A song plays from another room, 2021, Lesley-Anne Cao’s most recent installation at mo_ in Taguig, Metro Manila, stages itself as a duet between the intimate interior space of the exhibition and the external forces that spill into it. This framing guides our viewing experience: Through its reference to an outside presence, the title signals an expanded exhibition field, while still establishing its parameters as discrete and bounded.

In the darkened room, we hear the pensive “A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams,” a forty-three-minute score composed especially for the installation by Itos Ledesma. Arranged across the floor are six water tanks and two books made of glass. The choice of material dramatizes the porous condition alluded to in the installation’s title, as light pools in the water and is dispersed by the glass. The tanks are those typically used for domesticated living creatures, but here the artist has populated them with six hand-bound “books” of photographs. Most are printed on waterproof paper and ink, but one comprises scraps of found ponkan plastic wrappers, which gently undulate like seaweed.

The photographs fix moments of mundane life: unmade beds, doors to empty rooms, views of vegetation from windows. Where the boundedness of each tank conjures a sense of enclosure, the photographs offer portals. The calmness of each image is frequently interrupted by refracted light.

Cao’s works thrive on these kinds of thwarted transmissions—music drifting through walls, light passing through water and glass. A song plays from another room dismantles the discrete boundaries of spaces, revealing the distinctions of interior and exterior to be but fictive provocations.

— Carlos Quijon Jr.