Times & Tides: A Story Of Two Friends

The sea. How can it not be the sea?

When you gaze at Juvenal Sanso’s mural mounted on the wall of the lobby of the newly inaugurated SMX Convention Center beside the SM Mall of Asia, you stare at an unembellished, almost naked truth about living in a country surrounded by water: life is fluid, always changing, much like the advancing or receding tides at sea that move in synch with the cyclic rising and falling of the oceans.

“In Brittany (also a seaside town in Northeastern France),” writes Sanso in his column in The STAR on the day his mural was unveiled at the grand opening of the convention center, “you can revisit the same spot again and again and find an ever-changing landscape.”

The mural “Tides of Fortune,” at 6.5 x 2.5 meters and by far Sanso’s largest artwork, is reflective of how life changes with the seasons. In the artist’s own words, the artwork was inspired by no less than water, past summers, secret gardens, landscapes and seascapes, people and places and colors of the currents of life.

But how Sanso’s largest mural came to be mounted at what is now the largest convention center in the country beside Asia’s largest mall is the more interesting story.

Known to only perhaps but a few until recently, Henry Sy Sr., founder of the SM Group, and Sanso were childhood friends. It is, Sanso says, a “beautiful, beautiful, cloudless friendship.”

But how did a “Kastila” and an “Intsik” ever bond and form a most enduring friendship?

“I said last night (at the unveiling of the mural) and I’m going to repeat it:  We are sons of immigrants. Without really thinking about it there was mutual sympathy that we are doing well in our adopted country,” he says. “My father never talked of going back to Spain. My father was buried here, my mother was buried here. I went to study abroad but I always came back.”

It is the same with the Sys who were Chinese immigrants who did very well in the country and made the Philippines their home. 

The Sansos arrived in the Philippines from Spain in 1934 when the young Sanso was at the age “when boys are at their naughtiest.” Even now, Sanso says the whole Sy family always teases him and he always teases back.

The elder Sanso, a sculptor, quickly established a wrought iron business called Arte Espanol. 

“We have a store on Echague St. not far from the Quiapo area. There was a small street that separated our store and the Sy’s store. So, we were store neighbors until the war,” Sanso recalls.

There were, of course, pandays in Manila before the Sansos arrived but it was the elder Sanso who brought in the idea of artistic wrought iron.

“Business was doing very, very well but the war destroyed everything,” he recounts.

And it was during the war years that tides of fortune first turned for the two friends.

“We needed to leave Manila because everything was burning. We went to Montalban as refugees. Back then it was very far from Manila, it was the moon. We had nothing left – no house, no business. We lived in a bahay kubo.”

And because money was scarce and the elder Sanso refused to collaborate with the Japanese, the family bought two horses and converted it into a karitela to transport people.

“I was the dispatcher and I was around 13,” Sanso recalls.

After the war, gasoline was back in the market and the horses and the karitela were worth nothing. So, the elder Sanso, ever the entrepreneur, put together trucks and cars and made the first bus running from Sta. Ana to Plaza Miranda in Quiapo.

“I became the bus conductor,” he says. “The first trip was always a disaster because people will hang on to the bus railings like bananas because there was no other transportation. And the last trip was even worse because people will latch on to the bus to catch the last ride.”

At this time, his friend Henry was also rebuilding his own life with his family. While things were still smoking around Manila, Sy was already starting his shoe business and drugstores.

“We had this experience of confronting life at the roughest...I was working the whole day and there was little socializing. But of course when he had more money, it was a joy finding Henry again. We had picnics in Montalban, we would go bowling, badminton, mahjong. The house was always open to him and the future Mrs. Henry Sy,” he recalls of the friendship after the war.

Soon, the road diverged for the two young men. While Sy was on to building his business empire, Sanso was destined for another path.

“For our business, my father wanted me to learn how to draw. There was a gentleman who was very, very kind, a master painter who went to our home with some samples of his paintings but he didn’t like them. But anyway he said ‘Why don’t you teach my son how to draw?’ And that was his biggest mistake,” he laughs.

The first breakthrough he had at painting, he recalls now, is that while still a teenager and a student, he won what was then the most prestigious art competition in the country. He won two first prizes in a row, not even 12 months apart, for his works entitled “The Sorcerer” and “Incubus.”

“It was very, very great honor for me,” he says. “They could have said, why give it to him, he was a foreigner and he was only a teenager. So that prize was very meaningful for me.”

Shortly after, he left to study abroad.

“Manila was like Nagasaki then. There were no libraries, no museums, nothing. So you have to study abroad to go to the museums to see the great arts. My mother said, leave for a year then go back.”

His sojourn abroad lasted 50 years – almost a lifetime – but he always came back.

“When I came back and started exhibiting at what was then the newly born Luz Gallery and I remember my father was in tears. I was no longer what others thought I was – a clown,” he says, revealing that he always felt guilty for not being able to help in the family business.

“It’s painful because you feel you have not given back what you have been given. And I think so too of the Philippines. And I always come back to give back what was given to me, if not more than what was expected,” he says.

“I study all the time. In Europe, you just don’t snap your fingers and you’ve got a career made for you.”

In one of those homecomings in the 1960s, his friend Henry lent him the whole floor of one of their buildings in Makati, which is now the parking lot of Rustan’s Makati, for his one-man show.

“That was a smashing success,” he recalls. “It was sponsored by the Shell company and some people were really throwing checks at me.”

Then when SM Megamall was constructed, he had 16 shows at the same time in 16 galleries. It was another smashing hit that it gave birth to the Artwalk and Art Center. There was also a one-man show of 1,000 of his works at the former Aguinaldo Building, also in Makati.

“The beautiful, beautiful thing about our friendship of course for me is we’ve gone from one generation to the next with as much friendship. To me was a great, great wonderful thing, so absolutely good, I would say ‘cloudless,’” he says.

Henry’s son Hans, who is president of SM Prime Holdings, has the biggest collection of Sanso’s in the world.

It was of course Hans who approached the great artist about painting a mural for the P1.8-billion SMX Convention Center.

“I told Hans, look I’m 77 now, I don’t want to be keeping you from opening the center. Hans said no, you do it your way we will just wait and we will just have a blank on the wall. I don’t want to rush it and I don’t want to rush my work and I won’t do it because I won’t do my best work if I’m anguished that I’m not finishing up. They said no, no, no, take your time,” Sanso recalls of the deal.

Admittedly it’s such a big piece to work on such a short period. Sanso, however, was a trained muralist, having studied mural painting in Paris. Two of his other murals are mounted at the LKG Building and the San Miguel Building in Makati.

He says though that mural painting does represent many problems. “But because it was an affectionate wish, I said how can I say no? It was a beautiful challenge, though I cannot be rushed. If I sign it, it has to be as good as I can make it.”

Later on, he says it was such a wonderful feeling that doing the mural really went very fast – three months. When the SMX convention Center was opened to the public, it was a beautiful evening and the artist was in tears. Asked what it is that made him a very successful artist, he says: “I dared.”

“I’ve done everything upside down for my career. It doesn’t look like it now but really I dared by not following conventional paths because probably I also do not have conventional needs,” he says.

And that could be true as well for his friend who also “dared” and blazed so many paths in Philippine business.

“In Europe it was very, very tough, but I kept on going. I dared leave the family business and there are many temptations to make easy money like textile designing,” he says. “For a time it allowed me to ‘eat food with more vitamins.’ But you become a slave of it and life had no more sense. Then one day, I said, no more textile designing. Fortunately I had enough saved to buy a little studio. I have written my parents and my sister that I bought an apartment.”

What he didn’t tell them was that the place was a rundown little atelier for making fur coats. So, it was not really an apartment, but it had a skyline and was very cheap but had no toilets, no heating, no nothing but the walls.

“I was so happy I had my own place and one day I was going home and I heard someone calling me by my nickname here in the Philippines – Juvy. I turned around and my good old friend Henry said he wants to see my apartment. Kakahiya. I was sleeping on a mattress on a broken brick floor,” he recounts.

 Henry, of course, said nothing and took his friend to dinner. But when he came back to Manila he told his parents, “It took so much to hold my tears seeing how Juvy lives in Europe.”

But the tides of fortune have changed and are forever changing. Life is an ever-changing landscape.