Remembering Kiukok

His works were never of the middle ground; you either liked them or you didn’t. They were never pleasant or pretty, and they weren’t benign either; shocking, disturbing, awesome, angry, cruel... take your pick, but the reactions were always strong. Such were the works of National Artist Ang Kiukok, who died the week before last at the age of 74.

A long time ago–when I was young and didn’t know any better, I guess–I had the audacity to ask Kiukok why he painted the way he did. We were in his house in Quezon City, surrounded by several of his junkscapes. In answer, he took a sheet of paper and tore it up. "This is how I see a sheet of paper," he said in Chinese. "You see it like that–one sheet–but I see it like this." With that answer I understood why he was a great artist and I wasn’t: he saw things differently, saw beyond what was on the surface, saw what could be–even if that meant paper torn up into eight pieces, reality fragmented, the physical world dismembered.

His works invited intense and in-depth analyses by critics and theorists, who spoke of his colors (or the lack of it), forms, meanings, angsts (it was so tempting to pun, "Ang’s angst") and volumes have been written about him. But I don‘t think Kiukok ever really subscribed to all that analyses; his paintings spoke all he wanted to say–take it however way you wanted–and there would be no artist’s notes or clues as to the thoughts and feelings behind each work.

In person Kiukok was extremely soft-spoken, shy and self-effacing, but his presence was near awesome. In the first place he was a big man, quite tall and strong; our late founding chairman Betty Go Belmonte used to introduce him as a Chinese army general (quite fitting, really, since his name literally means "save the country"). And even if he hardly said a word there was an unmistakable depth to his persona, depths to which the artist retreated and no one could follow, these depths taking on an added darkness in recent years following a family tragedy, the death of a son.

In the past few years Kiukok achieved prominence in the international art scene, his works commanding sky high prices at international art auctions. But that is not the just measure of Kiukok’s art and genius, although it is recognition well deserved; it is that split second when you first look upon one of his paintings and you hold your breath and your heart jumps–that is the moment the finger of genius touched you.