Sirawit Chatu and Audrey Lukban examine how colonial image systems persist beyond the formal end of empire. Their works focus on structure: how ideology operates through aesthetics, display, and repetition.

Chatu reworks scenes from The King and I, the Hollywood musical that staged a fictional Siam for Western audiences. His paintings return to the Orientalist construction identified by Edward Said in Orientalism: the East rendered as spectacle, the West positioned as civilising authority. Executed in acrylic — a synthetic, industrial medium — the works underscore the manufactured quality of stereotype and its capacity for mass circulation. By translating film stills into slow, manual paintings, Chatu isolates moments that once functioned as seamless cinematic narrative.The ideological script becomes visible: a clear division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with authority performed as the civilised and the ‘other’ rendered as lacking.

Cinema operates as what Louis Althusser describes as an ideological apparatus — a system that produces subjects through interpellation, where identification with the narrative feels natural and convincing. In The King and I, Western rationality is affirmed through narrative pleasure. Through repetition and painterly delay, Chatu exposes how these positions are constructed and maintained at the level of the image.

Lukban addresses ideology through structures of display, examining Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines as a mediating centre of authority. Her carved wooden frames draw from ecclesiastical and museum formats encountered during her research in Madrid’s museums and churches — visual systems that were also established in the Philippines under Spanish rule and that defined what was sacred, civilised, and worthy of preservation. By recreating these ornate structures and inserting Philippine archival images, she returns Philippine history to the very frameworks that once marginalised it. The frame becomes both subject and structure: not merely a border, but a device that organises and authorises meaning.

Here the boomerang effect becomes evident. Colonial methods of classification and display do not disappear with political independence; they are internalised. The same framing devices once used to discipline colonial subjects are absorbed into national institutions and systems of cultural value. Authority is reproduced through inherited formats. The border continues to organise perception.

Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry clarifies this persistence: ideology embeds itself in aesthetic form, presenting hierarchy as order and tradition. Lukban’s frames make this embedding visible. They demonstrate how power resides less in individual images than in the structures that contain, legitimise, and circulate them.

Together, Chatu and Lukban trace colonial power at the level of representation and infrastructure. Empire survives in materials, formats, and habits of seeing. Their works render these mechanisms legible, foregrounding how ideology endures through repetition, framing, and institutional memory.