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Art Underground Manila

In Guhit ng Gunita, artist SAIS and fashion designer Daryl Maat merge to translate memory into form, reviving the spontaneity of youth through drawing and design. Guhit, or drawing, becomes a visual mark and a conduit to gunita, meaning recollections, with the exhibition exploring intimate memories of early identity, shaped within the hallways of childhood and adolescence.

Daryl Maat revisits his formative years through a tactile dialogue with garments, deconstructing the school uniform and weaving it anew with motifs that oscillate between nostalgia and rebellion. Traditional silhouettes, pleated skirts, crisp collars, and the translucent barong, are transformed into wearable reflections of personal evolution. The embroidery, drawn from the artist’s childhood sketches, is both playful and profound, with erratic lines and whimsical forms that speak to a time before self-consciousness, when creativity flowed instinctively, unrestrained by convention. SAIS complements this vision with his artworks, portraits of children, that mirror the emotional texture of memory, rendered in charcoal and softened by time. His imagery evokes the essence of being young, impressionable, and perpetually in flux.

The collaboration constructs a landscape of remembrance that is neither literal nor linear. Guhit ng Gunita is an elegy to the imagination’s first bloom, a lyrical homage to the years that shaped humanity, and the unrefined beauty of our earliest marks upon the world.


Write-up by Deseree Mapandi

June 18, 2025
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June 7, 2025

SAIS

Guhit ng Gunita

Guhit ng Gunita
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