Here’s a piece I wrote in 2011 on Kin Misa’s work, which I think now was ahead of its time, but what do I know, what do we know really, about life and death, rejection and struggle, except to try and make do, make from, make regardless of everything else that happens around us, until it is time to say no. Let it go.
Here’s to you Kin. Happy trails. — Ina.
The end of the (art) world in Kin Misa’s online exhibit
There’s never reason to go online before seeing an exhibit as far as I’m concerned. This means being blown away by fantastic work when I least expect it, at the same time that it means coming across horrid exhibits that I travel two (or five) cities for. Always, I allow myself to be floored. Yes, that’s me living on the edge. But what of an exhibit that only happens online, for reasons that are about what’s real and concrete, and about creativity and imagination? What happens when an exhibit rejects my notion(s) of art spectatorship, as it rejects the usual audience, doesn’t get the standard patrons, won’t follow the rules — spoken and otherwise — for art and exhibition in this country? What happens is rust and color by multimedia artist Kin Misa.
Happily rusty and rejected
Going through this first solo exhibit, it became clear to me that here was art I haven’t seen or experienced before, at least not in the past two years I’ve gone around art exhibits in Manila. Part of the difference of course is borne of the fact that this is an exhibit on Facebook, and instead of walking through a gallery, I had to click through photo after photo of the works. Anyone who’s been on Facebook for a while now would know that photo albums are rarely about the photos themselves, as it is about the people there and the lives it allows the viewer to imagine. So after a while, you get used to the same manufactured images and you just click on the mouse and through a photo album almost as a reflex, without really seeing anything, only satisfying your inner stalker, your inner voyeur.
The fact that rust and color isn’t accessible as a real live experience, the fact that all I have are these photos of art, keeps the clicking reflex in check, overpowered as it is by the need to stop at a photo, and go back, stay longer than usual. This of course has more to do with the orange and aqua palette that Kin uses vis a vis his found rusty objects that are reconfigured, redone on canvass. Right here, we are looking at how beautiful rejects can be, and how many possibilities an object left behind, old and rusty, can still have. In Kin’s hands rusty pieces of who-knows-what, small and strange, is formed into two guns (“AK 2047″ and “The Rattler”). In Kin’s hands these find targets in a series of four works all working with circular rusty edges.
“Eye in the Sky” has a pale blue center that looks translucent on the white canvas, and which works in perfect contrast with the rusty spoked edge. It’s sky and sea and eye, the kind you can get lost it, or fall in love with. While “Furnace” uses the same kind of rusty edge, the spokes get lost in the bright red-orange fill, almost as if it is being eaten up by the fiery center, which also burns the rest of the canvas into an ash black. A personal favorite from this series is “Open Up the Universe” that uses the same rusty edge but one which is broken, creating an unfinished circle, a broken shape, the black deconstructed center flowing to the rest of the canvas, as if the circle is everything, at the same time that it isn’t the point at all. Here, the rusty edge is interspersed with hues of aqua, highlighting even more the rusty key at the center of the canvas as both truth and flimsy. The aqua hue is used as solid backdrop in “Turn Table Saw” which is different from the rest of the series in its composition of rust and color. A thin rusty edge and a solid rusty center with jagged edges creates a circle within a circle, broken by a bright solid layer of black paint in between, creating a version of the long playing record of old, with just the right amount of violence to it of course.
The world ends in the rejected
This is what underlies the rest of the works in this exhibit, dealing as it does with what is imagined to be the lone survival of a man after the world has ended, in a space now filled with rust and color literally, filled with the destroyed and rejected, filled with the colors that survive.
Sculptures of white cement heads without bodies (“Death” “The Cherub Oracle” “The Scholar”), dirty white cement feet and calves without the rest of their limbs (“Pitter Patter”), and a huge eyeball in a cage are created with strips of rusty metal and rust color impressions. These are equally scary and zombie-like, as they are comic survivors of the world’s end. The same is true of “Catharsis” — a skull made of rust, the man’s catharsis happening in his doom. There is as well the survival of birds. That is, the rusty version of it, always perched on top of a sharp rusty tip. In “Merlot Bird” the context is rusty structures and a seeming relationship, conversation if you will, with another creature. There is an image of the bird speaking, if not making a sound. “Fight or Flight” meanwhile is witty and absurd in its portrayal of the bird being lifted into the air by what looks like human figures, making it the target of what look like tanks aimed at it. In “Safe Up There” the bird seems secondary to the bigger image of an animal’s head colored in light blue that blends into a bright orange, littered with various images of rusty objects: what looks like the moon or a new planet near where the eye should be, a star up in one ear, a bird perched on the crook of the neck. A blade falls from the bird, both a letting go and what’s left behind. Ah, but my favorite remnant of this end of the world is “Black Beach” in its portrayal of both night and day, on one canvas, without it looking like a clear division or a strange sunrise-sunset cycle. In “Black Beach” a piece of rusty metal with a wave-like shape cuts across the canvas, with a moon on the tip of the last wave, and a rusty sun against the stretch of waves on the other end.
It’s the colors on the canvas that blew me away, with the side of the moon an amalgamation of blacks and grays and blues, that blend seamlessly with the bright yellows and aquas on the other side of the canvas. The stretch of evolving color is surprisingly possible on this canvas, the movement from night to day, or day to night, seamlessly blending with the colors of the sun and sea, the night sky and dark waters. Truth to tell the post-apocalyptic world, in art and otherwise, never looked as good as it does in the hands of Kin. Imagine what it would feel like walking through the works inside a gallery.
Who’s rusty?
There is art in the blood of Kin, and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. He’s due to leave for elsewhere, to do something that isn’t about art at all. And before you say that this is the classic story of the struggling artist, Kin’s story does tell us otherwise. The truth is, Kin has paid his dues. Graduating with a Fine Arts degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman too long ago, Kin has waited for art he can be proud of doing. Unlike many of his peers who have published in galleries big and small, Kin took his time, he let his aesthetic evolve, his notions of art change. If rust and color is any indication, then the waiting has done Kin and his art well. No one knows to hold a piece of rusty metal, and safely run with it. Found objects and mixed media on canvas find renewed vigor here. The creation of color that’s faithful to the transience of time and space, earth and nature, are suddenly all possible. There’s an amount of pride to be had in the aesthetic that’s in rust and color, one that at most is new, but at the very least is rare.
As I went through the works in Kin’s first solo exhibit online, I couldn’t believe galleries hadn’t picked up his work. Then again, I’m barely surprised. Not many of our artists get to exhibit in galleries as virtual unknowns; many of them get to do exhibits, solo or as part of a group, through relationships both personal and professional. Mentorship exists not just as a handing down of aesthetics from one generation to the next, but also as a valid possibility of exhibiting in major art spaces. A version of this is the curator-artist relationship that ascertains the existence of group exhibits. The art agent-artist relationship exists most informally, usually among friends, but also silently and quietly between the art gallery owner and the artist who will agree to a painful cut in sales.
This of course isn’t particular only to the world of visual arts. A version of this system also exists in the literary world, in music, in film. It’s this system that fuels productions that are independent: from film to music, as well as online and small book publishing. What of course is different for the visual arts is that the production cost of a painting is never as cheap as say, filming with a video cam, or singing in front of a computer camera and uploading the video to YouTube. It also isn’t as easy as putting up one’s work on a blog. But maybe that’s the point of an exhibit like rust and color, existing as it does online, in a social networking site like Facebook. It refuses the usual processes involved in art production, rejects our notion of what the experience of an exhibit has to be.
Maybe, in the midst of rejected objects on canvas, and the rejections faced by the artist who has found them important, there is as well the exhibit’s rejection of us. All of us, who have been made to believe certain things about art, without realizing that these expectations are borne of a system that fails often enough, even as it remains most powerful. It’s in this light that rust and color, first solo exhibit, online and otherwise, tells us all to shove it. And right there, it’s art that we should all want to click through.
Published in GMA News Online, January 20 2011.