Tuesday in the Tropics 31

25th August 2015

Dear friends and colleagues.

When I got back from a month in Europe, Geraldine Javier showed me her most recent painting. It’s not going to be shown in a gallery but be sent directly for sale at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. Why is she, like many other artists in Asia, doing this? No-one in Europe does this. But first let’s say something about the painting.

Geraldine Javier. Que sera, sera. 2015

Having bought the grounds of an old fruit farm south of Manila on which to build a new studio and house, she was surprised and delighted this spring to find a number of pongapong flowers blooming under the trees. Famous for their obnoxious smell, redolent of rotting flesh, the flowers are also large, strangely shaped and vary a great deal one from another. There are five of them in the foreground.

The garden she was building there had been the major inspiration for the body of work shown in her May exhibition at Finale, Manila. (I talked of this in Letter XX.) The old farm is next to a forest that spreads up a mountain so it seems like the place where the cultivated and the wild meet. Several of the works for that show included deer antlers like this new work, either attached to the faces of old women whose skin seemed to be composed of leaves or else held by young girls to their faces as if they were ready to be transformed into deer.

She has always been restless and the exhibition was notable for several technical innovations: frames covered with fabrics that had been painted to her own designs; wooden elements that expanded out like the geometric forms of trees and bushes; thirdly, instead of painting with oil, she painted with inks directly on the canvas – this allowed for deep, rich colours and gave a highly sensitive surface.

This painting is developed from and extends that body of work. The painted fabric on the frame is again of her own design, whilst the elements that sprout from the top of the frame are themselves wrapped in fabric. The skin of the girls is made with hammered leaves, making them look somewhat unearthly. More than one person said “Henry Darger” when they saw the painting: innocence and beauty, but tainted with something strange – and more threatening.

We cannot be sure what is happening here. Why has the oldest girl put down her antlers? In surprise or shock? Was she struck by the oddness of the flowers, their stench, or as Geraldine was, by their beauty. The incident seems more meaningful than that. It is as though, unlike her two childish companions, she has been stopped in her tracks, seen a vision, perhaps entered into womanhood. Certainly, as in much of her work, some sort of rite of passage seems to be happening. The image seems strangely silent, as if the girls are frozen mid-gesture. The charred and fallen tree in the background seems ominous, like a broken gateway.

As with all her recent work the use of materials speak as much of a delight in the sensuous world as her imaginative one. She enjoys the textures and colours of plants and fabrics – and how that can be recreated in art. The challenge of blending fabrics and objects into a painting continues to intrigue her. It is not just an engaging but a haunting picture, it also a complex one.

But why send it to auction? Any gallery here would gladly show the painting and there are many collectors here who would rush to buy it.

When I moved to Asia a few years ago one thing that surprised me, indeed shocked me, was the way many artists in the region made works specifically to sell at auction, for Sotheby’s, Christies or one of the local houses. Old colleagues in the London auction houses confirmed that they would still not accept anything direct from the artist’s studio, or via their dealer’s gallery.[1]

However, eventually I came to see that perhaps Asia just has different ways of doing things. Here Sotheby’s and Christies have been much more active in creating an art market – indeed one could argue that they have to a great extent actively created that market. In an area as diverse and as dispersed as Asia and with so few good magazines or museums there was a vacuum that needed to be filled: how else were artists to be validated as “good” or “important” or “valuable”? One can also note that with there being so few museums or kunsthallen in the region, and no decent magazines, auctions offer a much needed international opportunity to see art works.

As Geraldine herself said to me when I first asked her about this, “The auctions helped give me an international context. A couple of years before my first participation in the auctions[2] I already had sold-out shows (NOT sell-out shows I hasten to add) here in Manila and I think I was one of the fortunate artists who was able to earn a living from my art even though I was just starting. However, a source of frustration for me was the lack of opportunities to show abroad except for VWFA (Valentine Willie Fine Art) who wasn’t deterred from showing my works particularly in Kuala Lumpur despite the obvious lack of “Filipino identity” in my works, which I know is the prerequisite for inclusion in major group exhibitions abroad. Biennales and that sort of thing I know I’ll never be included in as they have a tendency to snub painters and artists with an existing market.

“So in a way the auctions have opened up for me and other artists in similar situations a chance or a stage on which to be to be shown alongside works of artists in other regions.”[3]

This is one factor that has made the art market in Asia very different from that in Europe. How does it affect artists? At its worst, it is clear and well known that certain Chinese artists employ assistants to make examples of their work: there is no need for them to innovate as many collectors, especially the ill-informed ones, feel happier buying works that look very like what other collectors have already bought. They want a painting by YZ or a sculpture by WX much as they want a watch by Phillipe Patek or a suit by Armani. They want brands that can be recognised and that will therefore impress people.

For others like her it is a challenge. How to stand out in the visual pot pourri that an auction exhibition inevitably is?

But is it any different to an English artist showing in the Royal Academy? The weirdest experience of my time in the UK was going to the Summer Show there for the first time in many years and finding it full of my contemporaries friends and ex-students. Even if Michael Craig-Martin has had the walls coloured in odd, bright colours it still remains a visual pot-pourri – and with no false modesty about money for the prices are listed in the catalogue!

Room VII at Royal Academy Summer Show. The two screen-prints by Craig-Martin are priced at 3,000 pounds each – edition of 35. The vitrine is by Anselm Kiefer and officially not for sale but everything else in view has a price listed.

It’s nice to speak to you all again. I hope your summer was kind to you. See you next week

Tony

  1. The Damien Hirst sales remain exceptional.

  2. Between 2005 and 2011 she put ten works directly into auctions. This is the first time since then she has done so.

  3. Email to me July 31st 2011.