Of Triumphs and Tributes

Representative Mikee Romero and his wife, Sheila, started the year with gratitude by hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at their residence.

The gathering was also a tribute to the esteemed contemporary visual artist Rodel Tapaya, commemorating the couple's recent acquisition of his 2012 artwork, Multi-petalled Beauty, considered his largest piece ever auctioned.

"This work explores various narratives from folktales, legends, myths, science, history, and politics that comment on humanity's natural desire for youth, power, and beauty," the artist says.

Tapaya is one of the most important contemporary painters in Southeast Asia. His works form thought-provoking instantiations of myth and contemporary existence as beastly incarnations of gods beside factories and television antennae and are both a retelling and a continuation of his milieu's oral and pictorial tradition.