Whether we think of water as an inert mass, as a still pond or shimmering sea viewed from a distance, or as an active force, gurgling past as rivulet or stream or river, we recognize it as a horizontal element.
Of course we also imagine a cascade, and stand daily under a shower head welcoming the habit of cleansing force, or hunker down before a tap slowly dripping the precious liquid into a pail at the head of a line in a shanty town.
Indeed, water is naturally vertical; nature dispenses it as rain that falls on our heads and parched land. That it seeks its own level is but a curtsey to gravity. Its downward movement need not be stressed.
In a strangely shaped painting, acrylic on canvas, measuring a long 244 centimeters as against a narrow 17 centimeters, Lao Lianben chooses to depict his illumination of “Water” in a thin, vertical mode. Just above center is an inner frame or strip where the primary configuration suggests the subject as an undulating tail, wiggling downwards, until it reaches a nadir and surprisingly starts to curve up, veritably like a hook.
Here is the Zen quality to the artist’s life work. He partitions space as if there is so much of it and nothing much need be done to allocate its parts to a sense of that horror vacui that is the usual contagion among our households.
To have a Lao artwork grace a room is to deliver that space from clutter. That is the artist’s strength: he attracts collectors with a preference for inner-space contemplation.
Way back in the miid-’70s, in an interview conducted with the young Imee for the soon-to-be-defunct Ermita magazine, she gushed, as only a bright ingenue just back from London would, about the white-on-white series Lao Lianben had mounted for a one-man exhibit. “He’s so Zen,” Imee enthused.
Checking out the gallery resulted in immediate captivity between bewilderment and bemusement. Now why would a painter prime his canvases with the traditional white paint, and then simply layer it with more white paint? Why, how primal.
Lao has since rendered various other manipulations of aesthetic considerations, in terms of muted colors, minimalist forms, quizzical shapes, and that layering of AND through space that has been his trademark. His patent evidently suggests a thinking man not given to sheer emotion, but rather the sheer effrontery of private discernment, meditation, quiet epiphany.
Beginning in November of last year, Lao Lianben’s works were displayed at the Ateneo Art Gallery for close to three months, offering not only a retrospective array of cerebral art pieces, but indeed an introspective revelation of how an artist can so command, as the show’s title stated, “Passion & Compassion: A Collector’s View.”
All of the artworks came from the private collection of Dr. Leovino Ma. Garcia, former dean of the Ateneo’s School of Humanities. The compassionate collector’s passion is manifested even beyond this temporary loan of an elegant, edifying treasure trove. It shows most in the attendant publication of a large, attractive coffee-table book bearing the exhibit’s title — its 72 thickset pages laden with nearly as many works by Lao in full color, with Garcia providing equally minimalist text that glows with secret effusion.
In recounting how he began the collection in the early ’90s, when he finally acquired a place of his own, he writes:
“It helped that Lao’s paintings expressed in images the insights I tried to promote in my philosophy classes — the ability to see with new eyes, to see as if for the first time. How is this done?
“One begins by being honest with oneself. At a first glance, one does not know what to make of a Lao painting. ‘What does it mean?’ (Does it have to mean anything?) One needs to be patient. One has to admit: ‘I do not know what it means.’ There comes a moment in experiencing Lao’s work when one has to set aside all preconceived ideas on its meaning. One must approach Lao’s works without presuppositions, without rules, without fanfare; but with fun, joy, innocence. One only has to look, see with new eyes, see as if for the first time.”
The virgin says hi to tabula rasa, then, with nary a blush, and tames the unicorn that is the eternal mythical question posed by such a one as T.S. Eliot. Except here the Asian quality of inscrutability ups the ante for cogitation.
When the koan that is a Lao work finally rings that bell tone, whether pentatonic or as hum of inscape, yes, one will know — if the title the artist gave the work earned its keep, or the other way around, the work gaining ground on the words as synthesizing caption. Or, and it is always a big OR, if the beholder can lay claim to his own territorial imperative, having gleaned in the work something else that his third eye espied.
I am reminded of premier poet Cirilo F. Bautista’s critical discourse on the three supposed sovereignties: those of the artist’s, the reader/beholder’s, and of the work itself. Should a poem or painting or musical piece find a variety of stakeholders, then that is not discord but happy convergence.
In Lao’s works, whether the brushstroke is of genius or one that harks back in all ironic novelty to ancestral calligraphy, there is no denying that the artist’s own claims to passion and compassion can only elicit a similarly engaged response.
This is why — in this handsomest of monographs that I’ve seen in a long while — access is readily granted with the prefatory note that it revolves “around the works of Lao Lianben, one of the country’s leading exponents of abstract art,” and that “‘Passion and Compassion,’ which Dr. Garcia also curates, traces the fruitful encounter and interaction between painting and philosophy, vision and discourse, imagination and thought.”
Simply put, Lao’s distinctive art makes us think and reflect. As does Dr. Leo’s articulate exegesis:
“To paint a landscape — fields and mountains — the painter steeped in the Western tradition sets up his easel in the open. He then begins to copy, to re-present the reality. For his part, the Asian painter comes to the scene, unburdened by his painting gear. He breathes in the cool air, listens to the chirping of birds, walks up and down the field. He may even squat to sip tea while his eyes scale the rugged outline of the mountains. Then, he trudges home, and reaching his room, closes the windows. He then paints the landscape from the eye of his imagination.
“Lao paints from the eye of his imagination. Painting from imagination, he presents, rather than re-presents, the landscape. The landscape becomes an immediate presence because it is simply evoked, seen with the eye of that creative imagination which renders visible what goes beyond the visible.”