When one reaches the seventh decade, there is much to look back on, but visual artist Junyee would rather look forward and beyond.
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| Junyee at home in Los Baños |
Born Luis E. Yee Jr. and raised in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte, he
found himself at Grade One with several “Junior” namesakes so to make
him stand out from the others, a classmate contracted his nickname to
Junyee, and it stuck.
Before he entered school, he was drawing figures on paper. His father
owned a general merchandise store where reams of paper were available
for making brown bags. The boy was allowed first pick. His father
indulged him by buying him Marvel and other color comics.
He honed his craft by copying different comic styles and models. In
Grade Three, he won first prize in a school-wide drawing contest. In
Grade Four, he was doing portraits, a skill that sustained him as a fine
arts student at the University of the Philippines Diliman where his
portrait “racket” in pencil, ink or pastel earned him P50-100. This
supplemented his Napoleon Abueva scholarship.
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| "Worm Hole," soot and paint on board |
His latest show “Dark Matter” at Galleria Duemila (210 Loring street,
Pasay City) is dedicated to Abueva whom he considers a second father.
He said, “I owe him a lot. I learned so much from him, his mind that
couldn’t keep still. From him I explored and acquired a passion for
sculpture. With him I was able to focus on sculpture.”
As his student, they ate together, went to school together. Junyee
felt that he was treated not only as a privileged apprentice but like a
son. “I dedicated my show to him. I kissed his hand (at the opening), he
cried, I cried. The audience became silent. It was an emotional
moment.”
The show is a rarity in Junyee’s career, his first after a lull of
four years. He said, “I don’t like exhibitions, the pressures and
deadlines they cause. I’ve realized that some artists have regular shows
for the purpose of exposure so they can market their works. That’s not
in my system to this day.”
He’d rather do installations which galleries used to shun. Today,
galleries have opened space for installations or non-commercial shows.
He earns from doing functional art (furniture), designing houses and
chapels in collaboration with an architect and doing the landscape
afterwards.
It’s like what he has done to his home at the UP Los Baños
campus–transforming a rundown faculty house into something else, mainly
from found materials. The trunk of a
molave tree saved from a typhoon saw new life as a house post. Broken tiles were arranged into a wall piece.
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| Orange bench shaped like a worm |
The University tapped him to turn 3,000 square meters of land on
campus into a sculpture garden. He has put up three orange benches
inspired and shaped like an earthworm. His target is 15 sculptures
spread over the land. Afterwards, UP will maintain the garden.
Simultaneous with this is the first Artists Village in Baler, Aurora,
which had a soft opening in June. A project of the Juan Angara
Foundation, it is on 250 hectare of forest land and has a main house
where there will be space for theaters, workshops, artist residencies
from different disciplines, festivals, exchange of artists between the
Philippines and Spain.
He insisted on the use of indigenous materials which are plentiful in
the province and which can be picked up from the forest without cutting
down trees. The village will be unique for being made of found objects
and retrieved wood materials.
He is also part of two ongoing group shows, one in Lipa, Batangas, to
expose people there to contemporary art, and the other, “Recollection
1081,” an exhibition of protest art at the Cultural Center Main Gallery
done during martial law. His contribution to the latter, “Mate in Four,”
are anti-martial law cartoons done while he was
Philippine Collegian art editor.
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| On a rocking chair he designed and assembled from old wood |
He is thankful for those Diliman years for opening his eyes and mind
to the artist he wanted to be. It was good timing because during those
years, the debate was on the question “What is Filipino art?”
This encouraged him to research on traditional images, practices and
materials. He said, “If there was a time machine that would let me see
what life was like in the pre-Hispanic period, I’d take a ride in it. It makes me think what kind of art we would have developed without our
colonizers.”
In a corner of his house is a powerful telescope that enables him to
look at the stars. Junyee said, “I spend more time pondering the
workings of the universe than making art. My wife likes to tease me that
if I’d just work fulltime, I’d be rich.”
But at 70, he knows where the real riches lie.--
Text and photos by Elizabeth Lolarga
First published by Vera Files and Yahoo Philippines, July 25, 2012.
