Prelude to a conversation
Pristine de Leon, Lk Rigor

——————————————————————————–5 December 2025, Pristine de Leon

Koki Lxx’s works make me think of mobility and trace. Many of these elements are signifiers—artistic, culinary, sartorial—of specific places. Months ago, when he showed me a picture of the pusô made with vintage kimono parts, I thought, how interesting and how odd. There is contingency in the way these markers bind two places together, that the longer I look at them, and note their chance connections, how do I get past the idea that they are a trace of mobility itself? Here was Koki staying in Japan for the Koganecho artist residency; here was a piece bought from a cheap kimono shop by the side of the road, a shop he wouldn’t have found if his Japanese artist friend did not point him in that direction. It’s intentional, at the same time incidental. What roads and friendships and serendipities are open to a mobile body? New World Trash seems to register this, too. Collages from K-Pop merchandise are products, discards, ephemera—traces of frenetic global circulation. There’s contingency in the juxtaposition—K-Pop, kimono, pusô—and I can’t get past thinking of them as traces, signifiers not only of place but of bodies passing through.

——————————————————————————————-6 December 2025, Lk Rigor

In transition between BKK → MNL, GMT+7 → +8, presently 1:10-58 PM on my laptop on airplane mode

I am writing this as I fly across skies and seas, already a few days late from our initially agreed upon deadline. This dance with time and distance is – even though out of beat with our orchestrated tempo – is within the beat of how I’ve been thinking about temporality and space in general. How life is both short and long, like Schrodinger’s cat exists in two states, only ‘settling’ temporarily when viewed from a relative position. How separation (from a place or a person, or both) allows a breathing room for growth.

Some potted plants need to be re-homed so that they can accommodate the expansion of the roots.

As I recall our conversation a week ago, I see how the passage of time is interweaved within the works that Koki developed during his six-month residency (broken into two three months) in Koganecho. Along with the inevitable increment of seconds is the accumulation of commonplace objects: discarded luggage wheels, masking tapes used to frame work-in-progress artworks, fabrics and threads from kimono shops, booklets included in CDs by K-Pop groups. Happening in parallel is the inherent periods in producing ceramic-based works from sourcing the material, preparing, shaping, firing, cooling.

Waiting, making, waiting, making, waiting. Not happening in a linear manner as you read it, but simultaneously, in different planes, timelines. And after this, they all end in one point in space and time; a material embodiment of such concepts.

2:33 pm

Something I found while cleaning my Google Keep as a way to kill time:

“I keep reinventing myself because art is long, life is short.” – Santiago Bose

——————————————————————————10 December 2025, Pristine de Leon

10:00 am, Manila, in bed

I write this after I’ve finished submitting my students’ grades. Teaching is a rigorous labor of care that grounds you deeply in one place, period, semester. Lk, sometimes I would like to be on that plane, too, choosing mobility rather than rootedness. I would like to be the potted plant that grew legs, decided it did not need soil, and so it became another creature altogether. Mobility has become a feature, even a function, of contemporary art and global capital. But who gets to leave and who gets to stay? And who gets to decide who leaves and stays?

Mobility and rootedness seem to be thematic undercurrents running through this show. It’s wonderful what you’ve said about temporality, how different modes of making thrive on different rhythms. What we may associate with ceramics is rootedness, the concentration and routine rhythms needed to immerse in materials, processes, and time. Koki began working on the ceramics when he arrived in July of 2025, as the pieces required time to dry before firing. I can imagine the slowness and I can also imagine how gratifying it must have been to make ceramics in Japan. As he had told us, he made the tea bowls using a traditional method called tezukune. The bowls aren’t shaped through a potter’s wheel; the clay is stretched and kneaded by hand. In a different way, time is stretched and pulled when he revisited a sculpture he made for an exhibit in 2021—a sculpture of hands where the dominant form resembles a chrysanthemum flower.

Some of the discards he gathered—luggage wheels, fandom merchandise—arise from the more frenetic rhythms of global mobility. At residencies, artistic engagement somehow becomes an inquiry into place, an anxious urge to connect, to have some solid grounding within a lived context of estrangement, or as you’ve said, of being uprooted and repotted.

——————————————————————————————17 December 2025, Lk Rigor

4:22 pm, home

I continued my rumination again in a state of transition. As I prepared to meet a new friend yesterday, I realized we will meet in a place where someone decided to spend the last hours of their life. And so I think of existence, how we leave traces of our existence on earth, with intention or by accident.

It still ties back to how I view this presentation as a manifestation of time, although I also agree with you Pristine on how it also captures movement/stasis. As these works were created during a residency, it’s apt to raise inquiries about the structure itself in terms of art production. It truly is a privilege to be in one, but it comes with its own challenges, especially with us coming from a third world country.

What does it mean to exist in the world now? Pondering on one’s existence is such an enormous undertaking, one that could take a lifetime to attempt to answer. Day by day, we take it piece by piece. What I appreciate about art, is how it offers alternative perspectives to inquiries such as this. In his works, I see Koki put forward the overlooked, the New World Trash, the discards that we’ve been speaking about. In this interfacing, we encounter the world differently.

In art, there are no conclusive answers, only openings.

Et quand le jour arrivé
Je retournerai au ciel
Et je returnerai à la mer
Et la mer va m’embrasser
Et me délivrer chez moi

– From “Each flower began in the palm of a hand” (2025) by Lani Maestro & Neo Maestro

And when the day comes
I will return to heaven
And I will return to the sea
And the sea will embrace me
And deliver me home

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Pristine de Leon is a Filipina art critic, educator, and researcher known for her work in contemporary Philippine art. She writes for The Philippine Star, and teaches at the Ateneo de Manila University. She focuses on space, tactility, public art, and participatory practices, and curates exhibitions, exploring art’s engagement with social issues.

Lk Rigor’s practice moves along the matrices of researching, writing, curating, and archiving. Her plane of interest spans (but is not limited to) the following: archival photographs as a tool to interrogate history, formation and activation of archives in contemporary art, curatorial play in alternative spaces, & thoughtful and experimental transmission of texts as carriers of thought.