Leni, Bongbong and The Fort’s imported murals

SINGAPORE—Bonifacio Global City’s eye-catching murals are painted by foreigners. Does this explain Leni Robredo’s razor thin lead over Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in the race for vice president, which spurred calls to build martial law museums?

Archie Oclos, University of the Philippines 2011 graduate and street artist, laments the photorealistic astronaut painted across the entire back of Icon Plaza by a Los Angeles duo last year. He would have painted something Filipino, such as a tribute to the Sumilao farmers.

The eerily floating stranger’s sheer scale provokes reflection on one’s sense of space, but it has no emotional umbilical. The Philippines obviously never had a space program. When man landed on the moon in 1969, Ambeth Ocampo chronicled, we celebrated Gloria Diaz’s winning Miss Universe.

Reynaldo “Pogs” Samson, 2010 winner of Metro-bank’s prestigious art contest, pairs astronauts with angels as his avatars. These depict tension between science and religion, joined by bulul (Ifugao rice gods) and Caucasian bishops with Pinocchio noses. Ronald Jeresano, the 2008 winner, has astronauts float behind his trademark pink-skinned Filipino in dark jeans as he walks in contentment across the heavens. But who paints just an astronaut?

Artists with cranes and scaffolds painted new ArtBGC murals last week. The headline foreign murals were an African-style totem, an oddly colored combination of leaves and coconuts, and a tree with cut branches out of place in a Philippine landscape. The tropical colors of Filipino Trip63’s flowers resonated more in my biased mind.

Archie did get a small 15-foot wall at 29th Street corner Rizal Drive, near the Mind Museum. He painted just one farmer, evoking his Philippine

Collegian pen and ink work. The farmer clasps his hat to his chest, his grizzled, weather-beaten face radiating humble pride, a carabao looming behind him. His friends mimicked the salute in their selfies, ready to sing our anthem. Archie preaches that street art is more raw and closer to the public, its inherent vulnerability to damage adding to its charm.

Past BGC murals by Filipino unknowns likewise struck me more than the imports: Dee Jae Pa’este’s aqua-colored tribal figures and the mosaic-style sun, moon and clouds of Baguio’s The Mighty Bhutens. An American painted nonnative animals, a tiger and a bear. Japanese artists painted an odd Andres Bonifacio with orange pupils in 2014, his 150th birth anniversary.

To teach at the University of the East, I would drive past Gerilya’s striking Bonifacio and Rajah Sulayman on Nagtahan Bridge’s columns. I love their smaller Bonifacio with his pistol, alongside Jose Rizal holding a quill, beside Canvas, Gigo Alampay’s nonprofit gallery near UP.

Manny Garibay led a Canvas group, painting a 12-ft Bonifacio on the back of a truck during the 2014 UP Lantern Parade. It became an Art Fair 2015 hit. My favorite Bonifacio is by Pogs’ brother Jerson, a 4-ft graffiti-inspired depiction with

Gregoria de Jesus, against a graffiti Ginebra logo on a rusting wall, with a twin painting of Rizal and Leonor Rivera.

How many BGC shoppers have seen Carlos “Botong” Francisco’s 36-ft “The Progress of Medicine in the Philippines” from 1953, restored and moved from the Philippine General Hospital to the National Museum? Or the 40-ft “Karnabal,” painted in 1992 by Garibay’s Salingpusa collective, the first work in Antipolo’s Pinto museum?

How many have seen “Itak sa Puso ni Mang Juan,” the small 1978 watercolor by Antipas Delotavo in the Metropolitan Museum’s tiny martial law section? It captured that decade’s mood with a thin, weary man walking past a blood red Coca-Cola logo, the C’s sharp tail pointed straight at his heart.

I have seen precious few martial law paintings: BenCab’s 1970s works in his Baguio museum, a woman gagged with barbed wire in Pablo Baen Santos’ bold strokes in the Ateneo Art Gallery, and Ang Kiukok’s screaming figures.

A Twitter thread tagging Sandro Marcos claimed that everything about martial law is on the internet. Atenean Pei Pica roped in Ateneo’s Rizal Library. It not only refuted this, it later offered free electronic copies of Primitivo Mijares’ banned 1976 book, “The Conjugal Dictatorship.” Library director Von Totanes’ download link (bit.ly/RLConjugalDictatorship) went viral, with over 130,000 views.

I love BGC’s five-story Fully Booked as much as I loved the National Bookstore Cubao Superbranch’s discount floor as a student. But its central attraction is now a painting, on a 24-ft stack of books by a Los Angeles artist, of an out-of-place woman with sharp nose and pouty lips. It was unveiled in 2013, together with small paintings sold at 10 times a Filipino’s price.

Can we connect this choice not to feature a talented Filipino painter to the blood-soaked “The Conjugal Dictatorship” surviving in print only on Amazon.com, and how there is no place to see paintings from martial law, our most poignant modern art period?

Art is never purely aesthetic. It takes on greater significance from history and culture. It is a peek into a nation’s subconscious.

Is our subconscious thus blank?

I recall Garibay’s exhortation to express our national identity as strongly as possible in our art, as it is not entrenched in the global psyche. It is easier to quote Tyrion Lannister to one’s own countrymen than to quote Rizal today, much less Benigno Aquino Jr. or Jovito Salonga.

Why did 14 million Filipinos vote for Marcos Jr.? Do we need martial law museums like Washington, DC’s Holocaust Memorial Museum? Should we overhaul how we teach history?

Should we simply join Archie in asking why we fawn over murals of astronauts, not farmers?

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