ArtFairPH Find: This Stainless Steel-Wrapped Chair Costs Half a Million Pesos

In every iteration of Art Fair Philippines, from its days at The Link to its current space at Circuit Makati, a few artworks would catch your attention for how they look, what they convey, and how much they cost.

In 2020, it was Manny Montelibano's "Dukot Survival," which was basically a 90,000-peso worth of kaning tutong encased in glass—a metaphor for "the disappearance of a society, the fading values, and the vanishing traditions." In 2025, it was a Swarovski-fied box of laundry detergent, Shourouk Rhaiem's "Washing Powder Surf" (roughly P520,000), which highlights how ordinary objects "can hold profound emotional and cultural significance."

For ArtFairPH 2026, a piece that made us stop for a minute is a chair on display at Silverlens (7/F, Booth 4). It is titled "homage to homage (no. 17)" by Poklong Anading, who made the installation out of a found wooden scaffold, then wrapped it in stainless steel. It measures 17.25 (h) x 15.5 (w) x 12.5 (d) inches, and is worth U.S. $10,000 (roughly P590,000). The half-a-million-peso chair is small enough to be a stool, actually.

Anading's "homage to homage" series touches on the irony of construction and rapid urbanization. In Metro Manila, especially, we often see construction sites on almost every corner: a soon-to-rise office building here, another condominium there. Foundations are built with precision and uniformity, while concrete is poured into these boxes. Glasses are placed to serve as floor-to-ceiling windows, almost encasing people inside, but also reflecting the image of the world outside, like a mirror. And yet, during construction, the scaffolding supporting the laborers is a rickety maze of salvaged wood and mismatched beams. It is a study in contradictions: calculated blueprint versus haphazard asymmetry, the expensive materials versus cheap timber, and rigid planning versus the often romanticized ingenuity.

"homage to homage (no. 17)," in particular, could very well be a stool used during construction. It's small enough to give the construction worker sitting on it some support while manually leveling cement on the floor. It's uncomfortable and unstable, but it's still able to bear the weight of a construction worker using it. It can easily be collapsed and thrown away when the skyscraper is completed. But by wrapping the piece in stainless steel, the artist hopes to make it more permanent and visible, putting more attention to the underlying conditions among workers in construction.

A previous version of the series was on display by 1335 Mabini during Art Fair Philippines 2014, then at the gallery itself in 2015. In the latter, "homage to homage" consisted of five stainless-steel scaffolding sculptures of incrementally increasing sizes, created from 2014 to 2015.

Art Fair Philippines 2026 runs until February 8, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., at Circuit Corporate Center One, Circuit Makati. Ticket prices start at P750. The reception desk is on the fifth floor.

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