Why the island nation better known for all things high-tech and high-rise should be a stop in every art lover’s travel map
Henry Moore's "Reclining Figure"
Find it at OCBC Centre, along Canal Road
Image courtesy of The National Arts Council
In this installment of Art@Singapore:
"In The Public Eye"
One of Asia’s most walking-friendly cities, Singapore offers something compelling to behold at almost every turn
A feature on selected sculptures among the over 200 public art found around Singapore's urban landscape.
"Art-Shopping in Singapore"
Three boutique art galleries show you why a piece of Philippine art could be your best purchase
"Filipino Time"
Two major shows in Singapore give an international audience a sweeping view of Philippine art through the ages
By Regina P. Baxter
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BACKThe Ayala Museum, in the country’s most fashionable and ritziest enclave, houses what is perhaps our greatest national treasure—a sense of our own identity.
Text by Jewel Chuansu Photographs by Stan Ong
Image: An installation in the Fernando Zobel exhibit evokes the artist’s pristine and organized studio.
In the 1950s, Filipino abstract painter Fernando Zobel envisioned building an art museum in the Philippines. He believed in the talents of his contemporaries and collected their works while they were still starting in their careers. However, plans for a museum failed to materialize. He consequently donated over 200 artworks to the Ateneo de Manila University and these formed the core collection of the Ateneo Art Gallery. At the beginning of the 1960s, he left the country to live in Spain permanently.
The Ayala Museum-a museum of fine arts and history-became a reality in 1974 under the patronage of the Ayala Foundation, Inc. The first Ayala Museum building, located on Makati Avenue, featured 60 dioramas chronicling local history, as well as finely crafted models of maritime vessels. These are still found in the museum’s current building. After a change of address and extensive renovation, the new Ayala Museum was inaugurated in 2004, in celebration of Ayala Corporation’s 170th anniversary. The museum is presently situated at the corner of De La Rosa street, nestled within the Greenbelt mall complex. On the way there, you’ll pass through restaurants, retail shops, and the lovely Greenbelt Park with its lush gardens and koi ponds.
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BACKThe original leading lady of Philippine art, Purita Kalaw Ledesma, was a formidable and tireless force that helped steer the course of the country’s visual arts, both as a dedicated patron and a passionate chronicler.
TEXT BY TARA FT SERING
Victorio Edades’s “Portrait of Purita Kalaw Ledesma”, 1977, 95.5 x 80.3 cm, oil on canvas
READ MOREGrowing up, Ada Mabilangan lived among the superstars of Philippine art—a Napoleon Abueva installation in the garden, a Vicente Manansala painting presiding over the dining room, an Arturo Luz on one wall along the hallway of the family home. And when, as a student and editor of the Assumption College’s school paper, she needed a cover image, she asked for her mother’s help, and her mother in turn called on yet another National Artist and close friend to do the job: Cesar Legaspi.
Mabilangan’s mother, the legendary Purita Kalaw Ledesma, was no ordinary art collector, and the collection she had built over several decades no ordinary selection of fine art. For starters, it was Kalaw Ledesma who, in 1947, tracked down former students of the University of the Philippines’ School of Fine Arts (later to be called the College of Fine Arts) to organize an alumni association of professional artists. Her dogged efforts, along with those of 12 other fellow artists and writers, led to the eventual creation of the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) in 1948 of which she was elected its founding president. She would continue to serve it in the same capacity for four decades.
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BACKIn the lakeshore town Angono, an area famously steeped in art, a group of young artists known as the Neo-Angono Artists Collective buck artistic tradition in order to keep it alive.
TEXT BY Katrina Stuart Santiago PHOTOGRAPHS BY Nicky sering
Jose Mata uses the pointillism technique in painting.
READ MOREThe mention of the town of Angono necessarily brings back memories of childhood school field trips to museums and family homes filled with paintings, not to mention all the trinkets bought as souvenirs to remember the art by—a keychain from this home, some postcards from this one—all to be forgotten as soon as I returned to the city. What does stick about Angono though, other than its proximity to the urban center (30 kms east of Manila, or a good hour’s drive from the Makati Business District), is how art exists in the town, and how it is the Art Capital of the Philippines for a reason.
Angono has traditionally been known as the home of well-known Filipino artists, particularly of three names: musician and lyricist Lucio San Pedro, painter Carlos “Botong” Francisco (both National Artists), and Jose Blanco, the late patriarch of a whole family of painters. Botong was at the center of the artistry in Angono, he whose folk motifs in murals made the town famous, and he whose work became inspiration for many Angono artists after him.
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BACKA selection of rare paintings provide a panoramic view of the various stages of Juvenal Sanso’s lifework.
TEXT BY REUBEN RAMAS CAÑETE PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICKY SERING
“Recalling the Sea”, 1995, 11.75 x 17.5 inches, acrylic on paper
READ MOREArt is often the result of the artist’s negotiation between his or her life experiences, the occurrences of the society around them, and the political and economic forces that shape the circumstances by which one lives. Aesthetics, on the other hand, takes all these experiences and conditions of art making, and infuses them with a practisanal purpose that is derived from the artist’s vision of what kind of identity or set of enduring concepts he or she would like to present to their audience, one that can be linked to certain traditions and movements exclusively found in art. Certain artists would often produce bodies of work that have been consistent since their student days to their senior years, based perhaps on a similar stability that one has found as a productive member in society. In the case of other artists, however, the drive to produce consistently has also evolved from distinct conditions that occurred as a consequence of external changes that impacted heavily on their own lives and careers.
In the case of Juvenal Sanso (b. 1929), the personal experiences he felt, firstly as a transplanted Catalan in Manila resulting from his family’s departure from Spain just before the Civil War started, and then as a victim of the 1945 Battle of Manila, and finally struggling to survive in the immediate postwar years as a bus conductor, reshaped and transformed his outlook distinctly from 1947 to 1956. These negative and traumatic experiences in his early years resulted in a body of work that, seen from his early student days as in-house student of Alejandro Celis, and then enrolling at the UP School of Fine Arts from 1947 to 1951, bore the effects of this trauma in a phase of his artistic life known as the “Black Period.”
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BACKAuction specialists and other art experts weigh in on the future of Philippine art in the global scene.
TEXT BY REGINA P. BAXTER
Detail of Vicente Manansala’s “Machinery”, 1962, 32.5 x 70 inches, oil on canvas
READ MOREArt from the Philippines has taken a foothold in the Southeast Asian art auctions of big auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Collectors seek its distinct style and inventive quality, and there has been a steady increase in its international appeal, recognition and appreciation. Philippine art ranges from the modern to the contemporary, encompassing a diversity of styles and expressions, and it is accessible at different price levels.
Even before auction houses were operating in Singapore or Hong Kong, Filipino artworks were already included in auctions in other parts of the world. Examples of which are Felix Martinez’s “Street Vendors in Manila’ (sold for US$ 66,467 at Christie’s, London in July 1993), Fernando Zobel’s “Celina” (sold for US$ 20,983 at Sotheby’s, Madrid in April 1990) and Fernando Cueto Amorsolo’s “Returning from the Catch, Manila Bay” (sold for US$ 5,500 at Butterfields Auction in November 1987).
Amongst the first Filipino artists to be included in a Christie’s Southeast Asian art auction is Fernando Cueto Amorsolo, whose painting entitled “The Market Place” was sold at Christie’s in March 1996 for S$ 245,750. This first price set a pattern for other works by Amorsolo which were sold in the next three seasons. During the first half of the 20th century, artworks sold in auctions were sourced mainly from second generation original collectors who were mostly American and European expatriates living in the Philippines. The theme of most paintings would be of the classical pastoral scenes of the Philippines.
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BACKOn its first-year anniversary as a luxury island resort, Bellarocca, or ‘beautiful rock’, in Marinduque fashions itself as muse calling on the country’s celebrated artists.
READ MOREIt’s usually the other way around—an artist goes off in search of a muse. But Bellarocca Island Resort and Spa, whose concept as a resort is hinged on the idea of an exclusive, private getaway where guests can luxuriate away from the holiday crowds, is tucked away in a somewhat strategically secret spot southwest of Marinduque. It sits on a tiny island off the coast, ironically named by locals as Elephant Island in reference to its shape—the upper-half of a submerged elephant ambling in solitude in the waters of the Sibuyan Sea. In other words, if you’re not really looking for it, there’s little chance you’ll stumble upon it en route to some place else.
To get there requires a quick 30-minute plane ride from Manila, followed by a 45-minute drive along a two-lane highway that largely traces the coast and allows a preview into the quiet and languorous life of Marinduque’s small and sleepy villages, followed by a two- to three-minute zip across the sea aboard a state-of-the-art rubber boat until you dock at the marina. The whole tiny rock island is Bellarocca resort, sitting in the shadow of Mount Malindig across the channel in the Marinduque mainland.
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BACKArtists and art lovers stage a fundraising auction to turn works of art into homes
TEXT BY TARA FT SERING
Image courtesy of Julius Babao
READ MOREWhen art functions in the way it did during the fundraiser auction Art 2 Heart, it’s nothing less than sublime. In late September 2009, the floodwaters unleashed by Typhoon Ondoy (international codename Ketsana) drowned entire sections of Luzon, and most of Metro Manila, causing unprecedented damage to property and human lives. A week later, Typhoon Pepeng (international codename Parma) struck in a similarly devastating fashion, submerging provinces in the north, claiming both lives and livelihoods.
Fast-forward to the middle of December: a light, late afternoon shower that fell gently over the city may have tempered the holiday spirit of a metropolis still reeling from the unseasonal torrential rains just two months before, but the spirit of volunteerism was alive and well, and building into a frenzy, in a fourth-floor auditorium of the Ateneo Professional Schools building in Rockwell. Here were gathered artists and their artworks, as well as art lovers and collectors, for a fundraising auction dubbed Art 2 Heart, organized specifically for the victims of Typhoon Ondoy. The evening’s target: to raise PHP 3 Million from the sale of donated artworks with which to build homes for 30 families for the Gawad Kalinga Art 2 Heart village in Sitio Amparo, Caloocan City. Gawad Kalinga is working with over 2,000 communities, building homes and transforming slums into peaceful and productive communities.
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© Contemporary Art Philippines 2010
