One art

I walked into the gallery that warm summer day in Manila expecting to encounter the usual group of Bohemian-looking artists from abroad. But I was surprised to be met by eight young art and design students from a state university in Brunei, wearing tour uniforms of red polo shirts and veils for the five girls in the group.

The only hint that they were artists was the drawings some of them did on their shirt. One of the girls  signed her drawings with Frida Kahlo. She confessed later she was a  big fan of the radical Mexican surrealist painter.

“So how did you discover Frida Kahlo?” I asked her.

“I saw the movie,” she said. Later, I would find her on Facebook under the name “Kahlos” with a Photoshopped picture of her on the cover of Elle magazine—without the veil.

The Bruneian artists were in Manila for an art tour. With local guides from a tour company, they went around galleries and museums and met with artists in Manila and as far as Angono.

“Too many malls,” they said about Manila. “It seems there’s one in every corner.”

“We shop too much. That’s why we are poor,” I said.

Through Facebook, they had earlier arranged with  Cebuano artist Celso Pepito to spend a day making art with Filipino artists. Celso selected the artists and asked the help of ECCA gallery in Pasig to host the collaborative art project on Philippine Independence Day.

I was chosen to be part of the Filipino team, along with Celso’s artist-wife Fe Madrid and Manila-based artists Joel Cristobal, Florence Cinco and Adler Llagas. So we came to Manila on Freedom Day and made a mural together with our new artist-friends from the neighboring country.

The collaborative painting is supposed to reflect the theme of unity of our two countries or what we have in common. The Bruneians came with a prepared study based on a patriotic poem by the father of the same artist who loves Frida Kahlo.

The pencil sketch shows a landmark mosque, a person wearing a traditional cone-shaped hat (like our salakot), and the pitcher plant, which must be a national flower in the country rich in oil and natural gas. Brunei is a small country with a population of only about 400,000. The government provides for basic needs like housing, health care, education, and people don’t even have to pay taxes.

“Considering you have small population, is there a good chance your king will show up during your next exhibit?” I asked.

“That’s quite possible if you invite him,” said young Frida in a veil.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll invite him on Facebook.”

Unlike in the Philippines, you don’t need a social network to get in touch with all the artists in the country. In Brunei, the art community is so small they practically “know each other like one big family.” The young artists belong to a national organization and they respect their elders, whom they look up to as mentors. That explained why they were so polite and courteous, traits less seen among our more Bohemian young artists.

As soon as the big canvas arrived, we gave the Brunei group the middle part and joined them later with our own images. Soon, the patriotic symbols of Brunei would be surrounded with a cubist boy waving the Philippine flag, farmers planting rice in Amorsoloesque style, a dead tree perhaps symbolizing the global problem of the environment, and my own depictions of emaciated and naked bodies standing on globes floating in space.

“What are they?” one of the Bruneians asked, baffled by my images that are derived from the recent series of paintings I am making for an exhibit that—like the recent Venice Biennale—has for its theme “Light.”

“They are reminders that we have always been a lonely planet,” I said. “We may live in a society but we remain stuck in our own little worlds.”

What I really wanted to say was that the androgynous naked figures are meant to show the primordial state of humanity, stripped bare of cultural trappings. As in the emaciated and faceless figures of Alberto Giacometti, this nakedness symbolizes our oneness, our pure selves.

And yet the distance between the globes suggest a deep longing for a spiritual connection that may never be consummated in the present life.

This is my interpretation of the theme of unity or the state of being satu, the Malay word for “one.”

I came to learn the Malay word in a recent art tourism program Celso and I joined in Malaysia. The country’s recent national slogan is “Satu Malaysia” or “One Malaysia” and it’s already ubiquitous in the multicultural nation: sang on TV, printed on billboards, stickers, and even bus tickets.

Ultimately, the true state of being satu transcends all appearances. Or perhaps, as in human relationships, it can never be fully consummated. We can only express our aspiration in art or seni in Bahasa (sining in Tagalog).

Still, I told our artist friends from Brunei that our big painting should be called “Satu Seni” or one art.