Zero-in: A convergence of five at five

Zero-in, the consortium of the country’s leading private museums, celebrates its fifth anniversary this year. To commemorate this milestone, the author looks back at the series of exhibitions mounted annually by the Ateneo Art Gallery, Ayala Museum, Lopez Memorial Museum, and Museo Pambata, and welcomes the group’s newest member, the Chinese-Filipino history and lifestyle museum Bahay Tsinoy.

Year 1: The Art Historical Triune

In 2002, three private art museums, the Ateneo Art Gallery, Ayala Museum, and the Lopez Memorial Museum came together, fired by civic pride and a deeply rooted sense of social responsibility. Bound by similar geneses – their holdings serendipitously presenting a Philippine art historical continuum – they allied on the promise of strength as a consortium, drawing on the professional expertise of their staff, collections, and programming.

The personal tastes of the founding fathers of the three museums, Fernando Zóbel and Eugenio Lopez, played an important role in shaping the public’s awareness of and appreciation for Philippine art. Thus was the first Zero-in exhibition themed "Private Art, Public Lives." Mitigated by an enlightened concept of stewardship, this project investigated, for the very first time, how different collections move outside of individual or familial domains to become part of the public trust. Presented separately, yet tethered together, not only chronologically but with a keen interest in foregrounding innovative perspectives, the exhibitions cast light on the Lunas and Hidalgos of the Lopez through "Vexed Modernity"; focused attention on a significant aspect of the Ayala’s trove of Amorsolos in "Amorsolo’s Brush with History"; and proposed the philosophy of Ricoeur as a way of seeing the pioneers of Philippine avant-gardism through "Refiguring Modern Philippine Art" at the Ateneo.

Year 2: Moving Beyond the Surface

Brimming with excitement over the success of their initial outing, which lived up to the consortium’s potential to showcase the breadth and quality of Philippine visual practice under the aegis of peer collegiality and cooperation, the three museums set about organizing their Zero-in return engagement in 2003 with "Skin, Surface, Essence," which sought to uncover the myriad meanings and manifestations of being Filipino.

In keeping with its role as a leading research center of Filipiniana, the Ayala Museum delved into the decorative masonry on the façade of colonial churches in "Palitada: Skin of the Church," which likewise critiqued the problems of heritage conservation in the country. Ateneo Art Gallery devoted its showing to pay tribute to a largely underrated and unheralded modernist in "Nena Saguil, Landscapes and Inscapes: From the Material World to the Spiritual," piquing a resurgence of interest in her introspective work. The Lopez Memorial Museum’s "Essence and Sympathies" turned to the works of expatriate Filipino artists in its collection, fleshing out ideas of identity and nation. This year would also see the group welcome the country’s premier children’s museum, Museo Pambata, into the fold through "Skinteractives," which engaged the exhibitions of the partner museums through hands-on displays geared specifically towards primary school students, thus underscoring the importance of shaping young minds and developing new audiences.

Year 3: Shifting Visions, New Realities

Responding to the challenge of the times, and amid an atmosphere of renewal and rejuvenation, Zero-in entered its third year with "Transitions." Museo Pambata opened the offerings that year with "Weaving Lives: The Art of Saori," a show that focused on a unique weaving technique used by disabled children, amplifying the important role played by craft in creating tangible representations of their newly empowered selves, thus presenting a perfect metaphor for the transformative power of art.

For its part, the Lopez Memorial Museum mounted "Rough Sketch," which featured selections from the museum’s collection of drawings and sketches, expanding the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of unfettered creativity, hand in hand with its delineation of ambiguity and substance.

Inspired by Arturo Luz’s first sculpture, "Kristo," long held in the university’s permanent collection, the Ateneo Art Gallery showed the third dimension in the National Artist’s body of work in "Arturo Luz Sculptures," which highlighted the modern master’s minimalist mettle from figurative geometry to tensile linearity in stone, concrete, steel and precious metals.

With the Ayala Museum moving to new premises, a new chapter in its history unfolded through "Crossings: Philippine Works from the Singapore Art Museum." Surveying 100 years of art, from conservatism to modernism to contemporary expression, this exhibition of selected works from the collection of the Singapore Art Museum, presented a vivisection of the country’s social, economic and political history set against the context of a borderless and increasingly global museum.

Year 4: Building on Success

Signifying the ever-increasing promise and positive outlook for Philippine arts and culture – one marked by great enthusiasm, remarkable confidence, and boundless expectation – Zero-in marked its fourth year with "Constructs," a term that hearkened to hypotheses – conjuring thoughts of entities, templates, frameworks, imagined realites (‘kän-"str&kt) – at the same time that it posited imagination made real through action, permutation, transgression and evolution (k&n-’str&kt).

Strengthening their partnership by building on each other’s areas of expertise, the museums once again harnessed the potential of their collections and public programs to create a unified front that defied social devolution: constructing constructs which, altogether, formed a symbiotic, synergistic whole.

"Juan Arellano: Drawing Space" at the Lopez Memorial Museum explored the dynamics of space in relation to memory- making and acts of self-imaging. Threaded through with pictorial anecdotes in the life of this often- overlooked modernist painter-architect, the show coaxed visitors to consider Arellano’s work by summoning intersections of relationships between geographies of built structure and psychological terrains visited and thus virtually (albeit fleetingly) possessed. It brought together landscapes and mindscapes, making for disjointed accounts of flight/diaspora and restless habitation in pursuit of one Filipino’s constructed sense of self.

The Ayala Museum mounted an exhibition of works by the award-winning contemporary visual artist Gabriel Barredo, who continued his explorations into kinetic sculpture and assemblage with an installation entitled "(In)Visible." The show took Barredo’s surrealist juxtapositions from the realm of the uncanny to the ether world of the sublime, combining icons from Christian and Eastern religions into intriguing emblems, creating objects which took viewers on a multi-sensory journey into the artist’s unique, fantastically baroque mental universe.

The state of contemporary art marked by its move towards cyberspace – in particular, the incessant digitization of images — inspired the nine printmakers behind "A/P: Analog Playground" at the Ateneo Art Gallery – Virgillio Aviado, Benjie Torrado Cabrera, Ambie Abano, Pablo Baens Santos, Amiel Roldan, Sid Gomez Hildawa, Marina Cruz, Noëll EL Farol, and Eugene Jarque – to take a "contemplative pause" by proffering alternative modes of production/reproduction which straddle human and mechanical intervention. Challenging existing structures and strictures, their works took a determined step back by considering selections from the permanent collection of the Gallery, while simultaneously bringing forward a bold, new agenda for their praxis.

"Junk Art Carnival," an exhibition of works done by Romy Gabriel, the "Prince of Junk, " at Museo Pambata ng Maynila culminated the Zero-in series that year. The show featured carnival miniature rides made out of recyclable materials such as plastics, glass, and metals – a simple and creative way of presenting the country’s waste disposal problem. The exhibit aimed to provide children with the opportunity to discover the importance of preserving the environment and its natural resources by combining the concepts of art and recycling: constructing value systems that would inspire future prospects and help to establish a new order.

Year 5: Celebrating a Milestone as One

As the consortium enters its fifth year, it is by another startling coincidence that Zero-in welcomes its fifth member, the Chinese-Filipino lifestyle museum Bahay Tsinoy. The move rounds out the group as it reflects on its past achievements, discerns its future direction, and unfurls a rich and colorful tapestry that seeks to refigure Philippine realities by focusing attention on a community that has made an indelible mark on the nation’s artistic and cultural fabric.

This year’s theme, "Convergence," therefore aptly describes Zero-in coming to terms with what it has begun, reconsolidating its position, and offering itself once again with even greater resolve as a template for the myriad possibilities offered by encounters held within the ambit of mutual regard for the common interest.

It is in this light that the encounter between art and science takes center stage with the exhibitions of the member museums being centered around the relationship between two divergent – albeit intersecting – bodies of knowledge: the result of their meetings marked by the discipline of clear-cut parameters mitigated by the open-endedness of the generative imagination.

Bahay Tsinoy opens the celebratory salvo of shows on Oct. 7 with "Herbs, Harmony and Health," which brings together the science and history behind traditional Chinese medicine. Over 2,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine is an ancient form of healing guided by the principle of internal balance and harmony. In essence, it is widely known for acupuncture and herbology, a technique as well as medium to improve our capacity to balance the "resources" in our body. Traditional Chinese medicine is also a system of medicine, which uses natural laws and energetic principles in regulating the free-flow of vital energy for health and well-being.

This exhibition will show that Western and Chinese medicine are not substitutes for each other, neither are they competitors. Rather, it will reveal how medical practitioners see them as complementary forms of medicine.

On the occasion of the tercentenary of the Jesuit Bro. Josef Kamel, SJ, the Ateneo Art Gallery presents "Flora: Beauty, Desire and Death" on 11 October 2006, celebrating the work of botanical artists who have documented Philippine plants, contemporary Filipino visual artists Yasmin Almonte and Araceli Dans, and other artists represented in the university museum’s permanent collection like Ana Fer, Al Manrique and Paz Abad Santos, who have derived inspiration from plants and read them as a metaphor of the human condition. Bro. Kamel, who arrived in the Philippines in 1697, placed the Philippines on the world map of science through his vigorous study of local flora that led to drawings of about 270 plant specimens.

"Fuzzy Logic" at the Lopez Memorial Museum on Oct. 25 attempts to craft a tentative survey of how Filipino visual art and popular culture have, over time, weighed in on questions of craft, mechanization, industrialization and development, and living in the age of interactive TV, surveillance cameras and Pinoy Big Brother. A cursory scan through relevant reads reveals that these engagements span ironic extremes – from ultra-nativism/self-exoticization to hybridization and blind appropriation and yet, the show plays on the volatility that rings with shifting territories, ever-changing avatars, elastic virtual communities, and multiple versions of the real.

Museo Pambata features an interactive exhibition beginning Nov. 11 that showcases the medicinal properties of plants in "The Healing Garden." Like a small oasis, a pocket garden of actual medicinal plants can be explored by visitors of all ages and they will experience the textures, colors, fragrances and even prepare and taste a sample of a healing elixir. Pressed flower artist Penny Reyes-Velasco presents 20 medicinal plants selected from her flower journal collection of Zambales flora from the Pinatubo mountain range (1995-1996 expeditions). Each artwork was picked, dried and carefully mounted by hand.

Closing the series, the Ayala Museum presents "Black Bouquet" on Nov. 15, an exhibition that focuses on an intensely creative period in the early years of Juvenal Sanso’s artistic career, when the Paris-based artist produced an abundance of etchings and lithographs from 1955-1968, at the outbreak of student demonstrations, bringing together over 60 pieces from the collections of the artist and Zero-in partners Ateneo Art Gallery and the Lopez Memorial Museum. The works showcase Sanso’s "fine hand for linear detail" yielding gnarled trees, lush vegetation, and desolate landscapes – now recognized images in Philippine modern printmaking.

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It is difficult to say with utmost certainty what the future holds for Zero-in. But from the consortium’s enthused resolve and aspiration to make a difference in the way the arts and culture impacts on the way reality is viewed and experienced, already, plans are being laid for the next series of exhibitions in 2007, its prospects clearly look bright.

Zero-in is indeed a proud achievement in Philippine museum practice. What evolved through a remarkable confluence of events, personalities, collections and histories has, five years hence, become proof that altruism in this country is still alive and well.