Gateway Gallery’s Small Room is transformed into a brass-and-steam archive of imagination as Nestor Perez Ong, leader of the Steampunk Indio Collective, unveils his one-man exhibition, The Philosophical Tales of the Ancient Raconteur. Running from May 16 to 22, 2026, the show invites viewers into a world where memory, myth, and machinery collide.
At the core of the exhibition are visions born in sleep—fragments of dreams that Ong reconstructs through a distinctly steampunk lens. In his hands, folklore and futurism intertwine: clockwork maidens tend copper fields, gas-masked figures of Malakas at Maganda awaken beside mechanical ravens emerging from bamboo tubes, and baroque churches rise with smokestacks and iron rivets.
The result is not nostalgia, but transformation—a layered dialogue between precolonial spirit, colonial rupture, and imagined industrial futures forged into a single visual language.
Each artwork functions as a narrative fragment from a “raconteur” who bends storytelling itself. Ong’s universe feels like oral history retold through gears and steam: ancestral deities wear respirators, and literary classics such as Noli Me Tangere are reimagined in surreal ecosystems populated by sentient beings like Crisostomo Ibarrat and Maria Clarat.
Rather than imitating Victorian steampunk aesthetics, Ong indigenizes the form—rooting it in bamboo, abaca, and tropical heat. His machines are not cold constructs; they hiss, leak, and pulse as if alive, shaped by a distinctly Filipino sensibility of craft and environment.
As founder of the Steampunk Indio Collective, Ong frames the exhibition as both artistic exploration and cultural proposition. Each piece becomes a philosophical prompt, questioning memory, agency, and invention within the Filipino historical imagination.
What if epics ran on steam? What if revolutions took flight on airships? The Ancient Raconteur does not provide answers, but instead offers speculative blueprints—dreamlike architectures that invite viewers to continue building the story themselves.
In Ong’s vision, steampunk is no longer aesthetic costume—it becomes critique, reconstruction, and cultural reimagining.
The Philosophical Tales of the Ancient Raconteur runs from May 16 to 22, 2026, at Gateway Gallery’s Small Room. The artist reception will be held on May 16 at 3:00 p.m.
