Domesticating Chinese brush painting

Painting, Filipino writer and National Artist Nick Joaquin once argued, "was not one of our pre-Hispanic arts and can therefore be regarded as the most foreign to our nature; so how explain that it’s in this art, where one might say, we have no roots, that the Filipino has most excelled?"

Readers may find Joaquin’s argument about the supremacy of Philippine painting vis-a-vis other art forms disputatious. But Joaquin’s point about the acknowledged foreignness of a creative medium, such as Philippine painting, succinctly highlights an intellectual dilemma that has long animated serious discussions of Philippine culture.

Given the indisputable fact that painting as we know and practice it originated from the outside and continues to be informed by artistic currents, especially from the West, the challenge for Filipino artists has been that of claiming and making the foreign tools and forms as their own, of transforming what is foreign into Filipino.

This challenge need not be limited to the conscious choice of content, the use of specifically Filipino subject matter. It entails, as well, the creative appropriation of form, tools and techniques, materials and mediums.

It was with this challenge constantly in mind that my parents, Chinese-Filipino artists Hau Chiok and Sy Chiu Hua, sought to propagate and domesticate, over the past 25 years, Chinese brush painting in the Philippine cultural scene.

Viewed as exotic by some, and as monotonously traditional by others, Chinese watercolor painting is as seemingly alien to Filipinos as the cultural productions of the countries that comprise Southeast Asia, not withstanding the Philippines’ long history of interaction with its Asian neighbors before, during and after Spanish and American colonial rule. Looking ever to the West for inspiration, many Filipinos, artists and intellectuals among them, have tended to regard Western art forms from the East. Where some concessions are possible, acceptance of Asian art is more often than not borne on the wings of New Age fads, with their cursory, often distorted, impressions of Asian culture.

Seen from this perspective, my parents’ 31st joint exhibit, Trajectories, is not just a visual rendering of the new paths taken by the couple’s artistic development over the past few years. It is part of their ongoing project to promote Chinese brush painting as a medium for Filipino artistic experimentation.

Tracing the arc of my parents’ own experimentation are some 30 pieces of artworks, which draw on the supreme pliability of the Chinese brush and the textural possibilities of different kinds of paper to project a markedly modern and tactile representation of nature and Philippine everyday life.

Taking their cues from the philosophy of the Lingnam school of painting, which advocated the modernization of Chinese art through selective use of Western techniques and materials, my parents complement their brushwork with printing, producing textures and patterns alongside the cursive lines of the brushstroke. This is most evident in the weather-beaten nipa hut carried by a motley crew of past and present Philippine presidents through a ghostly patch of forest in "Bayanihan," and in the thatches and baskets of the carabao carts in "Pahinga."

Often enough, ink, color and paper help to shape the artistic vision. The textures enabled by them – the scratchiness of horse-brush on crumpled paper, or the mottled blotches of indigo rabbit hair-brush on washed paper – in turn, suggest possible representations, say the bark of an old tree, a grove of cacti, a rain of dragonflies, the walls of Intramuros, sprays of bougainvilleas, a school of carp, a clutch of stones.

My parents also drew on their memories of Chinatown, and on visual and tactile sensations culled from their frequent travels throughout the Philippines and abroad, for inspiration. Cocheros and tricycle drivers patiently wait for pasaheros beneath the shadow thrown by Binondo Church. A young Mangyan from Mindoro rides a carabao in a festival. An egret is nested in a blue swirl of lotus leaves. A potted plant rests on a capiz windowsill. An old cariton-pusher sits in the dark. Children laugh and call out to each other as they sit on the empty carts. Old Chinese-style tiled roofs form a protective helmet around the forehead of a mountain.

I would like to think that what makes for Filipinoness is less a ready-made set of eternal givens than a continual process born of Filipinos’ – and this includes Chinese Filipinos’ – interaction with each other and with the outside. Foreign though its provenance and its appurtenances may be, Philippine painting has become, and remains, an invaluable medium for expressing the boundless dynamism of Filipino responses to the challenges posed by history, territory and the present.

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Trajectories opened at the GSIS Museum of Art, Financial Center, Pasay City (beside the Film Center) last Aug. 1, with Winston F. Garcia of the Government Service Insurance System and Dr. Jaime C. Laya of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts as guests of honor. Museum hours are from Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8:40 to 11 a.m., and 1 to 4 p.m. The exhibit runs through Aug. 31.

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Caroline S. Hau is associate professor of Southeast Asian studies at the Kyoto University. She studied at University of the Philippines and Cornell University, where she obtained her Ph.D. She is the author of Necessary Fictions, put out by the Ateneo Press.