Why Patrick Jamora’s Gold Earring Deserves to Be Seen Again

By Noel Galon de Leon

At first, Patrick Jamora’s Gold Earring may seem simple, but there’s something about it that draws you in. At first glance, the work appears almost modest: a wooden frame, a sheet of glass, and fragments of printed text suspended within it. There is no literal gold, no reconstructed archaeological ornament, and no spectacular object competing for the viewer’s attention. Yet the longer one looks, the more complicated the work becomes. What initially appears to be an image of two earrings gradually reveals itself to be made entirely of language. The earrings are formed from words taken from Antonio Pigafetta’s account of his encounter with the peoples of the Philippine islands during the 1519 to 1522 expedition. Jamora does not reproduce a precolonial artifact. He reconstructs the idea of the artifact through the language of someone who saw it, described it, categorized it, and preserved it for history. This is precisely what makes Gold Earring a work that deserves to be re-mounted and re-exhibited. It does not simply show us something from the past. It makes us confront how the past has been made visible to us in the first place.

The physical appearance of the work is important to its meaning. The wooden frame gives the piece the appearance of something that might belong in a domestic collection, an archive, or even a museum. Inside it, however, the expected solidity of an artifact is replaced by transparency. The glass becomes a surface through which the viewer looks rather than simply at. The text seems to float, overlap, disappear, and reappear. The words do not form a perfectly stable image. Instead, they accumulate into two suspended forms that can be read as earrings. This instability is conceptually productive. The viewer has to move between seeing and reading. We first recognize an object, then recognize language, and eventually realize that the object itself is dependent upon language. Jamora therefore turns the act of reading into an act of looking and the act of looking into a form of historical inquiry.

The words themselves deserve close attention because they carry the intellectual and political weight of the work. On the left, the text begins with the description, “Their seignior was an old man who was painted.” It continues toward the statement that “He wore two gold earrings in his ears,” before moving through references to “gold armlets,” “arms,” and “their heads.” These words are not arranged as a conventional quotation on a page. Jamora extracts, layers, repeats, and positions them until they become the form of the earrings being described. The transformation is subtle but powerful. The sentence describing the gold earrings becomes the material from which the earrings are reconstructed. The historical description no longer sits beneath the object as explanatory information. It becomes the object.

The right side of the work is equally significant, and arguably more unsettling. The words describe another group of people through a distinctly colonial vocabulary: “There are people who have holes in their ears so large that they can pass their arms through them.” The passage continues with the classification of these people as “caphri,” followed by the explanation “that is to say, heathen.” It then describes them as “dark, fat, and painted.” Jamora does not erase these words or soften their historical violence. He allows them to remain visible as part of the artwork. Yet by turning the words into a visual form, he changes our relationship to them. We are no longer simply reading Pigafetta’s description as historical information. We are looking directly at the language used to construct an image of the people being observed.

This is where Gold Earring becomes more than an artwork about gold earrings. It becomes an artwork about the authority of description. Who gets to describe whom? Who gets to decide what is strange, beautiful, primitive, exotic, heathen, civilized, or valuable? Pigafetta’s account is historically important because it records an early European encounter with the peoples of the Philippine islands. But historical importance does not make historical language neutral. Jamora’s decision to preserve these words within the artwork allows us to see the distance between observation and interpretation. The people Pigafetta encountered existed before they were described by him. Their bodies, ornaments, practices, and identities did not begin with European documentation. Yet much of what contemporary audiences know about these encounters has been mediated through such records.

The word “gold” becomes especially important when we look closely at the composition. It appears within the left-hand passage as both a description of material wealth and a visual element within the reconstructed form. Gold is not physically present, but the word performs the function of gold. This is a particularly elegant conceptual move. The historical object has disappeared, but the word describing its material survives. Jamora consequently asks us to consider what happens when an object is remembered primarily through language. The gold earring is reconstructed without gold. Its materiality has been replaced by text. What remains is not the original object but a mediated memory of it.

This makes the title Gold Earring deceptively straightforward. The work is not really giving us a gold earring. It is giving us the historical language through which a gold earring became knowable to a later audience. The title therefore points toward an absence as much as a presence. We see an earring, but there is no gold. We see an artifact, but there is no archaeological object. We see a historical record, but we are looking at a contemporary reconstruction. This tension is one of the work’s greatest strengths.

The transparency of the glass deepens this idea. Because the words are placed on a transparent surface, they do not completely separate themselves from the space around them. They float between the viewer and the background. At certain angles, some words become more legible than others. Layers overlap. Certain phrases dominate while others recede. This visual experience mirrors the instability of historical memory. Not everything survives with the same clarity. Some words become prominent because they have been repeatedly quoted, archived, translated, taught, and exhibited. Other voices remain absent because they were never written down in the first place.

The work therefore deserves to be re-exhibited precisely because its meaning cannot be contained by the original exhibition in which it appeared. Created for Kikik: “Sang ang Bulawan Waay na Gin-ayag” under Art for All, Gold Earring already entered a context concerned with gold, history, regional identity, and cultural memory. Its subsequent invitation to Hánag demonstrates that the work has the capacity to travel into another curatorial conversation. This movement is not merely logistical. It is intellectually significant. Every time the work enters a new exhibition, the surrounding context changes, and with it the questions that viewers bring to the piece.

Re-exhibiting the work is therefore not simply putting the same artwork back on a wall. It is allowing the artwork to acquire another historical moment. The physical object remains materially consistent, but its meaning is activated differently by every exhibition. A work dealing with colonial documentation, translation, memory, and Visayan material culture should not be expected to have only one moment of relevance. In fact, its very subject demands repetition. The artwork is about the survival of words across centuries. It would be strangely appropriate for the artwork itself to survive through repeated encounters.

There is also an important distinction between re-exhibition and repetition. Repetition would mean displaying the work again without reconsidering why it should be seen again. Re-exhibition, by contrast, should provide a new reason for looking. It should place the work in a new conversation. Gold Earring could be re-exhibited alongside works concerned with Philippine archaeology, indigenous material culture, colonial archives, translation, language, indigenous identity, or contemporary approaches to history. It could also be shown in an educational context where viewers are invited to read the Pigafetta passages before seeing how Jamora transforms them visually. In such a setting, the work could become a powerful entry point into discussions about the colonial archive and the politics of representation.

This is particularly important because the language in the work should not be allowed to become invisible simply because it is part of an artwork. The viewer should be encouraged to actually read it. The phrases “gold earrings,” “caphri,” “heathen,” “dark,” “fat,” and “painted” are not decorative words. They carry historical assumptions. Their presence within the delicate visual structure of the earrings creates an important contradiction. The work is visually beautiful, but the language from which that beauty is constructed includes descriptions that reveal the colonial gaze. That contradiction should remain open. It should not be resolved too quickly.

Indeed, the beauty of the work may be one of its most productive provocations. We are drawn toward the arrangement of the words because it is visually elegant. Then we read what those words say. The experience shifts. What looks beautiful begins to demand critical attention. This is precisely the kind of encounter that contemporary art can produce at its best. It does not lecture the viewer. It creates a situation in which the viewer discovers the problem through looking.

This is another reason why the work should be re-exhibited in different spaces. In a public venue such as a mall, a viewer might encounter it unexpectedly. Someone may initially see only two unusual text-based forms behind glass. Another viewer may stop because of the wooden frame. Another may recognize the words “gold earrings.” Someone else may read the more disturbing descriptions on the right. The encounter can begin casually and become historical. In a more specialized gallery or academic setting, the same work can generate a slower and more sustained reading. These different audiences are not redundant. They are part of the work’s continuing cultural life.

For regional contemporary art, this kind of circulation is particularly important. Artists working with local histories and regional archives often produce works that are deeply connected to particular places, languages, and histories. Yet exhibitions can sometimes create a temporary visibility that disappears as soon as the exhibition closes. The work is photographed, documented, posted online, and then placed back into storage. Re-exhibition challenges that short lifespan. It gives the artwork another opportunity to speak, another audience to reach, and another institutional context through which its significance can be reconsidered.

I would argue that Gold Earring should be re-exhibited whenever a curatorial context can deepen its questions rather than merely repeat its previous presentation. It would be particularly appropriate for exhibitions concerned with Philippine history, precolonial culture, colonial encounters, archives, language, translation, material culture, regional identity, or decolonial practices. It would also be appropriate for exhibitions that examine how contemporary artists use historical documents as raw material. More importantly, it should be re-exhibited when there is an audience that has not yet encountered the work and when the new context can make its layered meanings accessible.

The timing of re-exhibition matters because artworks can become newly relevant as public conversations change. A work that deals with colonial language may acquire new significance when questions of cultural identity, historical memory, heritage, and decolonization become more visible. An artwork does not need to be new to become timely. Sometimes an older work becomes more necessary precisely because the questions it raises have become harder to ignore.

This is particularly true of Gold Earring. The work reminds us that the colonial archive continues to shape contemporary understandings of the Philippines. The words on the glass may have been written centuries ago, but they remain capable of influencing how bodies, cultures, and communities are imagined. By reconstructing the earrings from these words, Jamora gives the archive a physical form that we can scrutinize. We can see the language. We can see its arrangement. We can notice what is repeated, what is emphasized, what disappears behind another layer, and what remains exposed.

The work also raises a compelling question about whose words are missing. We hear Pigafetta. We see his description. But we do not hear the people who wore the earrings. We do not hear the person being described as an “old man.” We do not hear the people whose ears were observed and classified. This absence is not necessarily a failure of Jamora’s work. It is part of what makes the work so productive. The silence becomes visible. By giving colonial language the form of the earrings, Jamora also makes us aware that the surviving historical record is uneven. We possess the observer’s words, but not necessarily the words of those who were observed.

A future re-exhibition could therefore make this absence even more productive by inviting contemporary writers, artists, historians, or communities to respond to the Pigafetta passages. The work could become the center of a larger conversation about what might exist beyond the archive. What would these earrings say if they could speak for themselves? What language would we use if we were not dependent on the vocabulary of the colonial observer? What stories about Visayan gold, body modification, ornament, status, and identity have remained outside the written archive? These questions can extend the life of the artwork without changing the artwork itself.

Gold Earring deserves to be seen again because it is a work that changes as we learn how to look at it. Its apparent simplicity is part of its strength. A wooden frame, transparent glass, layered fragments of text, and the suggestion of two earrings are enough to open an expansive conversation about colonial history, language, material culture, memory, and representation. The work does not need to become larger to become more significant. It needs time, attention, and new contexts.

Perhaps this is what re-exhibition should mean at its most meaningful. It should not be an attempt to make an old artwork look new. It should be an acknowledgment that an artwork can remain intellectually alive. Gold Earring has already traveled from Kikik to Hánag, and that movement should not necessarily be understood as the end of its exhibition history. It can continue to travel because the historical questions embedded in it continue to travel with us.

The earrings in Jamora’s work are made of words, and words survive by being read again. That may be the most compelling argument for re-exhibiting the work. Every new exhibition offers another opportunity to read what was written, to question how it was written, and to consider what remains unwritten. The artwork asks us to look at the past, but it also asks us to examine the language through which the past has been handed to us. To exhibit it again is therefore not to repeat history. It is to reopen history for another reading.

And perhaps that is precisely what a good artwork should demand: not to be remembered only as something we once saw, but to be seen again because we have learned to ask better questions.

(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.