Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

educational attainment. That's why disc jockeys commonly make fun of rad io callers who speak English with native accents. I also loved drawi ng at an early age. As a ch ild, the first pictures I drew were characters from the very available DC and Marvel comics. My favourite character was Robin and my elder brother played the role of Batman . A figu re was good if it was of comic-book proportions. Not realising it, this has become my standard for figu re drawing. I became one of the artists i n our ultra-conservative, Cathol ic, al l-boys school run by Italian priests. Our model saint was a fourteen-year old boy n amed Dominic Savio who refused to eat with people who did not bother to say grace to the Lo rd . Being a pious student, I copied images of the saints and scenes from the Bible. Eventually, I went to Manila, the centre, to study col lege. Entering the University of the Philippi nes College of Fine Arts was easy. All that training with comics and portraits of pop personalities surely paid off. I d idn't have problems drawing the plaster copies of classica l statues like the Discus-Thrower, the Dying Gladiator, the Wrestlers and Venus de Milo. But I was baffled when it came to statue of the Oblation, a masterpiece by our own national artist, Gu illermo Tolenti no. I had a hard time d rawing the more roundish face and shorter proportion of this scul pture. I realised I was an aspiring Filipino artist who couldn't do a Filipino figure. 1 983 was a turbulent year. I was seventeen and Marcos was still the country's president. The economy was in a slump. Si nce the assassination of Marcos's arch political rival Benigno Aquino J r. , everything seemed uncerta in. Prices soared . Graduating was a gloomy prospect, because we couldn't afford art materials anymore . I t was a t ime for rebellion . Visually, we were d rawn into g raffiti art . American abstract expressionism was also a very attractive outlet of our rage and discontent. The music and fashion in vogue was punk. We were slamming and screaming at the establishment with Sid Vicious songs, studs, chains and anarchy emblems . Then came the People Power revolution of 1 986. I was a little older. Twenty years old and joining a street party in EDSA that would oust a twenty yea r-old administration. An entire l ife for me; a revolution for my generation . And when Cory Aquino stepped in as the next president, we were supposed t o be free. Condemned to be free. Obl iged to chart our own futu re. In a way, twenty years under a strict and domineering father was a convenient excuse for not growing up. Coming home from the party, the revolution was not fun anymore. Suddenly, we had to ask: Who a re we? What do we want for ourselves? I nteresting how the numbers recu r. There was a lso a revol ution in 1 896, almost a hundred years before. It suddenly acqu i red a new meaning to us. It was the year wh ich ignited a fullscale war against 300 years of Spanish colonisation. It was also an insurrection i nspired by some of our great thinkers; one of whom was Dr Jose Rizal. In his essay called , 'The Philippines a Century Hence' he wrote: Then began a new era for the Filipi nos; little by little they lost thei r own traditions, the mementos of their past; they gave up their writing , their songs, their poems, their laws in order to learn by rote other doctrines which they did not understand , another morality, another aesthetics different from those inspired by their climate and their manner of thinki ng . Then they decl i ned, degrad ing themselves in their own eyes; they became ashamed of what was their own ; they began to admire and praise whatever was foreign and incomprehensible; their spi rit was dismayed and it surrendered . 1 2 1