Sown by the Traveler: Art of the Diaspora at UPV MACH

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

While the subject of the Filipino painter as traveler and expatriate is not a new theme for artworks and art exhibitions, it certainly is a favorite conversation piece on the canvas, one which recurs with the blurring of cultural boundaries and the recognition of shared intellectual spaces through the decades. What happens when Pinoy sensibilities of the Good and the Beautiful take root and flourish in foreign lands?

The same theme permeated the newest exhibit at the University of the Philippines’ Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage. Amidst the hubbub of the Dinagyang’s early performances in the afternoon of January 23, the museum offered a different aesthetic and cultural experience with a well-attended vernissage to open ‘Ginsab-og sang Pangayaw’ (Sown by the Traveler). Exploring the theme of the representation of women and the experience of migrant artists in Philippine Art, the loaned collection from the Lopez Museum and Library featured select artworks by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Nena Saguil, Alfonso Ossorio, Juvenal Sansó, Macario Vitalis, and Fernando Zóbel.

Titled after a line from Rizal’s ode ‘To the flowers of Heidelberg’, the exhibit reflects and refracts the diaspora of art and ideas from and into the country. While one might consider this as a sequel to ‘Patrimony For All’ – last November 2024’s exhibition of selections from the Filipino artistic canon – this time, the art glimmers with feminine nuances. Far removed from the masculinity of the works of Luna, Arellano, Hidalgo, and Amorsolo, the scattered canvases pull the audience towards visions nurtured in renascent movements and growth, in new climes and lands: nothing of the heroic or the panoramic, only of way-wearied wanderlust.

Etymologically, the word ‘diaspora’ stems out from two Greek roots: ‘dia–’ to denote the crossing of a certain span or distance, and ‘speiren’, which means to scatter or spread, as one would do with seeds – or spores, the word tracing itself back to the same morphemic root. Hence, the idea of migration – physical or intellectual – transcends simple dispersal but also encapsulates the planting of seeds and taking root: where artists are uprooted, peregrinated, and replanted, there blooms new sensibilities, which in turn, shape our national narrative.

The multiplication of this ‘germ’ of ideas is especially felt in Nena Saguil’s abstractions. Sparse on the displays, two of these are redolent of pointillism where minute ‘cells’ fill up the canvas achieving gestalt dreamscapes, the sum of which, to the eye, is greater to behold than its parts. Complementing this figurative germination and thriving of life, Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s iconic female figures bent on postures of labor or conversation hold silent statements in their frozen attitudes, as if forever holding on to a fleeting shred of spicy gossip or the last vestige of work beneath blistering sun and wind.

Known for his association with modernists Pollock and Dubuffet, Alfonso Ossorio’s bohemian urbanity laces through his two works on display: a bricolage of odds and ends ‘congregating’ as a jazzy assemblage, and a surreal landscape occupied by nightmarish loafers in a dalliance most Daliesque. Demurer across the exhibit hall, the austere geometrical figures of Fernando Zóbel in drab, muted columns of color hang, in stark contrast, alongside the ochre, orange, and verdant splashes of Vitalis’ impressionist vibrance, filling his landscapes with matted hue and light. Standing out from the seriousness of the room, the portraits of Juvenal Sansó verge on the caricaturesque. His characters sport flared Castilian nostrils – even for the poorest of them – and the obnoxious countenances speak of a subdued though fiery Iberian passion, retained and resurfaced in the canvas, despite the years spent by the artist in the Philippines.

It is a lean exhibit. Still, the art is revealing and whimsical, yet incisive enough to remind its viewers of the hazy liminalities where our artists find inspiration. And if we take Patrick Flores’ curation as riposte to Rizal’s paean to foreign flora, then we might just find one piece of the answer that we look for when we ask what makes art Filipino: in the alien landscapes, in the visibly Western modernist techniques, in the colorful life stories of the artists, and in the Sturm und Drang and the traversals between these rests the groundwork of Filipino aesthetics.

We come full circle to our first query: What happens when Pinoy sensibilities of the Good and the Beautiful take root and flourish in foreign lands? Perhaps our ready answer to that is when artistic boundaries are blurred and aesthetics are displaced, shared, and contested, they are revitalized – like seeds sown by travelers.

There on the walls of UP’s museum hangs the harvest of the sowers. Check out the exhibit and taste of its fruit.

[The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city.]