses drawings, cyanotypes, and other formats such as virtual and augmented realities to materialize her long-term research on the life of bees and the exploration of botanical archives in understanding the influence of the environment on humans and vice versa.
While completing her BFA at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, she received a bursary to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des BeauxArts in Paris through the Jose Moreno Foundation. Her works were presented at the main exhibition of the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017 (Italy), in “A World, Anew” curated by Joyce Toh at S.E.A. Focus 2023 (Singapore), and in “Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth” curated by Joselina Cruz and James Luigi Tana at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila). Selected artist residencies include Bellas Artes Projects (Bataan, PH), Gasworks (London, UK), and the Centre Intermondes (La Rochelle, FR).
GARY-ROSS PASTRANA
Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Philippines) is a contemporary artist whose work explores time, memory, and the quiet transformation of everyday materials through conceptual and often poetic gestures. His interdisciplinary approach spans sculpture, installation, collage, writing, performance, and design. Pastrana has exhibited widely in the Philippines and internationally, including in Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the United States—most notably in the New Museum Triennial in New York. He currently serves as the Curator of Programming at Calle Wright, an experimental art space housed in a restored heritage home in Manila. Alongside his own practice, he curates exhibitions and facilitates workshops that support emerging artists and foster critical, cross-disciplinary exchange.
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© 2025 A+ WORKS of ART. © Text and images by the authors. All rights reserved.
A+ WORKS OF ART is a contemporary art gallery based in Kuala Lumpur, with a geographic focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2017, the gallery presents a wide range of contemporary practices, from painting to performance, drawing, sculpture, new media art, photography, video and installation. Its exhibitions have showcased diverse themes and approaches, including material experimentation and global conversations on social issues.
Collaboration is key to the ethos of A+ Works of Art. Since its opening, the gallery has worked with artists, curators, writers, collectors, galleries and partners from within the region and beyond, and continues to look out for new collaborations. The gallery name is a play on striving for distinction but also on the idea that art is never without context and is always reaching to connect — it is always “plus” something else.
