Lighting a Fire For the Ancestors

By Julian Foley

When darkness falls, a fire glows, and the smell of burning paper and wood overwhelms the sweet odor of smoldering incense. Soon, before a crowd of artists, friends, and curious onlookers, flames eclipse the image of a giant man. Burning man? Hardly. In this quiet, inconspicuous alley in West Oakland, nestled among warehouses and freeway overpasses abutting the train tracks that service the Port of Oakland, a small group of artists offers tribute to the dead, to art, and to heritage.

The bonfire and its backdrop are fruits of a month-long workshop at the Pacific Bridge Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Gallery to celebrate the Manong, Filipinos who came to California and Hawaii in the early part of the last century as agricultural laborers. Led by renowned Filipino artist Santiago Bose and Filipino American artist Carlos Villa, the workshop, called "International Hotel Intersection," shares with participating young artists a piece of what the two call the collective Filipino memory. The workshop is also sponsored by Pusod, a Berkeley-based Filipino resource center.

Recollection of history takes on a special importance for young Asian Americans, according to Villa, a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. They are finding more avenues for contemplating and expressing identity, he says, but they still have little cultural memory to draw from.

He and Bose designed the workshop to provide information about the lives of the Manong while challenging participants to create an installation piece and performance that weave together cultural and historical themes.

In developing the Manong workshop, Bose and Villa met only once and never worked or exhibited together, yet they stress their shared heritage. "We found that we both come from the same region, Ilocos, where the first wave of immigrants to the U.S. was from," said Bose.

Villa, a San Francisco native, felt an immediate affinity with Bose. "When [Santiago and I] met each other there was incredible body language," he recalls, lifting his eyebrow to demonstrate. "We didn't even have to talk. There was a fantastic bond."

Villa brought to the workshop his gifts as a storyteller, He recounted his childhood experiences with Manong uncles in Napa's vineyards - when he spent the night in crowded bunkhouses, heard fighter cocks squawking from their home-made pens, and watched the agricultural laborers smoke, gamble, and fight for survival in a hostile America that refused to allow their wives or girlfriends to join them.

The workshop's final product, completed just minutes before Saturday's celebration, was a giant collage of Manong images. Anting, or talismans, hung from posts on either side, each topped by a triangle-enclosed eye, representing the eye of god. For the base, the artists used paint, paper, photographs, glass and cardboard to represent relics of Manong life - Marlboro Reds; a red cock; a caricatured prostitute; a photo of a pig roasting over an open pit; beer bottles - all beneath an enlarged photograph of a Manong, meticulously groomed and well-dressed, pasted on a cardboard backdrop covered by rows of single red roses. Joss paper, the Chinese offering to the dead, dotted the colorful construction.

"These are things that people thought they would need after death," explains England Hidalgo, a Philippines native and workshop participant. "I have learned many things about Manong life," he says, even though he can't identify all of the talismans.

Guests at the celebration also make offerings to the ancestors. Many of the 50 or so who trickle in throughout the evening come carrying small paper crafts to burn. Others bring candles to set before the massive collage.

Orvy Jundis, a close friend of Villa's and a self-proclaimed story re-teller, applauds the workshop and the bonfire ritual that concludes the evening. "There is a revival of everything tribal going on - in music, in dance, in martial arts. Even body piercings. They are contemporary, but also a resurgence of old ways." The younger generation of Asian Americans wants to delve into its heritage, and "redefine it in our own context," he says.

Pacific Bridge co-owners Geoff Dorn and Beth Gates, who each hold degrees in international studies, opened the Oakland gallery in 1998 to raise awareness of contemporary Southeast Asian art. "We found that there was nowhere in the country with a deep interest and knowledge of [it]," Dorn said. The gallery provides Southeast Asian artists with a venue to showcase their art and an opportunity to work in the United States.

Bose's vibrant collages hang on the red brick walls of the gallery until October 28, in a joint exhibit with Villa entitled "The Spirit That Dwells Within." His floor-to-ceiling canvases weave together religious imagery and symbolism with vivid photographs of Filipino life. They starkly contrast with the soft silvery squares meticulously ordered on Villa's silky wooden backdrops that are mounted on the opposite walls.

As part of an artist-in-residence program begun in June 1998, Pacific Bridge pays for Bose's travel and provides him with studio space and a room above the gallery for his month-long stay. Next he goes to Canada to build an installation piece for a gallery there.

"Santiago is an incredibly famous and immensely talented artist in the Philippines," said Villa. He described the workshop and exhibit as an invaluable opportunity both for himself and the participants. "There is an incredible renaissance going on right now. Artists are finally getting to know each other."

So even as the fire dies out before a lingering crowd on a Saturday evening, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes and a curl of smoke that reaches up to the stars and the gods beyond, something new is happening. Onlookers and artists alike walk away from the scene with a greater sense of how pieces of the past can be retrieved to enrich their lives, and connect them to a shared culture.