The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

51 ARTISTS Transfusion 2017 Mixed media / 152 x 122cm / Collection: Jonathan Kue / Image courtesy: The artist Born 1979, Baguio City, the Philippines Lives and works in Baguio City Kawayan de Guia was raised in Baguio City in the Philippines’s mountainous Cordillera region, far from the sprawling capital Manila. This remote city of pine trees and houses clinging precariously to hilltops was one of the last regions in the Philippines to be colonised by the Spanish and reached by Catholic missionaries. Its indigenous people, the Ifugao, remain a strong influence on the region’s art and culture. 1 At the end of President Marcos’s regime in the 1980s, Baguio City became an important alternative art centre when a number of artists settled in the area and formed the Baguio Arts Guild. 2 Established in 1987, the Guild was known internationally for challenging Western-centric narratives and re-evaluating indigenous art forms. Guild artists, including Santiago Bose (1949–2002), Roberto Villanueva (1947–95), and de Guia’s father Kidlat Tahimik (b.1942), mentored de Guia at a formative stage of his career as an artist. Baguio and its Cordilleran culture are infused in de Guia’s art. He describes the city as a unique melting pot, where ancient cultures, American consumerism and cosmopolitan, European influences coexist. 3 Many of its contradictions are embodied in his own practice, which crosses easily between installation, painting, works on paper, wall-based assemblages and community art projects that take place outside traditional art spaces. 4 In addition, a number of his works are direct responses to local histories and the environment. For example, Bomba 2010, an installation of suspended mirror–mosaic torpedos, alludes to bombs discovered in the forest, a hangover of US annexation and battles with the Japanese during World War Two. Dap-Ay: Reflected Dialogues (A Baguio Unarchive) 2017 recreates the Cordilleran people's story-circles, in which indigenous elders gather to pass on wisdom. These works are indicative of the clashes involving colonial, historical and Western influences, and local practices and histories in Baguio — an ongoing interest for de Guia. For APT9, de Guia exhibits a group of ‘wallbound‘ mixed media works. Assemblages of painting, drawing and found objects, they are based around a loosely gridded flat surface — an idea inspired by the Ifugao elder Mumbaki, who saves elements from completed rituals in compartmentalised boxes. The artist describes his working process as a form of appropriation, starting with an image and building a narrative, then incorporating other materials, images and techniques until a story appears. 5 De Guia’s objects, however, are not ritualistic, instead comprising found, converted and personal artefacts, often with a collective resonance. Curator Rifky Effendy has described them as ‘new relics’, a term referring to the transfer of meaning that takes place when the objects converge with other symbols, histories and icons. 6 For example, organic items, such as animal bones, leaves, twigs and the Ifugao bulol (carved rice god figures) are juxtaposed with kitsch tourist items, including Mickey Mouse figurines, garden gnomes and cowboy hats, to create a complex crisscrossing narrative. Kawayan de Guia’s subtle and often humorous methods allow him to comment on a multitude of significant issues, from the histories of occupation, trade and exchange that have influenced Philippine history and culture, to the relationships between community and commodities in our contemporary world. As curator Patrick D Flores has written: Kawayan is an innate bricoleur . . . who sees in objects the potential of their being entangled in a web of other objects . . . He is also keen on configuring a spiritual world . . . [daring] to mix the indigenous and metaphysical, the shamanistic and existential . . . In this temperament that fuses the rough with the ethereal and the improvised with the finessed, a complex expression comes to the fore. 7 Abigail Bernal Endnotes 1 The Ifugao are especially known for their skilled woodcarving. 2 A number of these artists featured in earlier APTs. De Guia has also taken on other roles — mentor, curator, historian and writer (for local projects). 3 Kawayan de Guia, interview with Abigail Bernal, Brisbane, 9 March 2018. 4 This includes his Halsema AX(i)S Art Project 2012. 5 Kawayan de Guia, interview. 6 Rifky Effendy, ‘Kawayan de Guia’, Jakarta Contemporary Ceramics Biennale 2016 , 19 November 2016, <https://jakartacontemporaryceramic. wordpress.com/2016/11/19/kawayan-de-guia-the-philippines/ >, viewed June 2018. 7 Patrick D Flores, Kawayan de Guia: Bomba [exhibition leaflet], The Vargas Museum and The Drawing Room, Manila, 2010, accessed via Asia Art Archive , <https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/library/kawayan-de- guia-bomba>, viewed June 2018. KAWAYAN DE GUIA