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REFERENCE: Filipinos often lose sight of the fact that the first period of the Philippine literary history is the longest. Certain events from the nation’s hist

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Filipinos often lose sight of the fact that the first period of the Philippine literary history is the longest. Certain events from the nation’s history had forced lowland Filipinos to begin counting the years of history from 1521, the first time written records by Westerners referred to the archipelago later to be called “Las Islas Filipinas”. However, the discovery of the “Tabon Man” in a cave in Palawan in 1962, has allowed us to stretch our prehistory as far as 50,000 years back. The stages of that prehistory show how the early Filipinos grew in control over their environment. Through the researches and writings about Philippine history, much can be reliably inferred about precolonial Philippine literature from an analysis of collected oral lore of Filipinos whose ancestors were able to preserve their indigenous culture by living beyond the reach of Spanish colonial administrators.

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The Portuguese navigator and explorer Ferdinand Magellan headed the first Spanish foray to the Philippines when he made landfall on Cebu in March 1521; a short time later he met an untimely death on the nearby island of Mactan. After King Philip II (for whom the islands are named) had dispatched three further expeditions that ended in disaster, he sent out Miguel López de Legazpi, who established the first permanent Spanish settlement, in Cebu, in 1565. The Spanish city of Manila was founded in 1571, and by the end of the 16th century most of the coastal and lowland areas from Luzon to northern Mindanao were under Spanish control. Friars marched with soldiers and soon accomplished the nominal conversion to Roman Catholicism of all the local people under Spanish administration. But the Muslims of Mindanao and Sulu, whom the Spanish called Moros, were never completely subdued by Spain.

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Powers based this bust of George Washington (1732–1799) on the authoritative portrait the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon had modeled from life during his visit to America in 1785. The dignified image of the first president became the most successful of Powers’s portraits, with at least thirty-six life-size replicas carved. In some of them, the shoulders are covered in contemporary attire, while in others, such as this example, they are enveloped in a toga-like garment, a standard Neoclassical device. In the drape and the unincised eyeballs, Powers sought to link the bust with antique portraiture.

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The Genji Monogatari Emaki (源氏物語絵巻), also called The Tale of Genji Scroll, is a famous illustrated handscroll of the Japanese literature classic The Tale of Genji, produced during the 12th century, perhaps c. 1120–1140. The surviving sections, now broken up and mounted for conservation reasons, represent only a small portion of the original work (if it was complete) and are now divided between two museums in Japan, Tokugawa Art Museum and the Gotoh Museum, where they are only briefly exhibited, again for conservation reasons. Both groups are National Treasures of Japan. It is the earliest surviving text of the work and the earliest surviving work in the Yamato-e tradition of narrative illustrated scrolls, which has continued to impact Japanese art, arguably up to the present day. The painted images in the scroll show a tradition and distinctive conventions that are already well developed, and may well have been several centuries in the making.[1]

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These days when contemporary art relentlessly pursues the potentials of cutting-edge technology and enshrines the glitz of modern sensibility, it is refreshing to encounter artists whose impulses are still rooted within a tradition, community or a vanishing artistic heritage. This is one of the many accomplishments of Riel Hilario’s current one-man show in ArtInformal gallery  (Mandaluyong City, Philippines) which runs until September 20.

From the exhibit notes posted in the ArtInformal website (www.artinformal.com), it was mentioned that Hilario, who initially trained as a sculpture of santos (carved saints found in Catholic churches and private homes), reinterprets the folk belief of the Ilocanos in aniwaas, an animating spirit. The Ilocanos, one of the major ethnic and language groups in northern Philippines, believe in the earthbound spirit.