Tokwa Peñaflorida

Residency invitation through Gravity Art Space
5 September — 28 October 2025

Peñaflorida with the artworks created at the ABungalow studio during his two-month residency.


Tokwa Penaflorida (b.1989) is an artist whose diverse work spans children’s book illustrations, conceptual art, and queer erotica. Queering Filipino and western folk-religious and occult iconographies and his questioning of form appears as a constant theme in much of his paintings entwined with his advocacy for representation. Mastering the use of acrylics, watercolor, and digital, his expressionistic body of work echoes a somber opalescence evident by his gradation of pinks and soft, sinuous lines. He graduated with a major in Visual Communication from the UP College of Fine Arts

Walang Naiwan Kundi ang Hamog sa mga Dahon (Nothing left but the dews on the leaves)

Curated by Sachet Projects
25 October 2025
Kapitana Gallery

Walang Naiwan Kundi ang Hamog sa mga Dahon is the culmination of Tokwa Penaflorida's 2-month residency at The ABungalow Project. They assume the role of a pollinator, carrying the queer figurations replete in their body of work, allowing them to germinate and come to fruition within locations around Negros–at the residency’s grounds, among stone tablets at the local cemetery, underneath a bridge, and by the river, where spirits are said to linger and play. Here, Penaflorida’s often fantastical images are instead tethered to the sensuous materiality of nature, which in turn becomes an analogy to queer lifeworlds.

Like the poem by Allan Popa where the exhibit’s name was taken from, the works are exercises in suspension–between the condensation of dew and its evaporation, between flowering and withering, between breaths. They depict remote and secluded environments, thick with foliage rendered in varying shades of green. Within these pockets, masculine bodies emerge, otherworldly and disjunct from their surroundings. In Dapithapon, two bodies are depicted in front of a gate, with their skin painted in fluorescent colors, shiny like the surface of ripened fruit. There is a tension that hangs in the air of this picture, as with most of the other works, as if the subjects would vanish if they were to notice the viewer’s presence.

The comparison between fruit and flesh is not a coincidence, as Penaflorida likens the act of foraging to cruising. In the wild, one must ascertain whether what is found is edible or poisonous. Glances are carefully exchanged with bated breath, unless hunger or desire clouds judgement. In spaces cut off from reality, bodies assume new forms separate from what they are outside. Limbs elongate out of proportion, mimicking the morphology of leaves, and skin is variegated by red blisters from mosquito bites. One becomes the Kapre, with a neck as thick as a bicep, muscles that undulate in and out of each other, and nicotine stained fingers like the tendrils of an alien creature. Or one becomes the Sirom-sirom, small enough to sit within the Kapre’s palm, seemingly vulnerable, but possessing insect-like wings to fly away at the first sign of danger.

Droplets drip down the bodies of bathers in the exhibit’s largest piece, Murcia. It presents a utopic image, where such bodies are liberated and free to exist, rendered gossamer and ephemeral in pencil and watercolor. Penaflorida captures queer lifeworlds at the point of flowering, which like nature, is temporary if only because it is cyclical. These encounters evaporate like dew as the sun comes up, as reality returns to subsume these pockets. Bodies revert back into forms legible and decent in the eyes of proper society. Penaflorida’s images then are a bid at preservation–no, pollination, for such encounters to germinate, and come to fruition yet again.