Using her own body as a point of reference, Filipina artist Mia Antonio explores femininity, autonomy, and the quiet freedom of inhabiting one’s own skin.

For Filipina artist Mia Antonio, the answer takes shape in wood. Her latest collection, Embodied Territories - New Works by Mia Antonio, transforms the female form into something at once intimate and expansive, drawing from the body’s curves and contours to create scenes of solitude, leisure, and femininity.
Presented on September 16, at the lounge of Medusa at the Palace, the collection brings together Antonio’s layered wood, laser-cut, and hand-painted works.&nbsp;
Natural wood grain follows the curves of each figure, while carved details and ornamental elements extend beyond the body, giving the pieces a sense of movement and depth.
For Antonio, the series started with looking inward. “I was curious about how to explore my body,” she tells L’Officiel Philippines.
Using her own body as a reference, she began translating the female form into wood. The figures are recognizable without becoming literal, their faces often obscured by ornament so that they feel less like portraits and more like vessels for different experiences of being a woman.
“It’s not just about nudity or sexuality,” she says.

“This is why I titled it Embodied Territories because I see the body as our territory. When I take off my clothes, I don’t just see a body, I see architecture, I see landscape, and I see strength.”
That sensibility carries through the collection’s quieter moments. The women in Antonio’s work drink wine, rest, play, and linger. They are absorbed in their own worlds, unhurried and unconcerned with being observed.
The female body is so often presented through how it looks to someone else, shaped by expectations around beauty, femininity, and desirability. Antonio gives hers room to simply exist.

Game of Her Own

Private Ritual

In Game of Her Own, Antonio turns her own body into a playful study of personal territory. Layers of wood trace the figure, while carved and painted details bring in hints of ritual, leisure, and femininity.&nbsp;
In Private Ritual, a woman sits beside a candlelit table with a glass of wine. She is alone, but not lonely. The scene makes solitude feel intentional, even luxurious.

Pour Toujours

Quiet Bloom

Pour Toujours carries that feeling of lingering, capturing the pleasure of moving at one’s own pace. Beside it, Quiet Bloom surrounds a seated figure with ornamental forms and burgundy details, bringing femininity, concealment, and identity into the composition.

Still In Play

Coastline

The collection also knows how to have fun. In Still In Play, a woman sits with a golf club and a glass of wine, turning familiar symbols of leisure into a portrait of ease and personal freedom.
Coastline takes that ease somewhere softer. A reclining figure stretches across the composition, with the wood grain following the curves of her body like waves along a shore. The body becomes less a fixed shape than a landscape in motion.
It is a continuation of a practice Antonio has been developing for years. Her earlier wood-based works and presentations in California and New York laid the groundwork for what would eventually become Embodied Territories.

At ArtExpo New York 2026, her work was presented by Perseus Gallery at Pier 36 in Manhattan, bringing her practice to an international audience and marking another chapter in her journey as a Filipina artist.
For Antonio, being a Filipina artist is part of that journey, too. Her pieces have moved between California, New York, and Manila, carrying a practice that remains deeply personal even as it reaches new audiences. Embodied Territories allow that personal starting point to open outward.
Across Embodied Territories, the body becomes a landscape. It can be adorned or unguarded, alone or surrounded, still or in motion.&nbsp;
These are ordinary moments, but there is something quietly radical in the way Antonio lets them exist without asking the female body to answer to anything beyond its own presence.

In Antonio’s world, the body is not a boundary to be defined by someone else. It is architecture, landscape, memory, pleasure, privacy, strength.&nbsp;
A territory that does not need to explain itself, and belongs, above all, to the woman who inhabits it.

Mia Antonio’s Embodied Territories Reimagines the Female Form

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