Joshua ‘Wawa’ Gabayeran and the Aestheticization of Agriculture

by Noel Galon de Leon

In Uma-Asenso and Panublion sang Panguma by Joshua “Wawa” Gabayeran, the farmland is not merely a quiet landscape but is translated into a physical, material form. At first glance, the vivid green impasto, the rough texture of burlap, the natural wooden frame, and the small figures of farmers and animals that seem to move across an abstract landscape stand out. The thick, raised paint does not merely provide color; it constructs topography. The soil becomes relief, the fields become channels of movement, and the paths become large gestures of brushstrokes. In this way, the work exists somewhere between painting, assemblage, and bas-relief. The use of burlap as ground is particularly important because the material itself is associated with agriculture, storage, transportation, labor, and physical work. The artist does not simply depict the farm. In a sense, he brings the materiality of the farm into the very body of the artwork.

However, the first critical challenge in these works lies in the very concept of “progress” placed at the center of Uma-Asenso. The word uma refers to cultivated land, while uma-asenso directly connotes elevation, advancement, or development. By combining the two words, the name creates an important linguistic and conceptual tension. The farm is not merely a source of food but becomes a metaphor for social mobility. But what exactly does progress mean for the farmer? Is it an increase in income? Land ownership? Food security? Access to technology? Higher crop prices? Better infrastructure? Or leaving agriculture altogether and moving to the city? Such distinctions are important because “development” is one of the easiest words to use in discourse about the countryside and also one of the easiest to leave vague. In many official narratives, rural development is often portrayed as a straightforward journey from tradition toward modernity. But farmers’ actual experience is not that simple. Debts, middlemen, fluctuating prices, land conversion, the climate crisis, inadequate irrigation, access to machinery, labor migration, and questions of land ownership shape the reality. When “progress” is presented merely as a positive direction for the farm, there is a danger that the complicated reality of agrarian life will be replaced by an easier-to-believe image of progress.

This is where the work’s thick impasto becomes useful. The paint is not applied thinly merely to create the illusion of grass or farmland. Instead, it seems to insist that the soil possess its own body. Each stroke becomes like a trace of the hand, while the surface of the work becomes a tactile field. The technique is connected to the materiality of agriculture because the farm itself is a physical place of touching, pulling, planting, plowing, harvesting, and repetitive labor. The painterly gesture can be read as an analogue of manual labor. Yet there is an important contradiction here: it is the artist’s hand that creates the material representation of the farmer’s hand. The farmer’s labor is represented through the labor of the artist, but the two are not the same kind of work, nor do they occupy the same position within the production system. The artist creates a cultural object about the farmer, while the farmer produces food that society directly needs. This distinction matters, and we should not lose it in a sentimental view of the countryside. If the artwork claims to “honor the hands that cultivate the fields,” we must also consider how society actually values those hands outside the gallery. The question is not whether the farmer is dignified, because dominant cultural discourse has long repeated this idea. The harder question is whether such glorification is matched by material recognition of their labor.

The small figurines of the farmers are among the most important elements of the composition. Because they are so small compared to the expanse of the green landform, they appear almost like markers within a vast landscape. This scale relationship effectively creates a sense of vastness, but it can also carry an ambivalent meaning. On one hand, it shows that humans are only part of a larger ecosystem. On the other hand, it almost diminishes farmers’ individual agency because they become miniature figures within a landscape that seems more powerful than they are. Their bodies are not depicted in detail; instead, they become visual signs of the “farmer.” Through this representational strategy, the particular person can disappear behind the generic symbol. We no longer see Mang Juan, Maria, or a specific farmer with a particular history, debt, land, family, and struggle. We see the abstracted category of the farmer. This is a limitation the artwork must confront if its aim is not merely to pay tribute but to offer a deeper representation of agricultural life.

This miniature treatment becomes even more complicated because it creates an aesthetic distance. The viewer stands outside the landscape and looks down upon it, as though viewing a model world. The farm becomes orderly, beautiful, and almost idyllic. There is no mud, no exhaustion, no sweat, no broken equipment, no rotting harvest, no collapsed prices, no pests destroying crops, and no direct trace of economic precarity. The absence of these elements is not automatically a deficiency, since the artist may deliberately be constructing a symbolic landscape. But if the work places itself within the discourse of Filipino farming, it must also recognize that landscape beauty can become a way of aestheticizing hardship. The countryside can easily be made beautiful inside a gallery because the problems surrounding it can be removed from the frame. The green color becomes a sign of life, abundance, and hope, but the actual agricultural landscape is not always green or productive. A critical artwork about farming could become more powerful if the beauty of the land were not separated from the tension of the lives that depend upon it.

In Panublion sang Panguma, the artist’s attempt to place agriculture within cultural inheritance becomes clearer. The word panublion is important because it suggests something passed from one generation to another. Farming, therefore, is not merely an occupation but a heritage. This framing matters in the context of Western Visayas, where agrarian knowledge shapes local memory, livelihood, food systems, and cultural identity. Using the local language in the title strengthens the work’s cultural specificity and prevents it from becoming a generic “Filipino farmer” artwork. However, the concept of heritage also risks turning a living practice into a cultural artifact. Farming is not a museum piece. It is present-day work, an economic activity, and for many families, a condition of survival. When we call it “heritage,” we may romanticize it as a tradition that must be preserved without asking why many young people no longer want to continue it. A more meaningful concept of heritage is not merely preservation but continuity under changing conditions. Heritage should not only be passed on; it must also have sufficient conditions to remain alive.

In both works, the use of a natural wood frame and burlap is one of the most effective material decisions. The roughness of burlap immediately opens associations with the farm and material labor. It is not a neutral canvas. Its material carries its own history as a utilitarian fabric. By placing thick acrylic-like paint over the woven ground, the contrast between an industrially produced textile and an organic-looking landscape becomes visible. The regular grid of the burlap serves as an understructure while the fluidity of the green paint falls, spills, and extends beyond its visual order. The result is a formal tension between grid and gesture, structure and spontaneity, containment and expansion. This is one of the aspects that is stronger than the literal subject matter. The artwork does not merely say, “the farm is alive.” Through its material itself, it shows a collision between the system that organizes and the organic force that continually grows. The artist could develop this possibility further in future works.

However, the green paint has become a dominant visual shorthand for “nature.” The intense lime and grass green can easily be read as fertility, vegetation, life, and hope. But because its use is so consistent, the symbolism may become predictable. Green almost automatically becomes “farm,” just as brown becomes “soil” and the wood frame becomes “natural.” For an artist interested in agricultural experience, it may be more dangerous and productive to question this very color convention. What is the color of the farm during drought? What color does it become after a storm? What is the color of the soil when it has been damaged by chemicals? What is the color of the fields when they are replaced by subdivisions? What is the visual language of the farm when it is no longer fertile? Moving away from the predictable agricultural palette could open a broader visual vocabulary for a subject that is more complicated than pastoral green.

Another important contradiction lies between the artist’s statement and the visual form of the works. The statement emphasizes the “enduring spirit” of Filipino farmers and the “deep connection between people and nature.” This is a noble statement, but it is also a familiar trope in Philippine cultural representation. Farmers have long been portrayed as hardworking, patient, humble, close to nature, and guardians of the land. Although some of these qualities are indeed part of the experiences of many farmers, this becomes problematic when the farmer’s entire identity is reduced to virtue. The farmer is not merely a symbol of diligence. The farmer is a worker with rights, an economic actor, a political subject, and a citizen with their own interests and agency. When the farmer is constantly represented as a “guardian of the land,” we may forget that he or she has concrete questions about ownership, prices, labor conditions, access to capital, technology, markets, climate, and government policy. Cultural admiration is not a substitute for structural analysis. In fact, it can become a comfortable way to praise farmers while avoiding the systems that continue to make their lives difficult.

Because of this, the most important critical possibility of Uma-Asenso may lie in the very ambiguity of the word “progress.” The title carries optimistic momentum, but it does not automatically answer who is progressing. Is it the farmer? The farm? The family? The community? The agricultural industry? Or the country that benefits from agricultural labor? These possibilities differ significantly. A green, seemingly abundant landscape is not sufficient evidence of development. Productivity does not automatically mean prosperity. Agricultural output may be high while the farmer’s income remains low. Agribusiness may develop while farmers lose control over their own land. Production may become modernized while traditional ecological knowledge disappears. Therefore, “progress” must be read not only as movement forward but as a contested political term. The artwork becomes more provocative when it leaves this question open.

In this context, the two works can be viewed as part of a larger debate about the representation of the rural Philippines in contemporary art. It is often easier to depict the countryside than to explain the systems that shape it. The landscape is visually attractive, while agrarian conflict is politically complicated. The farmer is easily turned into an icon, but it is more difficult to represent him or her as a subject with contradictions, anger, ambition, disappointment, and a voice of their own. The cultural critic’s task is not to reject the beauty of rural imagery but to examine what disappears when the landscape speaks for the people who live and work within it. In Uma-Asenso and Panublion sang Panguma, the artist already possesses a strong material and visual vocabulary to do this. The next level of artistic development may lie in introducing more friction into the landscape: not only harmony but conflict, not only growth but loss, not only inheritance but rupture.

Despite these limitations, Gabayeran’s achievement in using mixed media to construct a tactile agricultural landscape should not be underestimated. The thick application of paint gives the work a sculptural presence and creates a surface that the eye can almost “read” as texture. The brushwork is visible, gestural, and physical, so it does not conceal the making process. Instead, it reveals the trace of the artist’s hand. The concept of “labor” is not only found in the miniature figures of farmers; it exists in the very making of the artwork. The artist uses physical labor to speak about physical labor. This creates a productive correspondence between form and subject. The challenge, however, is how to expand this correspondence so that it does not simply become “the artist works like the farmer,” a romantic equivalence that can itself be problematic. Their labor conditions are different, and it is more meaningful to acknowledge that difference than to erase it in the name of artistic metaphor.

Uma-Asenso and Panublion sang Panguma become more meaningful when they are not viewed merely as tributes to farmers but as images that engage with the very way we think about the countryside. Their strongest point is their attempt to combine the materiality of the soil, the gesture of labor, cultural memory, and the visual language of contemporary mixed media. Their greatest challenge, meanwhile, is to avoid the pastoral idealization that has long been used to make the countryside beautiful and noble while remaining distant from the concrete conditions of agrarian life. Between the green landscape and the rough burlap, between the small farmer and the enormous landscape, between “panublion” and “asenso,” there is a larger story about the Philippines: a country that continues to depend on the land while gradually distancing itself from the people who work it. If the purpose of the work is truly to honor the farmer, the most effective next step is not merely to create a beautiful image of his or her life but to expose the forces shaping the farmer’s future.

In this reading, Uma-Asenso should not remain a simple image of a farm moving toward prosperity, and Panublion sang Panguma should not end with the romantic idea of farming as heritage. The two works become more powerful if their visual beauty is used as an entry point into the more difficult questions of land, labor, inheritance, class, modernization, ecological vulnerability, and rural identity. Their true critical potential lies not only in the vivid green paint but in the space that can be opened between the idealized landscape and lived reality. The farm is not merely a landscape. It is a workplace, a home, a political territory, an ecosystem, an economic resource, and a site of struggle. And the farmer is not merely a figure placed upon green paint to represent diligence and hope. The farmer is the person whose life and labor determine whether what we call “progress” is truly development, or merely a beautiful word that is easier to paint than to live.

(This essay is part of a series on Hánag: Emergent Perspectives, curated by Elvert Bañares, an exhibition that brings together visual art, photography, fashion, furniture design, film, and new media, offering new ways of seeing and experiencing Iloilo.)

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Noel Galon de Leon is a professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas. His poems have been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He serves as Secretary and a member of the NCLA Executive Council of the NCCA.