Copying from the past
April 7, 2003 | 12:00am
Working on an exhibition of 19th-century Philippine clothing in New York a few years ago, I wondered why designers today are not copying the design motifs perfected by the artisans of the past. This question came to me again recently while I was helping my daughter furnish her flat in Boston. We came across a huge warehouse full of found pieces – actually antique reproductions. There were Chinese armoires, Indian coffee tables, Tibetan painted cabinets, Indonesian Dutch colonial tables, and Eastern European painted furniture. It seemed to me that every country is simply faithfully reproducing their treasures and exporting them for the world to appreciate and enjoy. Except for the Philippines.
My first thought was that our designers and manufacturers do not have enough source books or museums from which to research and learn from, so they have been forced to create original designs. Or, is it perhaps because we have such a high opinion on our creativity that we need not copy from the past? Do we find fulfillment only when we create something new?
It is always refreshing to take a break from business to chat with friends who are immersed in culture like Cora Alvina, director of the National Museum, and Sonia Ner of Asia Society, so I sought their views to understand creativity Filipino style better.
Both Cora and Sonia echoed the popular view that Filipinos are indeed very creative. "Filipinos think out of the box and make do with what we have in unexpected ways," Sonia says. "We are innovative and have the ability to create things that are different from the familiar – sometimes to our detriment like defying the law," Cora adds. "We have the capability to struggle out of things and to find solutions others fail to see." This kind of lateral thinking is sometimes called right-brain thinking.
Cora, however, believes that we do not embrace or trust the past because of our experiences as a disaster-prone series of islands. "We have had to count on our intellectual inventiveness because there is little trust that things will last. Look at the decorations in our fiestas, our bahay kubos or dwellings that we build. Very little is permanent or monumental architecture except for the rice terraces and perhaps the torogan structures of the Maranaws. Mindanao is spared from the "storm mentality" because the province is typhoon-free. We started out as hunters and gatherers, then as kaingeros moving from one abundant place to another and returning back when replenished by nature. So we have had to be inventive and innovative, a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention.
She told me about an American importer who buys baskets from the Philippines. He told her that our basket makers are both excellent and frustrating at the same time. They are creative and have marvelous craftsmanship but cannot resist adding their creative input making it difficult to have a high-level of quality control. "The basket weavers strictly follow the prototype up to fifth basket. Left alone, by the sixth basket, they add ears. By the eighth basket, you will have little legs and finally a totally new design."
Nonetheless, I still think that we would do well optimizing our innate creativity with a little discipline, cast away our distrust of our past, feel confident enough and with great pride reproduce what we already did so well in the past, and build upon our legacies to bring our creativity and sense of aesthetics to a more profound level.
Thank you for your comments at dorisho@attglobal.net.
My first thought was that our designers and manufacturers do not have enough source books or museums from which to research and learn from, so they have been forced to create original designs. Or, is it perhaps because we have such a high opinion on our creativity that we need not copy from the past? Do we find fulfillment only when we create something new?
It is always refreshing to take a break from business to chat with friends who are immersed in culture like Cora Alvina, director of the National Museum, and Sonia Ner of Asia Society, so I sought their views to understand creativity Filipino style better.
Both Cora and Sonia echoed the popular view that Filipinos are indeed very creative. "Filipinos think out of the box and make do with what we have in unexpected ways," Sonia says. "We are innovative and have the ability to create things that are different from the familiar – sometimes to our detriment like defying the law," Cora adds. "We have the capability to struggle out of things and to find solutions others fail to see." This kind of lateral thinking is sometimes called right-brain thinking.
Cora, however, believes that we do not embrace or trust the past because of our experiences as a disaster-prone series of islands. "We have had to count on our intellectual inventiveness because there is little trust that things will last. Look at the decorations in our fiestas, our bahay kubos or dwellings that we build. Very little is permanent or monumental architecture except for the rice terraces and perhaps the torogan structures of the Maranaws. Mindanao is spared from the "storm mentality" because the province is typhoon-free. We started out as hunters and gatherers, then as kaingeros moving from one abundant place to another and returning back when replenished by nature. So we have had to be inventive and innovative, a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention.
She told me about an American importer who buys baskets from the Philippines. He told her that our basket makers are both excellent and frustrating at the same time. They are creative and have marvelous craftsmanship but cannot resist adding their creative input making it difficult to have a high-level of quality control. "The basket weavers strictly follow the prototype up to fifth basket. Left alone, by the sixth basket, they add ears. By the eighth basket, you will have little legs and finally a totally new design."
Nonetheless, I still think that we would do well optimizing our innate creativity with a little discipline, cast away our distrust of our past, feel confident enough and with great pride reproduce what we already did so well in the past, and build upon our legacies to bring our creativity and sense of aesthetics to a more profound level.
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