Beyond Imagination: Reections on Contemporary Filipino Art, Identity, and a Transnational State of Being

Marc Ocampo Works in Progress: DAS Graduate Research Colloquium February 26, 2013

I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the rst. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. -- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Third and Final Continent

Filipinos live in a country that was a site of colonizing projects from 4 foreign powers: Spain, Japan, Britain, and the United States, all exerting massive religious, political, economic, and cultural inuence, so even before Filipinos sets foot on foreign soil, their identity at home is in ux and ambiguous, inuenced on the onset by colonizing forces, and by virtue of this inuence, I believe existing in a transnational state.

And while this transnational state can ease the ways Filipinos abroad can integrate their lives in their new countries, it also exacerbates ...the immeasurable sense of nonbeing that haunts Filipinos, 1 as they nd themselves often trapped between national, racial, and cultural intersections.

1. Jeff Baysa, Longing/Belonging: Filipino Artists Abroad, in At Home and Abroad:Twenty Contemporary Filipino Artists (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1998), 46.

In Invention, Memory, and Place, Edward Said writes, Memory and its representations touch very signicantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority.

Representations and reinventions by contemporary Filipino artists form new narratives that speaks of a decolonizing strategy that denes, documents and and asserts post-colonial Filipino identity, and as Florina H. Capistrano-Baker writes, it is an ongoing stratagem of creating and dening self.

Manuel Ocampo

Lynda J. Barry

Lizza May David

What we never understood was the power of a narrative history to mobilize people around a common goal.

Looking Inwards

Relearning My Mother Tongue

Mapagsangguni Street

Edward Said writes that these battles have been fought by all colonized peoples whose past and present were dominated by outside powers who had rst conquered the land and then rewrote history as to appear in that history as the true owners of that land.