Becoming | Unbecoming at Galerie Raphael at Azuela Cove will run until September 25, 2025.
Exhibit notes.
In Bing Taojo's hands, flowers are never permanent. They wither and bloom again,caught between grasps of blossoming and fading, fragile yet resilient, fleeting yet radiant. Each painting in her exhibit holds the trace of impermanence and the quiet force of renewal.
Becoming | Unbecoming represents vessels of time itself, as her floral motif unfolds in a state of emergence and departure. At one moment, the blooms are thriving, pushing outward with radiant vitality. At another, they seem to wilt, melting into earth tones or shadowed washes that signal ephemerality.
Taojo uses this ebb and flow to explore how life is constantly in flux. Her brushwork gathers such energy into dense, textured strokes, only to release it into softer, more serene passages of calm and repose.
Color is the central force of her practice saturated reds and golds flare against quiet grounds, suggesting resilience; muted violets and greys drift into stillness, hinting at vulnerability. Rather than rendering flowers as subjects, Taojo allows them to become thresholds: points where memory and sensation overlap, where endings give rise to beginnings. The petals in some paintings nearly vanish into abstraction, as though surrendering form to gesture. In others, the blossoms insist on themselves, luminous against the tide of decay.
About the artist.
Caroline "Bing" Galang Taojo is an artist whose abstract-impressionist practice turns to flowers as vessels of fragility, impermanence, and renewal. She first discovered painting in the 1980s, working with textile paints and bamboo brushes while raising four children and later serving as CFO of the family business. Though she set aside her art for many years, she returned with a sharper sense of color and form, drawing from mentors and a restless curiosity that never left her. In 2023, her first solo exhibition, Essence of Being at the Tagum Historical & Cultural Center, marked her 60th year with works that affirmed a voice distinctly her own; the following year, she debuted in Manila at Salcedo Auctions' Masterpieces in Motion, painting directly onto Michael Cinco's couture gowns and presenting her luminous canvases.
Caroline's brush strokes embody her outlook on life, where each experience, whether bold or subtle, significant or minor, contributes to the masterpiece of our existence, with imperfections adding character and authenticity.
While she and her husband Noe remain active in ventures such as Hexat Mining Corporation and Napa de Oro, a Napa Valley wine brand, it is painting that remains her most personal ground and most enduring form of creative expression.
As a whole, these works embody the paradox of becoming and unbecoming. They remind us that life is never singular but layered, never still but always moving toward transformation. Bing Taojo's art resides in that in-between space, where fragility becomes strength, and impermanence opens into possibility.
Seen on opening night:
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| Jack Teotico, Rossana Tuason-Fores, the artist Bing Taojo, Ching Cruz & Sylvia Lorenzana |
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| The artisti's husband, Butchoy Taojo with Philip Cruz |
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| Denise Kaur, Cresencia Galang, & Raman Singh |
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| Harry Morris, Iñigo Taojo & Andreas Taojo copy |
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| Len Bosquit, Tess Cruz & Aaron Cruz |
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| Katrina Taojo & Joyce Taojo |
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| Rose Alcantara & Robbie Aguilar |
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| Chari Gavino & Chin-chin Talaver |
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| Christian Pasumbal, Jennifer Floirendo, Emil Sitjar, Otoy Mercado & Kenneth Ong |
