The Artists Junyee: Mother Nature’s Son

It promises to be another benchmark in the life and times of the artist Junyee, the unveiling this Earth Day morning of his exhibit "Angud, a forest once" on CCP grounds. Junyee, or Luis Yee Jr., describes the installation piece—which gathers thousands of angud or the dispensable piece of a cut log where a hole had been drilled for hauling—as a "graveyard" or mute witness to years of illegal logging, thus representing the evidence of our abuse of nature.

The idea for the outdoor piece was germinating in Junyee’s mind for two to three years, including countless trips to Quezon province for research and actual mingling with loggers and furniture cooperatives down to the gathering of the angud on 10-wheeler trucks, but the artist’s concern for the environment has been a life-long advocacy, being a country boy at heart.

The Butuan-born Junyee was raised in a farm and learned to swim as a young boy in the Agusan river, and in Alice Guillermo’s book "Image to Meaning" (Ateneo de Manila Press, 2001) is described as a pioneer not only in the Philippines but in the Southeast Asian region in the use of indigenous materials, and how he is able to subtly incorporate the aspect of the spiritual in his work.

"From the beginning, Junyee (b. 1942) embarked on a brave and path-breaking mission, refusing to be held captive by the art market... According to him, ‘the environment shapes culture and this is best shown in art through installations making use of indigenous materials from the natural surroundings and found objects, as well as artifacts from our social setting,’" Guillermo writes in her essay.

In that light "Angud" seems to have arrived just in time in our age of global warming, toxic spills and the thinning ozone layer, climate change and mudflow burying entire towns.

The act of protest, or at least Junyee’s act of protest, began late one afternoon in the year 1970, outside an apartment off Diliman campus, when the UP Fine Arts student put to the torch all his valuables—books, citizenship papers, diplomas, art materials —as a way of starting over or, in his words, "to start unlearning" all that he learned in college.

"To this day, I remember that day as one of the happiest in my life," he says, adding that all that he kept were three pairs of pants and some personal effects for hygiene, like a toothbrush. Today he still keeps three pairs of pants. Not the same ones, of course, although it is possible that given his trim figure he could still fit into the old ones.

It was also in Diliman that he had his first exhibit, "Trellis," an interactive installation work that had participants contributing sundry pieces to hang on the trellis he had set up in the then vacant lot in front of the Sampaguita ladies’ dorm.

Junyee was art director of the Philippine Collegian, then edited by Oscar Yabes, when martial law was declared, and the artist saw fit to complete his break from the mainstream, taking to the mountains for two years and not once reading any newspaper or picking up an art material. The artist is silent if he became a political renegade, but Junyee somehow wound up on the foothills of Makiling, there to make a home in UP Los Baños, where he would found the UP system’s first art gallery in Sining Makiling, and help oversee the forthcoming centennial celebrations of the university next year.

But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves, indeed leapfrogging over too many anguds, because in LB Junyee’s exciting metaphysical indigenous journey may have just started.

To wit, it was in 1980 when Junyee rejected the 13 artists award handed out by the CCP and the martial law administration, in protest of the "elitist" orientation of the CCP then geared more on the performing arts, and as a gesture to push for the "democratization" of the Cultural Center, to make it possible for even high school students and no-name artists to exhibit there so long as they have a proposal and sound art ideas backed up by more solid execution.

"I just told Ray Albano, who is my friend, to just give the money meant for the award to help finance a workshop in Los Baños focused on installation," Junyee tells STARweek in an interview at the CCP office of Sid Hildawa, visual arts and exhibits director, days before the unveiling of Angud, whose major sponsor is the Metrobank Foundation and with supporting artists Orlina and Fil dela Cruz and collaborating artists Toti Uysingco, Hermisanto and Gerry Inco.

The LB workshop ran for a couple of years, maybe three, and had among its participants Santi Bose and Robert Villanueva, Baguio-based shamans who took the art form to the outer limits and have since departed to the great installation in the sky.

Junyee recalls that he felt exhausted afterwards, being like the lone (art) ranger in Los Baños, and told Santi and co. to continue the good work (shop) in Baguio, which henceforth metamorphosed into the Baguio Arts Guild and thereafter the Baguio Arts Festival, since "marami naman sila ro’n."

Meanwhile Junyee continued to confound the critics, astound the academicians in their ivory towers with his unconventional set pieces, the first of these entitled "Wood things" in the CCP Small Gallery, on the invitation of Albano, consisting of handcrafted imaginary insects made of kapok, banana leaf and stalk, crawling on the once gleaming white walls.

"Even this wood thing is in tune with the seasons, because it can only be made after the rainy season when the kapok is harvested," he says, noting that the porcupine-like creation that has also been transposed to another work, "Unpath," brings good luck.

"Unpath," which discombobulated a corner of the Pinaglabanan art gallery in the 1980s, was in a manner of speaking an ars poetica: "Lahat ng pinasukan ko walang trail, it’s a little bit on the romantic side."

If there are wood things, there are also "city things," an installation exhibit hatched in Japan in the 1990s based on easily disposable but still functional "garbage" of the Japanese —such as transistor radios and washing machines.

But as far as autobiography is concerned, then one has to look at "Luminous Being," part of a trilogy of art works exhibited in the GSIS Building in Pasay in 2000, and which for the critic Guillermo represented a shifting of gears towards a more spiritual concern.

"According to the artist, this work was inspired by his experience of an ‘apparition’ that he encountered during a walk at sea, an effulgent vision exuding a presence fusing nature and the numinous that continues to haunt his dreams. He says that the unforgettable sight made him shed the natural egoism of humans who think that they are the only existing beings. Why cannot other beings exist as well?" writes Guillermo.

I thought at first it was a la Carlos Castañeda and his Yaqui way of peyote knowledge with Don Juan, until I heard it straight from the artist himself: "I was in 2nd year high school on boy scout bivouac between sea and forest, and was alone on graveyard shift watch after my partner got stung by a wasp in the eye. There was this shimmering light coming from the coconut fronds above and when I looked toward the seashore, I saw this little luminous man walking."

When the young scout tried reporting what he saw, he at first got scolded by the scout master and became the laughing stock of his fellow scouts, until a team went out to investigate and saw little footsteps by the shore that disappeared as soon as they began, as if the luminous being had momentarily tried the feeling of sand on bare feet before being beamed up again to who-knows-where.

And just as suddenly thousands of angud will be on the CCP lawns, after the artist spent months going to and from the towns of Infanta, Nakar, Real, in Quezon, befriending the furniture makers and foresters who at first thought he was a government agent.

He initially offered them three pesos per angud, which was ignored. Finally P10 per angud was agreed on, and for a while it seemed like a rain of wood after he made the downpayment. Haulers had to secure permits from the DENR in anticipation of numerous inquisitive checkpoints (trabaho lang!) along the highway to Manila.

Junyee, who to this day maintains a home in Los Baños because he cannot be far from the forest, says the exhibit’s message may be bleak but he hopes to end it on a bright note. At twilight of earth day is a dance performance around the installation, to cap the day’s celebrations in keeping with the artist’s own philosophy that one is most open to another dimension at dusk, it’s not called agaw-dilim for nothing.

"When I say spiritual I don’t mean religious," Junyee, who admits not being able to pick a flower off a stem because he can hear the plant cry, says. "We must not take more than we need because that would be abuse of nature."

If man is half-spirit, as Junyee says, then satisfaction can be derived not only on the physical plain. "We must save some part for the other half."

Junyee though admits that it will take some doing before people finally realize the damage being done and change course. "It’s like a huge ship that must change direction very slowly. These things take time," he says, hoping that Angud, like all the other installations he has done, is a step in the right and luminous unpath.