Philippine artist Don Salubayba has baggage. So do I. So do you. So does everyone.
Painful childhood memories, professional stress, fear for the future, addiction. Baggage is perhaps an ideal — though a bit simplistic — metaphor to ponder these self-absorbed times.
But for Salubayba, baggage isn’t just a burden weighing down the individual. With his exhibition Bagahe — Excess Baggage, he lays bare some of the prevailing shackles that he feels subjugate his country’s people. The six collage-like paintings, two sculptural installations and a video, currently on view at Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間) in Taipei, also have resonance here in Taiwan.
Photo: Courtesy of Project Fulfill Art Space
“Whereas other countries export products, [The Philippines] exports people,” he said.
It’s a particularly significant comment in light of the arrest two weeks ago of Jacqueline Liu (劉姍姍), a US-based diplomat for Taiwan who has been charged with underpaying and overworking her Filipino employees.
I didn’t ask Salubayba about Liu’s case and the attention it could bring to similar practices in Taiwan, which, according to Council of Labor Affairs statistics, has 420,000 migrant workers.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Nor did I ask him about the recent case in Hong Kong in which a Filipina domestic helper won the right to apply for permanent residency — a ruling met with much grumbling from authorities there.
Instead we discussed a project about the experiences of Filipinos living and working in Taiwan that Salubayba conducted last year as part of a residency at Taipei Artist Village.
“I interviewed 25 Filipinos. Only five of them had positive stories,” Salubayba said.
And though internationally known Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) has addressed the harsh conditions migrant workers often experience in Empire’s Borders I (帝國邊界I), Salubayba is largely correct when he says it is a topic Taiwanese artists rarely concern themselves with.
In any event, Salubayba’s art isn’t an emotional reaction to perceived injustice — no activism on canvas here. He said most of the burdens Filipinos encounter are rooted in their desire to escape conditions in their home country.
“I think most of us are blinded, that starting a new life [elsewhere] will solve our problems,” he said.
As Slit-slip-slice-send reveals, many of these problems are to be found in an educational system that assigns roles based on an outdated notion of gender. Like all paintings on display, he projects an old photograph onto the canvas, reverses it to avoid copyright issues, reduces it down to a basic, almost graffiti outline in black, and builds it up to form a tableau of interconnected figures, objects and text on a translucent array of primary coloring.
Embedded on the surface of the canvas are simple phrases torn from school textbooks that make reference to the roles children are expected to fulfill later in life. Three female figures at the bottom are symbolically engaged in the roles society has assigned to them: earning money, rearing children and caring for the elderly. An airplane at the center offers escape from what many see as a dreary existence.
The baggage of the Philippines’ colonial past comes under scrutiny as well. Curse of the White Package pokes fun at the Filipino obsession with beauty pageants, popularized during the US occupation of the country. The women pictured are faceless and their bodies are rendered in vague outline, symbolizing that their individually has been effaced under a general idea of beauty.
Equally prescient is Patnubay (Guidance). The installation features a shredded map of the Philippines affixed by plastic wire to an open suitcase that contains an amulet of protection. It suggests how the often repressive religious orthodoxy of the past retains symbolic importance for those migrating abroad in the present.
In Bagahe — Excess Baggage, we don’t so much as look at Salubayba’s work as read their symbolic connections and meanings. Patiently doing so might help us to forget our own troubles, at least for a time.
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