Restless Natives
Four Filipino artists and their identity crises.
By Kelly Vance

Published at Eastbay Express

Traidor!, the new art exhibition at Oakland's Esteban Sabar Gallery, might appear on the surface to be a routine collection of iconoclastic images related to the Philippines, but it's probably inadvisable to wade into it casually then you'll quickly find yourself in the deep end. Depends on how much you know about the Philippines and Filipino identity. The old expression "Four centuries in a convent, fifty years in Hollywood,"referring to that Southeast Asian republic's former status as a colony of Spain, then as an imperial outpost of the United States, isn't the half of it. The very cultural ferment that makes the contemporary Philippines such a fascinating mixture has produced a whopper of an identity crisis. We see that vividly in the work of the four Bay Area painters in the show, all native pinoys. England Hidalgo's Like the Sweetness of the Bubblegum That the American Soldier Gave You depicts a GI with a Mickey Mouse head, an indigenous youth with bow and arrow, and between them, a crucifix. Carlo Ricafort, on the other hand, riffs on the racist American political cartoons of the early 20th century with the rejected infant of his intaglio print Bath Water Babies, and artist Marcius Noceda lets symbolism do the talking.
For San Francisco artist and "Traidor!" curator Lian Ladia, the conflicts expressed in the four artists' work represent more than knee-jerk Filipino nationalism. As she explains via e-mail: "We are all from a country named after a Spanish king, baptized into Christianity, and colonized for 300 years, yet later taken by the US with imposition to its culture and language. If we are waving the Philippine flag, we are waving it in a comedic, satirical way for the falseness of being a Filipino." Bitter laughs indeed, and Ladia draws on the ideas of social philosopher Theodor Adorno to help explain the Filipino predicament. "The issues are nihilistic, not leftist," Ladia insists. "The paintings provoke feelings of great contempt, self-mockery, and social disillusionment. The artist deals with negating and ironic issues in trying to resolve the traditions in art practice, the responsibility to truth and meaning while being attached to the commercial." In Mel Vera Cruz' outraged, graffiti-inflected paintings of crucifixions (of a monkey as well as Jesus Christ with the head of an American eagle), Hieronymus Bosch and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as Adorno, put in appearances as stylistic influences. Not even a bottle of Ginebra San Miguel, the rotgut local gin, escapes Vera Cruz -- he relabels it as Ginibang Diwa (act of destruction). For the Filipinos, he seems to be saying, there are multiple cruel masters, past and present. This is not your pleasant, inoffensive, forgettable art show.