‘Bukang Liwayway’ at Silverlens
By Lim Sheau Yun

(From left to right) Liv Vinluan. Photo by Jilson Tiu. Ryan Villamael. Photo by Joseph Pascual.

Ryan Villamael (b. 1987) is a Filipino artist largely working in the medium of cut paper. Sliced, carved, folded, stacked, and glued, his intricate works allow paper to take on dimension, where nature and geography are remade at the scale of the page. Liv Vinluan (b. 1987) is a Filipino artist whose works are entangled with the cyclicality of history and the movement of time. A painter who largely works in watercolour and oil, she borrows the grammar of historical paintings to build a resplendent yet unnerving world anew.

In this conversation, held earlier on the occasion of their two-person exhibition ‘Bukang Liwayway’ at Silverlens Gallery in Manila, the artists share the process of making and working on their exhibition. They speak about the haunting of history in Filipino art, the medium of paper, the work of collaboration, and the role of language and nature in their works.

How did ‘Bukang Liwayway’, as a project and as a title, come about?

RV: Liv and I initially met in college when we were art students in the University of the Philippines. Through the years, we’ve remained close friends, bore witness to each other’s growth—both as artists and people—and observed the parallelisms and overlapping themes and fixations of our bodies of work. We always said we’d do a show together and the situation presented itself when Silverlens offered me a slot this year.

In Filipino, the word “buka” means “opening” or “beginning.” Meanwhile, the word “liwayway” means both “light” and “daybreak.” Understood together, keeping in mind the duality of their meanings, the phrase “bukang liwayway” means a signal of change or a new beginning, after darkness or a period of struggle. At certain points of Philippine history, it has been used to mean a time for revolution or hard-won hope. At the tail end of another difficult year for the world but especially the Philippines, the title is almost a prayer for better times.

On a personal note, while working on the show, I stumbled upon a painting I made when I was 11 or 12 for my entrance exam to the Philippine High School for the Arts. The painting was a literal depiction of dawn in rural Philippines. More interestingly, I found at the back of the painting a poem by an unknown writer telling the story of the struggle of a working-class Filipino family and the lessons they learned from their mother who laid out the realities of hardship but always brought home with her light and hope.

LV: Ryan and I met in 2004, as freshmen in art school. That's roughly 17 years of friendship between us. As two people who have practically grown up together, and have witnessed each other's loss, pain, successes and growth, a show shared by us was something that has occupied the back of our minds for many years now. Sometimes, randomly, we would talk about it in passing and sometimes, we would discuss it fully. Fast forward to late 2020, Ryan was slated to have a show at Silverlens in late 2021, and he asked both Isa and Rachel if he could do the slot as a two-man show with me. And suddenly, we had a venue, and it was happening.

In Tagalog, we have many designations and names for different times of the day. For example, sunset is not just sunset, but can be subdivided into 3 more names – dapithapon, agaw-dilim and takipsilim. Bukang liwayway is a tagalog term that pertains to the darkest hour before dawn. “Buka” as verb means to open. Liwayway is dawn. This is around 3am, 4am I would guess, right before the sun rises and light blooms into the sky. Initially we had a long list of titles, and all of it we wanted to be in Tagalog. Bukang Liwayway materialised at the very end, right before installation, and we both knew it was the clear winner. It just held so much significance, not just for us personally, but for everything that has transpired for everyone the past two years.

In the words of the writer Carlomar Daoana, the two of you pursued not “collaboration, but a disarticulation of the stitches of [your] related/relational practices.” Having known each other since art school, what did the process of working together look like? How have your practices grown together, and/or apart?

RV: Strangely enough, when we were in school, our practices and preoccupations were not alike at all. I was making sculptures and paintings that featured fantastical imagery from Philippine mythology in a kitschy, acid-tinged aesthetic. Meanwhile, Liv was painting a lot of beautiful, bold absurd imagery. Through the years, without consultation or dialogue, we separately found ourselves drawn to the idea of history as a subjective text. We did not quite discuss those parallelisms until recently and in that way, we have found a fellow student of history in each other. Because of that, working together was easy and fluid. We both have the utmost respect for each other’s practice and point of view, as well as love and understanding that can only come from knowing each other for over half of our lives.

LV: Ryan and I joke a lot that possibly the biggest point of success in the show is that we managed to still be friends—even after working on it together. I kid around that it could have gone south real fast in other cases. There was a slight but real fear of a clash of egos. I feel like two creatives who are friends would not necessarily mean a good working relationship, or possibly a cohesive creative outcome. Individually there are over thirteen years of individual artistic careers behind both of us, so at present, perhaps we were going with the flow, welcoming each other's opinion. It was a true push and pull, give and receive, tag team dynamic, and honestly that's the dream isn't it, when one does a two-man show?

History plays a large role in your work, both in content and form. The invocation of the family album, the theatre set, and the bell jar point toward a notion of history as observation: the theatre of the past plays out not merely in novels and documents, but at scale. The works read to me almost as a response to the tradition of history painting in the Philippines, of course with Juan Luna’s Spoliarium (1884), but also as a response to the dioramas at the Ayala Museum meant to be a “comprehensive” look at the history of the nation. But rather than seeing any attempt to picture the entirety of a world, your works seem to belong to the scale of the intimate: the compulsion of the hand toward liberating the cut-out, the Victorian use of bell jars as display cases for curios. How do you position yourselves in relation to the past, imagined or real?

RV: They say that “those who do not remember the past are condemmed to repeat it.” In so many ways, the past cannot be undone but I think people have a responsbility to remember. In a fast-changing society that so readily discards recent history, this remembrance becomes all the more vital to nation building, especially in a country burdened with a complex history. The recyling of historic narratives is prevalent. Memory is powerful because it can inspire determination and cohesion in times of crisis.

LV: Back in 2009, when Ryan and I were writing our theses in art school, our late professor Leo Abaya asked me why we are so enamoured, or maybe even haunted, by history. At twenty, I could not quite articulate what compelled me to make three, 6 feet by 9 feet oil paintings about it. He answered, “It's because it's big and always looming. You look behind you and it's there casting a shadow.” That was a real pivotal moment for me. I see history as this colossus, and I live in its shadow. In retrospect the works in the show, and my whole art practice as well, is about harnessing something immense and confusing and wielding power over it so that something as painful and bewildering as history is manipulated, miniaturised, condensed and contained.

Liv Vinluan, ‘For Shame! A Filipino Family Album’, 2019, watercolour, gouache, ink and graphite on bamboo paper 38 panels assembled accordion-style, 17 x 12 cm per panel. Image courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Galleries. — Liv Vinluan, ‘*For Shame! A Filipino Family Album’,* 2019, watercolour, gouache, ink and graphite on bamboo paper 38 panels assembled accordion-style, 17 x 12 cm per panel. Image courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Galleries.

You both work extensively with paper, and with it index a genealogy of form. Liv, ‘For Shame! A Filipino Family Album’ plays with the tradition of the ethnographic photobook. Yet in rendering bodies shrouded or with backs turned, your figures refuse the eye of the painter, and therefore the eye of the audience. Ryan, in the transformation of cartographic material into sculptures in the ‘Pulô’ series, you are almost reversing the operation of the map, turning a picturing of three-dimensional space into two-dimensions back into three-dimensions. Why paper, and for each of you, why return to this medium?

RV: I started working with paper cutouts more out of necessity rather than choice. After college, I worked as an assistant for different artists, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to paint and sculpt, but I could not afford to work with those expensive media. I ended up with paper because it was what I could afford. I discovered that I could say what I wanted to say and do what I wanted to do with a very simple material. I think we all have a very personal relationship with paper—we played with it as kids, we write on it, we shape it. I realised I did not have to paint or sculpt; paper on its own can be expressive. I have stuck with it since then because the medium has so much potential.

Recently, I have started experimenting with different materials—metal, mirrors, even sand. We’ll see where that goes.

“I discovered that I could say what I wanted to say and do what I wanted to do with a very simple material. I think we all have a very personal relationship with paper—we played with it as kids, we write on it, we shape it. I realised I did not have to paint or sculpt; paper on its own can be expressive. I have stuck with it since then because the medium has so much potential.”

LV: When we started formally hashing out ideas for the show and having zooms regularly, a lot of ideas were thrown around. There were art objects, Ryan had some totem pole-esque things in mind, I was going to do oil paintings too along with the watercolors... There was a lot! The learning curve in conceptualising this show was intense and that curve rested heavily on the idea of restraint. Restraint is easier said than done, especially in Filipino culture where horror vacui is a real thing. We made this conscious decision to step back, recalibrate and meet in the middle. Paper was the middle point and it eliminated the other things quite easily. We both agreed that there was another time and place, or maybe another show, to do such things.

Liv Vinluan, ‘Lagas Lagas Islas (The Islander Play Theatre Series)’, 2021, watercolour, gouache, ink and graphite on bamboo paper, 40.30 x 29.70 cm (unframed).

The natural world - both cosmic (in the case of ‘Que Linda’) and tropical - feature heavily in the picturing of your worlds. They are at once bountiful and lush, yet are the domains upon which conquest and commerce are imagined. Nature becomes not background, but another figure in the stage-set of the worlds you build. What specific natures, flora, or fauna recur in your thinking, and why?

RV: I would not say there is specific flora or fauna but rather the environs in which I grew up in Los Banos, Laguna, surrounded by nature in the province. And since moving and living in the city, every time I visit my hometown, there is a sense of being reintroduced to that place. I always find myself with a different perspective on how to look and understand the familiar and yet strange landscape.

LV: The idea of islands and archipelagos recurred during production for the show. Ryan has long been dealing with the subject matter, and for this show I entertained the island idea far more freely. Just the thought of these scattered, small masses of earth, floating in water. As Filipinos, water is this element we wrestle and contend with, and depend on. It can kill, it can turn catastrophic, it has a possibility of a deluge, but then without it we do not survive. Typhoons are a way of life, but the sea that surrounds us sustains us. So, like in ‘Terra Firma Galactica...’ it's this strange archipelago laid out in a circle, and I wanted it to look like it can spin out of control. Most of the figures stand on these lonely, little pieces of land.

“As Filipinos, water is this element we wrestle and contend with, and depend on. It can kill, it can turn catastrophic, it has a possibility of a deluge, but then without it we do not survive. Typhoons are a way of life, but the sea that surrounds us sustains us.”

In a similar vein, words feature frequently in both your works, either in fragments from a map, or instructions for use, or - frequently - names of places and geographies. What role do words play in your work?

RV: I am fascinated with recorded history and the process of how it is determined. It is so subjective and man-made, and therefore prone to inaccuracy and bias. It makes room for multiple translations, and language is yet another filter or mediation of fact.

LV: I love using texts in my work because I feel like they are these little notes you pass secretly to your seatmate during class—totally prohibited, and most of the time nonsensical. It is altogether funny, serious and dramatic. It was interesting because half of the time the audience would read and find the words I hid in the work, but half of the time it would go unnoticed. Thinking about it now, it makes me realise that I sort of treat text on work like vandalism as well, sort of like me scratching words on the public bathroom door—so that may be an act of defiance and leaving a mark in time and space there.

Lastly, as you chart the geographies of your practice, where do you see yourselves gravitating toward? If there’s anything else you’d like to mention or projects you’d like to shout out, please do so here!

RV: Right now, I am working on an exhibition for the CCP 13 Artists Award, which I received this year. The show will open in the first quarter of 2022.

LV: I would love to do more shows with Liv in the future.

Liv Vinluan and Ryan Villamael’s two-artist exhibition ‘Bukang Liwayway’ with Silverlens Gallery ran from 25 November to 22 December 2021 at Silverlens in Manila. More information about the exhibition here, including an exhibition walkthrough with the artists.

This interview was republished on Art World Database (AWDB) on 22 March 2023 here. Click to view the profile of Liv Vinluan and Ryan Villamael on AWDB.