Dear friends and colleagues
A three-day holiday in Camiguin island and I show you two posters or signs I saw there for your consideration. There are elections brewing for half the senators. I don’t think this poster for a candidate from Duterte’s party will endear him to you. Here, despite every denunciation in the Western press, Duterte remains remarkably popular.
At one seaside resort there was a sign prohibiting kissing: a reminder of how strong the hold of the Catholic church at its most conservative can be. Alas, I did not have that classic English seaside hat inscribed “Kiss me quick, I’m single” to put on my head and selfie myself beside it. One is rarely prepared for such moments.
At 6.00PM on May 13th 1871 Cotta Bato, the main city of Camiguin, was destroyed by an earthquake. All that was left were the walls of the church dedicated to San Roque founded in 1623. The roof has long since gone, the walls eroded, but those massive buttresses survived. It isn’t like the National Trust, there wasn’t much information about it. The solitary information panel said it was also a convent. However, I suspect it was actually a friary. Was the second nearby, equally monumental, building a dormitory? Did the buildings also serve as fortifications against marauding Moros from Mindanao? No more information to be found on the web either.
Now it is a beautiful little park beside the sea, the local school girls hang out there and do their homework, or more probably check Facebook. Please note their long skirts. School uniforms are exceedingly modest here. Anything to put off public displays of affection!
But, apart from some extraordinary waterfalls, the most curious things I saw there were two Christmas trees. They are, like an all-day breakfast, clearly all-year Christmas trees! I like it that they are so home-made and using local materials. The second tree which encloses a picture of the holy family is like a genuine shrine – what a brilliant conception! It may seem odd that Jesus is already several years old, but all things are possible in Christmas Tree World.
Soon after to Singapore and a meeting with Eugene Tan, the director of the National Gallery there. We went around the show of minimal art he has curated there together. I will talk about that next week as I haven’t yet had a chance to peruse the catalogue. It is clearly an important show, and one that raises some important art-historical issues – issues that are still pertinent to making or understanding art today.
We also paused and talked about a large painting, Raw Canvas, made by Jane Lee eleven years ago for the second Singapore Biennale. Using long lines of paint as if they were threads of textile she first made a “textile” of brightly coloured “threads”, overlaid it with one of white “threads” and then folded part of it back to reveal the colours. It is a complex, beautiful work. In that biennale it was shown in a stairwell of the building that has since been converted into the National Gallery. It has now been returned to the same spot. Her work has gone in many directions since then, both in ways of manipulating paint, and in dealing with issues of representation. Commissioned to make a site specific installation she has created a bench filled with threads of paint, sealed with silicon. Sitting on it one can look at the second part of this new installation entitled Nowhere or Now Here, a wall of multi coloured reflective panels. One sees one’s fractured self (and on this occasion also Eugene Tan’s fractured self) and behind it the original painting.
It’s a fun idea, it connects her current work to earlier work, though I am not sure it makes one enjoy the original painting more.
Join me next week for a walk through the National Gallery’s Minimalism show. Arguably, as the title (Minimalism: Space, Light, Object) suggests, it isn’t just about Minimalism.
See you then
Tony