A Cup of Rice: Tea Set Series, 2019-2020
Antique bone china teacups, saucers, china plates, and silverware, placed on antique tea cart. Teacups, saucers and plates decorated with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce in different dilutions with water to achieve varying shades of brown. The raw dried rice is then baked at 250° F for 30 minutes in order for the pigments to stick to the rice grains. It is then cooled off and dried overnight before use.
Silverware contains cut-outs of printed images of Eskinol skin whitening toner.
These objects that had been excavated from Antique Markets and now had been re-appropriated with Basmati Rice that had been stained with Filipino Soy Sauce is the act of tracing the colonial patterns to be covered, replacing colonial aesthetics to mimic the detailed tactile Filipino Indigenous Mark-Makings found in textiles and body tattoos. The origin of tea drinking goes as far back to the 3rd AD in China, during the Chinese Tang dynasty. I expressed this information to the fact that now in popular culture it had been appropriated as a British Colonial practice of Afternoon Tea to act out elite Patriarchal entitlement. This acts from past histories of acquiring the practices, objects and lands from these colonized spaces is important to be reminded of the power dynamics and effects of colonialism that still lingers in our current times, that normalized our knowing and understandings of these antiques and objects that inhabits our daily rituals.
Balikbayan Tea Cart, 2019-2020
Antique late Victorian, early Edwardian tea cart decorated with white text “Balikbayan” (English: To Return to the Country), as well as images derived from Manapul’s unique, hybrid, gay porn cut-outs, and whitewashing products.
Traditional Filipino Clay Ceramics, Water Jug & Tea Set Collection, 19th Century
The installation is set to serve as what otherwise is understood as an afternoon tea service—but rather than traditional china, the artist placed a traditional Filipino water jug and tea set collection which informs the cart settings through decolonial aesthetics.
On loan by Rick & Tess Malonzo from the Malonzo Famil
Hybrid Rice Queen, 2019-2020
Digital animated GIF projected on TV Screen 4 seconds looped
This digital collage work is crafted from an animated Queerious Butterflies from homonormative male gay bodies, templates of indigenous Filipino butterflies, and a performance by the artist in the Hybrid Rice Queen paper gay porn costume.
This video installation will continue to evolve for the duration of this exhibition.
Balikbayan Bakla After Jose Honorato Lozano Series, 2020
Digital Collage: Archived Painting, Artist Selfie Silhouette, Queer Images, Filipino Text, and Balikbayan Box Template.
11 x 17 inches
Balikbayan Bading After Jose Honorato Lozano Series, 2020
Digital Collage: Archived Painting, Artist Selfie Silhouette, Queer Images, Filipino Text, and Balikbayan Box Template.
11 x 17 inches
Balikbayan Ladlad After Jose Honorato Lozano Series, 2020
Digital Collage: Archived Painting, Artist Selfie Silhouette, Queer Images, Filipino Text, and Balikbayan Box Template.
11 x 17 inches
Jose Honorato Lozano’s paintings from 19thcentury depiction of the Philippines shows Filipino Indigenous life which became part of my appropriated medium that I interrogate in my cultural belonging and unbelonging. Grappling through the painting’s problematic taxonomy studies of Indigenous exoticization and the perpetuation of the “otherness” which in turn limits the understandings of race and culture. Inserting the whitewashed silhouettes of myself from selfies taken from my iPhone thus inserts and subverts these pictorial archives that then travels through Colonial Lenses. The blank absence of myself in the image points to my distance from the representation while the presence of my outline tries to reconnect myself to what was erased and washed out from my ancestors, cultural histories and sense of unbelonging. Thus, excavating the problematics of many diasporic bodies about the erasure of a country. The Balikbayan Box is then inserted central to the image, confined while connecting the Box’s symbolism of cultural flight and exchange between Filipinos in the Philippines and Diasporic Filipinos from Western Countries. Balikbayan box is a corrugated cardboard box which is a repatriate box containing items sent by overseas Filipinos. The surface of the image is then flattened with the injection of decorative Tagalog texts, of Bakla, Bading and Ladlad which translates Gay, Fag and Openly Queer. These decorative aesthetics creates a screen between the edited narratives and the viewers, linking boundaries in the act of looking between public space and the personal present space of the selfie. The last insertion is a bleached out subtle hints the Toronto map compiled from a surveys made in 1866, around the same century Jose Honorato Lozano’s paintings of the Philippines landscape were made
You’re Whitewashing Me With Your Soap, 2020
Collage made with Stereoscope photos of the Philippines from the Late Victorian Era of 1900s, juxtaposed with printout of Likas skin whitening soap logo from the Philippines
Framed Dimensions: 11 x 17 inche
Take a Picture It Will Last Longer, 2020
Stop-Motion Video Animation Projected on TV Screen, 11 seconds looped
Indigenous Filipino Face Tattoo GIF Animation. The bust of Beethoven is an example of a Decolonized Eurocentric whitewashed objects I started to acquire in my collections to decorate my home. I often question why I gravitated towards these colonial Eurocentric aesthetics which further question my learning and conditioning growing up from the Philippines & Canada. Collections of whitewashed objects from second hand stores occupies my personal space, reflecting on the aspects of colonial belongings and an unconscious act of assimilating and performing whiteness, class, and acceptability that had been generalized through interior and the decorative aesthetics that can be sold and acquired. This bust is adorned with tribal face tattoos from the Visayan Langi face and Luzon (warrior markings from the Philippine History of pre-colonial times) with a permanent sharpie marker. Trying to acquire the permanence of re-learning my cultural indigeneity through the objects that had settled in my daily life.
Balikbayan Wall Sconces, 2020
The TV monitor is anchored with two antique wall sconces with white Balikbayan text.
Bongga Ka ‘Day, 2020
Set of two framed decorative floral prints with white vinyl silhouettes of the artist in stilettoes.
The title comes from a popular Filipino disco song, meaning “proud and fierce”. Usually this terminology is used between Filipino queer communities.
13.25 x 17.5 inches, irregular, each
Ladlad Bakla Tea Set, 2020
Digital animated GIF projected on TV Screen 25 seconds looped
This digital collage work is crafted from homonormative male gay bodies, templates of indigenous Filipino butterflies, and Tagalog texts. The words Ladlad and Bakla (terms that denote homosexuality, effeminacy, and related performances) adorn the digital tea set image.
Rice Ka Ganda Hosts the Dinner, 2020 (Stills from the Video Installation)
Video Installation projected on the wall.
Ka Ganda translation: Very Pretty.
The video and photo projections are the artist’s alter ego in drag “Rice Ka Ganda” who echoes the same template of showing audiences how to become a domesticated colonial host to prepare a formal sit-down dinner party in the tone of a ramshackle version of the Martha Stewart Show. This documented performance interrogates the acts of gender prescribed roles of the domestics re-interpreting the Filipinix experience of the Diasporic nanny intertwined with the colonial perspectives of the Western ideals of the Host in context of the Happy Home Maker. The video is intertwined with images the artist took during their last visit to the Philippines back in 2004, echoing the act of the Balikbayan embodiment (to return back to the country). The Balikbayan boxes were used by Filipino immigrants in the west to send western products to their families back home. It is also Intertwined with the Digital Archive of the 1609 book “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas” (English: Events in the Philippine Island) a book written and published by Antonio de Morga, an early historical account of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, a first-hand account of the early Spanish colonial venture into Asia. The first English translation was published in London in 1868. This video installation will continue to evolve for the duration of this exhibition.
José Rizal, Plate, 2019-2020
Antique decorative China wall plate, decorated with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce.
Dimensions: 9.75 inches diameter
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (born June 19, 1861, Calamba, Philippines - died December 30, 1896, Manila) was a political leader, and a Philippines National Hero. A physician, and author, he was educated in Manila, and at the University of Madrid. A brilliant medical student, he soon committed himself to the reform of Spanish rule in his home country, though he never advocated Philippine independence. Most of his writing was done in Europe, where he resided between 1882 and 1892.
In 1887 Rizal published his first novel, Noli me tangere (The Social Cancer), a passionate exposure of the evils of Spanish rule in the Philippines. A sequel, El filibusterismo (1891; The Reign of Greed), established his reputation as the leading spokesman of the Philippine reform movement. He published an annotated edition (1890; reprinted 1958) of Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, hoping to show that the native people of the Philippines had a long history before the coming of the Spaniards. He became the leader of the Propaganda Movement, contributing numerous articles to its newspaper, La Solidaridad, published in Barcelona. Rizal’s political program included integration of the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), the replacement of Spanish friars by Filipino priests, freedom of assembly and expression, and equality of Filipinos and Spaniards before the law.
Upon his return to the Philippines in 1892, Rizal founded a nonviolent-reform society, the Liga Filipina, in Manila, and was deported to Dapitan in northwest Mindanao. He remained in exile for the next four years. In 1896 the Katipunan, a Filipino nationalist secret society, revolted against Spain. Although he had no connections with that organization and had no part in the insurrection, Rizal was arrested and tried for sedition by the military. Found guilty, he was publicly executed by a firing squad in Manila. His martyrdom convinced Filipinos that there was no alternative to independence from Spain. On the eve of his execution, while confined in Fort Santiago, Rizal wrote “Último adiós” (“Last Farewell”), a masterpiece of 19th-century Spanish verse.
Gabriela Silang, Plate, 2020
Antique decorative China wall plate, decorated with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce
Dimensions: 9.25 inches diameter
María Josefa Gabriela Cariño Silang (born March 19, 1731) is remembered as a fearless anti-colonial fighter and a great leader of the people of the Philippines. She was the first Filipino woman to lead a revolt against the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.
The artist is related to Gabriela Silang through their father’s mother side (the Cariño family).
Gabriela was the daughter of an Ilokano peasant living under Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. Imperial Spain’s three centuries of colonialism were not accepted passively by the Filipino people. At least 300 significant armed revolts against cruel Spanish repression were launched by the indigenous peoples of the Philippines.
She married an indigenous Ilocano resistance leader named Diego Silang. During the Seven Years’ War between Spain, Britain, France and other colonial powers of the day Diego Silang was imprisoned by the Spanish after suggesting to the Spanish authorities that they abolish the tribute, colonialist tax, and replace Spanish functionaries with native people. He volunteered to head Ilocano forces against the British. The newly appointed Catholic Bishop of Nueva Segovia rejected his call. Diego Silang’s imprisonment stirred an Ilocano revolt. After his release, he roused his people to action once again. His effort was cut short when he was assassinated by a traitor paid by the Catholic church.
Following his death, Gabriela took on full leadership of the resistance. She moved into the Abra mountains to establish a new base, reassemble her troops and recruit from the local Tingguian community to fight the Spanish. Gabriela led the resistance group for over four months before being captured. She and around 100 resistance fighters were executed by the colonizers on 20 September 1763.
The people of the Philippines eventually defeated Spanish colonialism in 1898, only to begin a new anti-colonial struggle against the United States. Despite harsh, racist repression and vicious massacres, the U.S. imperialists faced the same problems as the Spanish had. They too were unable to subdue the Filipino people.
The courageous fighting spirit and leadership of people like Gabriela still marks the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle being waged in the Philippines. The ongoing class struggle in the Philippines bears not only Gabriela’s mark, but also her name. Her deeds inspired the creation of GABRIELA in 1984, the country’s leading grassroots women’s alliance of more than 200 organizations, institutions, desks and programs of women all over the Philippines seeking to wage a struggle for the liberation of all oppressed Filipino people. The name stands for a General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Leadership and Action.
Datu Lapulapu, Plate, 2020
Antique decorative China wall plate, decorated with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce
Dimensions: 9.25 inches diameter
Chief Lapu Lapu is an essential part of the history of the islands which became known as the Philippines and their resistance to foreign takeover by European countries such as Spain. Lapu Lapu was born in 1491, although no one knows the exact date of his birth. He lived on Mactan Island and soon became the chief of his people, helping them stand on their own and fight for independence. During his time as chief, many foreign countries tried to claim the islands as their own, including the famous explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
While Magellan was conquering the neighboring island of Cebu, he learned of the existence of the island and the small group of people who lived there and attempted to conquer it. However, he was met with a great amount of resistance by the Mactan people headed by their leader, Chief Lapu Lapu. Lapu Lapu and the Mactan killed Magellan and many others during this battle, known in Philippine history as the Battle of Mactan.
Lapu Lapu has been written about extensively throughout history. In the 19th century, Lapu Lapu was referred to as Kalipulako by Mariano Ponce, who wrote primarily propaganda. The Declaration of Independence for the Philippines refers to Lapu Lapu by this name and goes so far as to call him King Kalipulako of Mactan.
On the island of Mactan today stands a statue of both Magellan and the great warrior Lapu Lapu. The statue of Magellan is erected at the site where it is believed he was killed by Lapu Lapu. The statue of Lapu Lapu stands in the center of the island to commemorate his contribution to the independence of his island and its people.
The Battle of Mactan is recreated by volunteers on the island on April 27th every year to honor this chief's great bravery.
Kamayan na! (Let’s eat with our hands now!), 2020
Installation of a dinner table setting design, constructed from antique plates with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce, forming Filipino/Tagalog texts. The table’s center piece is constructed with faux flowers made from gay porn images and Filipino whitewashing products in crystal vases, candles encased in paper with Snow Skin Whitening Cream logo in a candelabra, Philippine Kalesa (horse and carriage toy purchased from souvenir shop in the Philippines), napkins with Likas, a Filipino whitening soap logo and Basmati rice stained with Filipino soy sauce, an act “to stain back the soap”, as well as antique silver salt and pepper shaker with images of whitewashing products.
The lack of utensils echoes the cultural way of “eating with our hands”.
This installation speaks about the etiquettes to the colonial, patriarchal ceremony of dinning and hosting. As a Filipino who grew up eating with my hands on a special BBQ party (Kamayan/Eating with hands) back home when we eat specific grilled food spread on banana leaves called Boodle Fight. A boodle fight, in context of Filipino culture, is the military practice of eating a meal. The explanation on its etymology says that the term “boodle” is an American military slang for contraband sweets such as cake, candy and ice cream. A “boodle fight” is a party in which boodle fare is served. The term may have been derived from “kit and caboodle”. My experience of the boodle fights is grilled seafood such as Tilapia, Shrimps, Mussels, Squid, as well as BBQ Pork, Rice, Mango Salad, with a Lechon/Roast Pork. In this installation I will create a hybrid of both dining etiquettes with a Colonial ways of eating that was introduced to the Indigenous Filipinos during the Spanish Colonization to eat with the utensils rather than their hands, but rather I will dispose of the utensils and lay antique plates that had been adorned with rice creating Filipino/Tagalog texts of sayings exchanged in a Filipino family table. The translation of the Tagalog words into English echoes how most Filipino migrants experiences of forget the language of our mothers tongue as we continue assimilate and colonize ourselves in order to belong and be accepted in the Colonized lands we inhabit. The center piece of the table settings will be adorned with flowers, candles and white washing products purchased from my local Filipino Store, and Filipino toys from souvenir shops in the Philippines.
6 Filipino Narra, Kamagong, Rattan, Carabao Bone Dining Chairs, 19th Century
The table is accompanied by six chairs made by the artisans from Paete, Laguna who are well known as native furniture makers in the Philippines. The chairs are made of Phil mahogany (narra) wood and inlaid with native carabao bones creating intricate designs. The seats are made of interwoven well treated rattan. On loan by Rick & Tess Malonzo from the Malonzo Family.
-Kamayan na! (Let’s eat with our hands now!)
-Hoy, huwag ka nang maarte diyan! (Hey, don’t be pretentious/extra/diva!)
-Bonggang bonga ang dating ng hapag kainan! (This table setting is so extra and extravagant!)
-Hay naku, nasaan ang kanin! (Geez, where is the rice?)
-Ano ba ito? Pang ulam ba ito sa kanin? (What’s this? Is this savouries for rice?)
-Paki abot naman yung Patis? (Can you please pass the fish sauce?)
Rice Tagalog Texts Plates
Antique decorative Chinastyle Simpsons (Potters) LTD England Moonstone Dinner Plates, Weimar Germany Katharina Dessert Plates, decorated with basmati rice stained with Filipino Soy Sauce, Permanent Marker, and Supper Glue.
Dimensions: 10.5 inches diameter Dinner Plates, 7.5 inches diameter Dessert Pla
The Rice Queen’s Regalia, 2020
The Rice Queen’s Regalia Brown Rice Pillow, 2020
Sculpture Installation of a replica of the Spanish Royal Crown constructed from synthetic recycled red Dollarama bag, plain Basmati rice and Basmati rice stained with Filipino soy sauce, printed images of Filipino whitewashing product logos, white gay porn, and the artists collected fingernails. The crown sits on a square altered bag of rice, replacing the pillow that the crown usually sits on. The square bag of rice crafted by the artists mother Juliet D. Manapul, 2020. The choice of the Spanish Monarchy Regalia symbolizes the colonization of Spain to the Philippines. The Rice Queen character have always been present in my art practice and at times performed by myself, and through most of my digital body of work. The term “Rice Queen” is a derogatory word that is given to white queer men who has a preference for Asian queer men, usually as an exoticization fantasy of objectification of the Asian characteristics, merely viewing us as objects of fetish that perpetuates racist representations with a narrow spectrum of understanding. This context of understandings represents the Asian Queer Male bodies viewed as passive, domestic, soft, feminine, docile and ready to serve any master which then would fall as the white colonial representation of homonormative entitled queer whiteness that are usually placed upon a pedestal through the social media of the templated queer representations.
Crown Dimensions: 13 x 13 x 10 (h) inches
Installation Measurements: 13 x 19 x 13 (h) inches