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Martin de Mesa
a.k.a. BOHOVEE

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I am a Filipino interdisciplinary artist working with performance, time-based media, and drawing. At the center of my practice is BOHOVEE—an evolving persona that investigates objectification, ritual, and transformation.

Influenced by drag yet not confined to it, BOHOVEE operates through what I describe as SHE-MAN-IC RITUALS: performative encounters where the boundary between artist and audience dissolves. The audience is not passive—they are implicated, activated, and entangled in the work. Collaboration becomes reciprocal, unstable, and intimate.

BOHOVEE manifests as an audacious, seductive queer enchantress, shifting across multiple forms, costumes, and presences. These iterations assert both vulnerability and authority, constructing a performative language rooted in gaze, tension, and provocation. Seduction in my work functions not only as erotic display but also as a strategy of access—disarming, unsettling, and drawing viewers into psychological and embodied participation.

Language operates as both structure and disruption. Through chants, incantations, and pop-inflected jingles, BOHOVEE navigates humor, discomfort, tenderness, and opacity. These elements resist coherence, inviting audiences into states of uncertainty where meaning is felt as much as it is understood.

Collaboration extends to musicians and sound artists, shaping immersive environments that heighten the ritual dimension of the performances. Queer desire is a central force in my practice—foregrounded, performed, and reconfigured as both subject and method.

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This inquiry continues in Muses of Bohovee, an ongoing project involving collaborations with male muses born from direct exchange. Through photography, video, and drawing, these interactions explore intimacy, projection, and the politics of looking. The resulting works—performative videos, collages, mixed-media altars, and pastel drawings—form an expanding archive where desire, authorship, and representation remain in flux.