Masterstroke, A Glimpse of Hau Chiok, His Disciples and Chinese Painting in the Philippines

I REMEMBER my first try at ink painting.  My palms broke out in a cold sweat. My fingers and my wrist became immobile and took on a rebellious mood.  And, naturally, the lines that I produced betrayed my frayed nerves.  For many novitiates of Chinese ink painting, only a certain self-conscious fear enters the mind upon holding the brush over a sheet of paper.  The ink and the brush are not always kind to those without nerves of steel or, perhaps even better said, to those without internal calm that obviously shows on paper once the first stroke is executed.

I therefore stood dumbfounded in front of the masterstrokes of Hau Chiok at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, in the exhibit Enlivening the Past, Shaping the Future: An Exhibition of Hau Chiok and His Students. I have yet to meet the master, yet I already know that he can only be a beacon of tranquility.  It is not difficult to see this in his works, as well as the other qualities of excellence in the discipline of Chinese painting.  These qualities are control in the expressive power of the brushstrokes, consistent refinement in simplicity, delicate skill in rendering subjects without sacrificing vigor, originality within the bounds of depicting the “essence” of subjects, the ability to use emptiness to express nuances of mood, and the ability to portray depth and space in the confines of the two-dimensional plane. All these elements inherent in the master’s brushwork help create a floating world that all at once evokes nostalgia infused with some hints of social realism.  (And how can this happen in “Oriental Art?”)  This seemingly paradoxical quality perhaps is the one that embeds the artist in his hybrid milieu, the world of a rare Filipino “master of Chinese painting” practicing his art and honing the skills of his multi/interethnic students in an increasingly global/local Manila.

Fair enough, the obra that opens the exhibit is classical Chinese painting to the bone.  Autumn Lotus, 1982, evokes the full life of summer in retreat as the cold winds of the approaching winter whip around leaves into tatters.  Master Hau captures the movement of time in swirling washes of dark charcoal gray and burnt umber that are made livid by bold strokes and spots of black further accentuated by touches of blue-green, thereby animating the painting with contrasts of values. In the midground a lotus blooms delicately like candle flame buffeted by forces that constitute its cycle of life and death. The background is, by tradition, left empty.  The so-called essence of the subject is at very center of this composition. It speaks of life being led fully, fearlessly facing the inevitable...the unknown, ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”—Seneca).

The paintings that follow depict the animal characters of the Chinese Zodiac. The selection unabashedly celebrates the Chinese cultural heritage of Master Hau but, at the same time, hints at a type of humor that can be called Filipino: sows with wrinkled snouts openly express their weariness as piglets oink in and out of their nurturing breasts; a cock stands proudly brandishing it comb-cum-crown and yet a hen pecks at him in perfect feminist personification; two pups, weepy-eyed and seemingly grounded by mommy dog, gaze enviously at two other pups playing with a cricket (move over, Snoopy!);  an aesthete mother monkey gets “liced” by an auntie (?) as her baby plays in the foreground (“Damn those kids!”);  a mother goat shrieks as if saying:  “They should not have eaten McM’s [this author’s] rare plants!”;  a colt and a filly bask under the light of sunny day.  Entwined in the branches of strangler fig tree, two snakes strike a lethal conversation.  Two crimson dragons take turns chasing the summer sun.  As blue cornflowers bloom, two rabbits smell winter’s approach.  Two tigers strike two different poses: one timid, the other terrifying. “Grrowrl!”  Unmoved, a cow and an ox sit and stand steadily as the plum tree. Field mice teethe their way through corn cobs. Ah, what humor! Ah, what technique!

One section of the exhibit features the works of Master Hau’s wife and life partner in the arts, Sy Chiu Hua. Her strength in composition parallels Master Hau. It is, however, most evident that she diverges in her treatment of the background and the spaces between lines that define the silhouettes of her subjects. “Texturing” appears to be a major technique and concern in her paintings. In Cicada, 2007, the singing insect perches on what appears to be a Bo tree’s branch putting forth new leaves. The subject and its host are surrounded by a rich crackled darkness reminiscent of Balinese black batik backgrounds. My personal favorite, however, is T’boli Woman, 1994. In this work the lone figure of a woman sits amid an unelaborated background. Her appliqué-covered hat is a stark scarlet mass broken by an indigo triangular motif. Coral and glass beads decorate her neck and bosom. She can very well be a figure straight out of the Boxer Codex, albeit with better shading of color and perspective.

Following the Sy Chiu Hua section is a panoply of works by the master’s students. As Plato is to Socrates, they reflect the glory of the master’s mind. Many of them have developed their own styles, testament to the greater work of the teacher: to bring out the best among his students.  For instance, Harvest, 1995, by Angela Hong Carlos essays a countryside scene of women and nature’s bounty in the genre of Chinese painting.

What enters the master’s mind as he picks up the brush and starts to portray a fragment of this world? Part of his thoughts is revealed in Binondo Church, 2006. Monolithic in a largely blank and edited background (yes, the buildings that crowd around it are omitted), the church presides over the grit, the grime and the dull grayness of the mid-ground. The urbanscape is enlivened by punctuations of nearly fluorescent colors of orange, lime green, royal and powder blue hues of tricycles, padyak-cabs, calesas, rickety old jalopies in the foreground. This unusual juxtaposition results in a picture that is oddly exquisite in portraying a dimension of Philippine life.
 
Indeed, the mark of a true master is to see beauty where it is not apparent.