Beyond anguish: Ang Kiukok (1931-2005)

When I learned about Ang Kiukok’s passing on May 10, the first emotion that I felt was not sadness or grief but, rather, respect and admiration for a man who lived completely.

Ang was that rare breed among Filipino visual artists, enjoying both critical acclaim and popular success for the distinctive manner in which he pictured the human condition.

His journeys in oils on canvas, collages, gouaches and inks opened our minds’ eyes to the afflictions surrounding all of us, presenting an alienated worldview that he confronted with utter stoicism. Indeed, Ang was the very embodiment of his art: A person who suffered a lot, yet did so with quiet dignity.

Few could say that they truly knew the man. He was like the sphinx: An enigma who loomed large, but hesitated to speak. I, for one, had only met this extraordinarily taciturn artist twice – both times marked by awkward handshakes and brief murmured pleasantries.

Outside of a detached appreciation of his works, most of what I knew about Ang I learned through stories narrated by his close associates, and through books: Kiukok Drawings, with an introductory essay by Emmanuel Torres (1975); Ang Kiukok: The Artist and His Works by Esperanza Bunag Gatbonton (1991); and Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair by Alfredo Roces (2000), the last two published by his most ardent admirer, the collector Paulino Que.

Among these volumes, I found Gatbonton’s to be the most informative. It was from here that I discovered, among other things, the full meaning of the artist’s given name. Born March 1, 1931, the only son of immigrants from Fujian province who settled in Davao, Ang Kiu Kok (the latter two names translate as "Save the Country") underwent the travails typical of progeny of hua-chi’ao families whose fortunes in the dry goods trade rose and fell through war and peacetime. Expectedly, Ang’s foray into a professional career in the arts was met with resistance, his father only agreeing to support his studies in Manila after recognizing the earnestness with which he pursued his craft. (It is worth noting how the son’s later success, culminating in commercial triumph and the supreme accolade of National Artist in 2001, exemplifies the importance given by the Filipino-Chinese to struggling early in life in order to reap future rewards).

Enrolling at the University of Santo Tomas, Ang studied under the tutelage of the early modernists Victorio Edades, Diosdado Lorenzo, and Galo Ocampo. But it was the neo-realist Vicente Manansala who took the novice under his wing, and grew to become the aspiring artist’s foremost inspiration, his figurative and later semi-abstract style, subject matter and compositional techniques closely mirroring that of his teacher.

Ang’s treatment of subject-matter during those early years was either realistically straightforward or showed aspects of Manansala’s transparent cubism: Characterized by the reduction of natural appearances to their bare essentials or geometrical equivalents, and by the emphasis on formal structure without regard for illusionary depth.

It would be through years of iteration and exposure – foremost of these, a first time trip to New York City in 1965 where he saw, and was profoundly moved by, Pablo Picasso’s "Guernica" at the Museum of Modern Art – that Ang was able to refine his technique and develop a visual vocabulary, which, although growing more akin to the Mexican Rufino Tamayo, was still delivered in a unique voice, a quintessential style that led to his being recognized as a pioneering exponent of Philippine Expressionism, a manner of painting which put greater stress on what was felt about subject-matter than on how it appeared.

The idiom that Ang gradually developed alluded to his growing, albeit still sublimated, social and ethical concerns, e.g. the mechanization and dehumanization of urban life, a cutting expressive idiom marked by sharp angles, pointed, thorny shapes, and abrupt demarcations creating bleak spaces.

The quantity of artworks that Ang produced during a career that spanned over half a century is considerable, although these may be easily grouped into five major genres, which may further be broken down when seen as a series of variations on recurring images: Human figures (including the "Androids," "Lovers," and perhaps the only glitch in his career, the ill-considered "Clown" series), animals (cats, dogs, birds, cocks, fish), landscapes (the early barung-barongs, "junkscapes," "cosmoscapes," doorways, windows), still lifes (potted plants, cacti, fruits, bottles, table arrangements), and the Crucified Christ.

Human Figures

In my opinion, Ang’s paintings of embracing nude couples, remarkably enough, arrived at quite late in his creative sojourn, stand out in his body of works depicting the human figure, joined only by the shattering brilliance of "Man on Fire" (1980), an icon that has been seared indelibly into the collective memory.

"Lovers" (1985) and (1991) best exemplify this idée fixe: Elements of pathos and urgent necessity are seen in their tightly knit composition. Here, the intimacy of sexual desire is heightened amidst the stark background, while eroticism seems enveloped if not altogether sublimated by the biomorphic elegance of coupling forms – aesthetic intent achieving perfect union with human concupiscence.

Animals

It is not difficult to imagine how a studio situated in a house overrun with dogs and cats could give birth to a series of works devoted to fauna. The creatures dwelling in Ang’s bestiary, however, can never be mistaken for reticent pets. With glowering jaws, menacing stares, and sharpened nails poised for attack, the sense of foreboding brought to viewers by these beasts of prey is unnerving, a feeling made all the more emphatic by the deadpan settings he conjures up offset by a black moon or a sanguine sun. On occasion, however the artist would present a more benign side to his temperament, producing a rare, if somewhat surreal, grinning stray.

Owing perhaps to his Chinese heritage, fish remained his most enduring animal leitmotif. Dating from 1959, "Mudfish" shows his masterly skill in traditional Chinese brush painting. In evidence are a finely tuned arrangement of linear rhythm and a predilection for asymmetrical balance. The circle as visual punctuation mark to bring a focal sense of order and emphasis makes an early entrance in this watercolor, a compositional device that would remain even as the fish began to mutate as years passed into the freakishly bony creatures served up on many of Ang’s canvases.

Landscapes

Like a mountain range looming over an open plain, a collapsed, heavily riveted steel frame piled on top of, and nearly filling, an unknown vista – an ingenious interplay of mass and space – dominates some of the most memorable of Ang’s depictions of the urban milieu, the "junkscapes."

Futuristic in atmosphere, they rank among the artist’s most powerful images: Depictions of what might rightly be perceived as the aftermath of an industrial holocaust, a cold and disturbingly bleak picture of the hegemony of human contrivance over creation.

Still Lifes

The essence of modern painting is fidelity to the two-dimensional quality of the pictorial surface. Foreground and background meld. While line, form, color and texture take precedence over figurative exactitude.

Ang best expressed this idiom in his still lifes, where the shapes of fruits, bottles and potted plants become visual notes masterfully orchestrated into harmonious conceits.

A black grid imposes order upon a brooding tabletop arrangement in "Still Life with Bottle" (1957) Set against a textured plane of gray, these grids become more articulated in "Still Life with Bottle and Fish" (1960), whose stark linearity provides a perfect foil to the bony remains of a meal.

Subtleties of composition acquire a more vivid form of Cubist expression in later works. "Brown Window" (1975) literally breathes life into stasis: See how the spiky plant disrupts the orthogonal order of the painting.

In the more recent works such as "Still Life with Red Cloth" (1992), the artist boldly uses repetitions and variations of triangles, rectangles and circles to hold a precarious arrangement in place.

Crufified Christ

Without doubt, Ang received widest acclaim for his tortuously pained renditions of the crucified Christ – "Crucifixed" (1977) being among these.

The title immediately evokes the brutality heaped upon the seemingly hapless Savior, a revolting conglomeration of the symbols of the Passion on His Person: Spearheads, spiked whip ends, nails, the crown of thorns.

The scene is rightly apprehended as oppression embodied; yet it is also resistance so masterfully visualized. Faceless and emaciated, viewers empathize with the figure of Christ who, having been buffeted by the darkness of human cruelty, still strives to maintain man’s innate dignity as Son of God. With His ossified pallor, accordion-like impacted torso, and entwined legs, what impresses viewers is Christ’s stolid insistence to emerge from the seemingly inescapable forms and masses surrounding Him – a sentiment starkly expressed by the artist’s use of opposing monochromes within a supremely balanced composition.

Cast in this light, the work may be seen to defy the long accepted view that the art of Ang is one of despair: "that his visions begin and end on Good Friday, with no prospect of ever seeing Easter." Thus charged with hope, the painting shows us there is no reason for sadness and that, in the end, "Angst, An(g)xiety, Anguish, and Anger" are futile emotions.

The artist may have passed on but, in truth, he remains because his creations endure.

Through his life’s work, Ang Kiukok shall continue to be exalted.

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