Kawayan de Guia's surreal, tableaux-like paintings emerge as "portraits" of indigenous figures in museological settings. Based in the Cordillera mountain range north of Manila, de Guia's paintings engage with the changing nature of this region in the face of modernization and development, as well as the region's spirituality. The figures are surrounded by European paintings, globes, and bulols, pre-Hispanic representations of spirits or ancestors carved in the Cordillera region. De Guia's works consider the fallout when ancestral spirits collide with Western culture.