Rodel Tapaya: Urban Labyrinth

Rodel Tapaya: Urban Labyrinth was a 2018 exhibition at Manila’s Ayala Museum that brought together ten new paintings in which Tapaya turns the city’s sprawl into a modern folktale. Shanties, markets, and billboards collide with aswang and with fables like The Monkey and the Turtle , making migration, greed, and survival feel like shared myths rather than private news. Within the museum’s wider work of shaping Philippine memory, the show framed Manila as a maze where old stories still name contemporary fears and hopes.