This chapter is the text written by curator Alice Ming Wai Jim. It is two minutes long. 
Alice writes:
Marigolds thrive in the arid climates of Marigold Santos’s desert landscape paintings, one of which appears in the background of her studio depicted in the ink drawing shroud (arid interior I). The scene also affords us a glimpse of the artist’s take on the asuang (aswang), a traditionally terrifying shapeshifting creature of Filipino folklore.
Multiple configurations of this powerful, amorphous being populate Santos’s drawings and ceramics. Her reimagined asuang figures appear in numerous poses and positions — their shrouds at times made of thick dark masses, mystical woven textiles or braided voluminous hair, or exchanged for largebrimmedveiled hats of different styles.
The asuang mythology arose from the Babaylan — pillars of society as shamans and healers in pre-colonial Philippines — whose meaning and purpose were inverted by the Spanish colonizers. Reconfigured again, Santos’s asuang figure is hybrid in state and status, negotiating strata and longing, becoming land; these are not uncommon preoccupations today, during eras of migration and diaspora.
The blemishes or ink spots, or perhaps striae or scars, all over their bodies are more than skin deep. They tell stories, the narratives that make a life legible to oneself and to others. A form of permanent body adornment, tattooing was a prevalent cultural practice passed down in all ethnic groups of the Philippine Islands before they were colonized in the sixteenth century.
Super enlarged tattoo motifs of the artist’s design monumentalize this living art form as a cutaneous archive of ancestral knowledge that Filipinos are reviving today as a vibrant, decolonial practice.
 
Please move to the next stop. Turn right and follow the path for 4 metres. Then turn right and continue for 7 and a half metres. The drawing is on your left. This is the last stop of the tour.