'Philippine Ancestral Gold' to be launched in Singapore
MANILA, Philippines - The book Philippine Ancestral Gold will have its Singapore launch at the Asian Civilisations Museum tomorrow, Feb. 21. A follow-up to its successful launching at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York last November to an audience made up of the academic and museum communities, as well as US-based Filipinos.
“This new material on the Philippines opens a whole new chapter in scholarship,” attests Kaja McGowan, associate professor from Cornell University, New York.
Definitive and compelling, the book provides the art-historical context of 1,059 pre-Hispanic gold objects found in various parts of the archipelago now on permanent exhibition at the Gold of Ancestors: Pre-colonial Treasures in the Philippines at Ayala Museum in Makati City, Metro Manila.
The book’s Singapore launch is all the more meaningful because it is Ayala Museum’s first collaboration with an overseas publisher, the National University of Singapore Press (NUS). It will include presentations from the book’s editor and author Dr. Florina Capistrano-Baker, curator of the “Gold of Ancestors” exhibition, and co-author John Miksic, associate professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Miksic points out that the pre-colonial gold of the Philippines is “perhaps the country’s greatest tangible cultural asset and can stand comparison with any other assemblage of gold artifacts in the world.”
Dr. Baker states likewise that the deeper value of these gold objects “can be assayed only in consideration of its historical and academic significance and the self-knowledge and pride it gives to Filipinos.”
