The taste of green ‘manga’

A sensation of the unfamiliar persists in the recent canvases of painter, filmmaker and graphic designer Pablo Biglang-awa Jr. which is ironic, in a sense, as Biglang-awa sources his imagery from a visual mode popular among most urban-based Filipinos: Japanese cartoons (more popularly known as animé) and manga, Japanese comic books.

In his first solo exhibition at the Mag:net Gallery at the Loop, ABS-CBN Compound in Quezon City, Biglang-awa offers a series of large and small-scale canvases that bridge the extremes between pop-derived and abstract expressionist art. Now, while, pop-derived art has historically yielded a varied array of visual combinations, the artist’s appropriation of techniques and images from Japanese animation becomes a palatable – though initially unusual – sampling because of the bewildering complement of form and meaning produced by his juxtapositions.

His acrylic and chalk on canvas paintings utilize cropped images from manga and animé characters – such from the popular series, Gundam – juxtaposed or merged with abstract backgrounds. Animé and abstraction derive from opposed visual traditions, seeming like an unlikely complement for each other’s visual vocabulary. Biglang-awa, however, creates spaces where these artistic genres converge smoothly. In the work "San’s Illumination," for instance, an arresting juxtaposition of amorphous and flat surfaces emerges: Corpuscle-shaped objects in flat colors float in an inchoate mist of beige and white, where rapid, red chalk strokes cut across the expanse of space. Such a seemingly effortless effect of flatness, however, is something he meticulously achieves by appropriating animé production techniques, such as masking surfaces when filling in pigments.

The artist maintains a technical precision even in abstraction. Biglang-awa lingers at the borders of mechanical control and nuanced restraint by including diametrically-opposed elements, such as the fragile precision and linearity of animé techniques and the spontaneity of dripping pigments and chalk marks. In "The Domination of Eboshi," for instance, the artist crops the upper torso of a kimono-clad figure and several details from an animé figure’s armor. Defying gravity, the images seem to levitate slowly away from the bottom of the plane, leaving paint to drip and meander down to the bottom.

For Biglang-awa Jr., it is the primacy of novelty and freshness that governs his use of such contemporary visual sources and techniques.

"I want the audience to look at popular forms in a different light," he says.

It is this penchant to portray what has not been evident before, to make unfamiliar what local broadcast media regularly airs on primetime slots, that compels the artist’s ambiguous treatment of space and an emphasis on detail. Biglang-awa, interestingly, now focuses not on the familiar figures and faces of animé characters, but on the unnoticed details of clothing and costume, something which even die-hard animé fans may find difficulty in identifying. In the "Path of the Leopard Asteroids," for instance, the leopard pattern of a character’s costume is repeatedly stamped across the painting’s surface, floating like planet’s along with little print of lilies and machine parts. His rejuxtaposition of elements – from metal parts to flower prints, from broad swaths of color to calligraphic strokes – creates an air of the unfamiliar and the surreal.

The artist’s newfound engagement with the possibilities of such a mode of imagery – he gained interest in manga as a painting subject two years ago and has been at it ever since – is largely experimental at this stage of playing with the medium and subject, to the pouring of forms and forming of patterns. This may be gleaned from the whimsical and playful demeanor of works, such as "Kimono Melt," where cropped items of clothing – traditional kimono and black boots – are juxtaposed within a dim void. The work is presumably named after the way the purplish pigment (that forms the shadows of the kimono) drips over and meanders down to other surfaces of the frame.

Other works, such as "My Hiroshima" present the artist’s rather ambiguous personal contemplation of – rather than explicit commentary on – what a recall of Hiroshima signifies. Yet the very fact that the artist chooses Japanese animé as a subject and source of inquiry poses more probing questions for the viewer. For to defamiliarize what is being popularized in the local context eventually entails a self-reflexive and critical contemplation of what such imagery signifies in the Philippine milieu, where Biglang-awa’s works are produced. In closing, it is hoped that all those engaged in the reception of Biglang-awa Jr.’s works develop a palette not only for exoticness or novelty, but for judicious deliberation of the implications of such imagery as well.