By Siddharta Perez

10 Filipino Artists displays their work to the 25th Asian International Art Exhibition in Ulaanbaatar MONGOLIA last September 15 to November 21, 2010.

These artists are Maria Victoria ‘Ambie’ Abaño, Virgillio ‘Pandy’ Aviado, BenCab, Benjamin Torrado Cabrera, Rosscapili, Rick Hernandez, Nap Jamir II, Wawi Navarroza, Ramon Orlina, and Susan Fetalvero-Roces.

The themes of Asian International Art Exhibition always have the currents of unifying over the call to showcase diversity among the countries represented. Filipino artists naturally tend towards paradoxes of this kind – having been accustomed to many contradictions in their culture - playing with them at such ease or, in the act of brushing them aside, fulfilling them. Likewise, as artists, there is great liberty after all in drawing connections even to the most asymptotic of associations.

For this year, the group of artists from the Philippines again displays a stark individuality in thought and practice from one another. The collection of works range from portraits to abstractions, photomedia to engraving. On the same grain of gauging this diversity, we can observe that the participating artists’ inclinations are towards personal introspection, re-examination of medium to cultural mapping. And yet, they share a way of hindsight and formulation of a society of what W. J. Thomas Mitchell, a professor and writer on visual culture explains as “complex of utopian fantasy and everyday reality.”

Ross Capili introduces us to the participating Filipino artists in a work that displays his fluency in making use of mediums. A painter and photographer, Capili merges where these two practices are formally attuned to – portraiture as subject of photography and strokes that are always predicative of painting. A common introduction that goes, “Glad to finally have a face to a name” is signaled in Coexistence #38 as he introduces this collective with a majority of who have been regular participants to AIAE. Likewise, the work solidifies these individuals with one another – that although separate are their cultural contributions and significance, it is also through camaraderie are they sustained. The characteristic of camaraderie comes under the umbrella of what is locally dubbed as “pakikipagkapwa-tao” - a Filipino trait focusing on all levels of human interaction and translated as neighbourliness.

If we sense this unity and support among the participating Filipino artists in Capili’s work, printmaker Benjie Cabrera’s work, Convergence casts a bigger net of interconnectivity. Cabrera points to “pakikipagkapwa-tao” inclusive of the Filipino collective and beyond it. Made out of two semi-penetrable layers, this work presents an act of linking a wider demographic. Convergence is reminiscent of Cabrera’s exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines titled Multiple Scrolls of Thought wherein he makes use of impenetrable layers.

On the first layer of fabric of Convergence, the connected red lines are the residues of an attempt to connect visually the countries participating in AIAE prevailed by a reversed-engraved lotus flower. In the same vein, this symbol inherently holds the ideas of enlightenment and interconnectivity – both of which are tautological and not separated from each other. Under this layer we are confronted with the geography of Mongolia, AIAE’s host country and two women – one obviously a local aborigine and the other a colonized native. Easily can we associate such reference to the question of national identity but in reality, as Cabrera maps and interconnects, these icons actually ground the previous general symbols in presenting that the indigenous of every country are alike, that all our roots share one link as we gradually become historically alike in the event of colonization.

The aspect of mapping out the past is also present in Rick Hernandez’s oeuvre. What will emerge from an overview of his work are his poetic assemblages of found and obviously old materials that are juxtaposed with other popular objects and texts. By the same principle, he creates The Relation of Things with a religious banner, references from dated books in dentistry, poultry and geometry books, tarot card icons, and images from his neighbor’s photo album. The thrust of The Relation of Things is to resolve the tension of filtering the past, whether or not the act of excavating for what was forgotten in the first place is necessary in paving the present to move forward. If Cabrera reductively points to a singularity through a common history, Hernandez ignites the survey of the past by presenting metonymic fragments of it.

If a past that is somewhat obscured emerges from Hernandez’s work, Ramon Orlina’s Temples are of subjects that are presently treated as historic monuments. Self-referential is the title to places that are still existent, with their past engrained into their structures. Orlina, known for his contribution to sculpture in Philippine art, produces a giclée print on canvas for this year’s AIAE. The subject of his works are motivated by him being presently based in Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand, and perhaps has earned his interest because of their sculptural presence. He manipulates the images of the actual temples, by seizing their components and rearranging them. Likewise, the element of illumination in Temples is akin to the reflective nature of his glass sculptures as they capture light that ricochets off them.

In the self-reflexive re-examination of the photographic medium, Wawi Navarroza focuses how the bouncing off of light is essential to making an image. A female sitter holds up a board in With Every Light in facilitating the making of her portrait. Conventionally, this reflector is cropped in the final image. Navarroza chooses to portray this act to bring attention to one of the essential elements to the practice. After, as she recalls a lesson from a teacher, “What we record in camera are not merely appearances but ‘emanations’ - energy, heat, light.” This process of catching light extends to the environment in a way that the expanse of sea and sky acts as a big reflector to the main source of light, the sun.

Interconnectivity among the elements of nature, or the environment, and man (but in these cases, woman) can also be seen in One, an oil painting with woodcut print work of Ambie Abaño. Aside from Abaño’s repute in the mastery of printmaking – exhibiting widely and conducting workshops as well as presiding over the Philippine Association of Printmakers – she is also known for her striking portraits. She is adept in marrying the provocative charge of woodcut to external manifestations in the face of an internal state. She has managed to portray the poignancy of a gaze to a split-second delight. For One, Abaño has captured a woman in intense introspection, a climactic serenity that is naturally associated with an epiphanous state. The background in oil of the sky and landscape, on the other hand, is made possible because of the woodcut, rendering a coinciding of two layers. The background provides the setting to the woman’s state of consciousness – applying to a union to nature depicted by the sky and land. Likewise, this frozen ecstasy depicts the very event of acceptance and giving of man to his environment.

The subject of woman is also not far from National Artist Bencab’s oeuvre. In Totem Forms, he portrays a mass of women in his distinct painting style. As much as he is usually inclined towards social realists’ contexts of daily hardships, Totem Forms depicts women with expressions that do not display a shred of vulnerability. Instead, they possess expressions of cheery hopefulness at the same time invites an optimistic “come-what-may” aura. Another element that recurs in this work is the veil from his Larawan series to the bandanas on peasant women. As much as it adds to the mysterious dimension attributed to women, the veils on the women further constructs the monumental form of the totem.

In relation to figurative works, a different structure is inherent to non-representational ones. Master printmaker and painter Virgillio “Pandy” Aviado presents an amorphous form in D’Krasm floating in a bordered sea of sky blue. From the start, Aviado opens the reading of the abstract body with barely decipherable title. In a way D’Krasm acts as a code to this Rorschach, and likewise a password of an islander absorbing the parameters of his space. If it is form that precedes a figurative work, it is usually colour in a non-representational one. The significance of this piece lies in Aviado’s arrangement of hues into a portal of healing.

Cinematographer and director Nap Jamir II is concerned with quite the opposite of healing, or perhaps is drawn to what needs to be healed in the first place. Decay #1 is a montage, painted in different tonalities, of a torso with the image of a dead fish superimposed on it. Jamir has a penchant for deconstructing images when it comes to his two-dimensional works. Aside from that, destruction to a degree is a resounding subject. A pivotal series is Self-portrait, for the 13 Artists Award exhibition in the 70s, composed of images of self-mutilative acts. The way to deconstruction and pairing of images are seamlessly attained perhaps because Jamir departs from and makes use the form of storyboards, framing scenes and casting shadows that make flat images become three-dimensional in appearance. Decay #1 points to a universal disintegration of man and nature, that their disintegration is simultaneous as matched by their innate union.

The best conclusion to the collective from the Philippines is the utopian undercurrent in Susan Fetalvero-Roces’ Passage to Eden. Interweaving handmade cotton elements into the abstract foliage, Roces provides both an entry point and actual landscape of an ideal plane. Passage to Eden, in its depth and composition is akin to Prayers I Say Everyday, her Philip Morris Art Competition entry in 1999. Her lifework, with this present one being part and parcel to it, focuses a lot on what is right and strives to drive at an inspiration towards uplifting lives. In a way, it has the undertones of appreciation and thanksgiving, both values necessary in protection and preservation of what we possess.

The group of Filipino artists constructs essential characteristics of the trends that govern their practice within their cultural root. At the same time, the nature of their works is projected beyond their spheres as they connect the dots to their neighbouring nations.