Unmasked (Masks and Figures) Teak Wood Religious Sculpture

This assemblage stages a quiet theatre of identities—masks suspended like remembered faces—where rough timber grain and rusted wire become a skin for shifting personae. Warm, lantern-like illumination pulls the eye across a vertical procession of carved expressions, while the surrounding ephemera—signboards, paper scraps, devotional figures—anchors the work in a lived streetscape of commerce, ritual, and rumor. The composition oscillates between playfulness and unease: bright pigments animate the masks, yet their fixed smiles feel like social armor, suggesting how public life demands performance even as private selfhood frays at the edges. In its layered materials, the piece reads as an archaeology of belonging, collecting fragments of faith and everyday signage into a single, haunting register of memory.