Literature: De La Paz, Christiane L., Private Collections, Artes De Las Filipinas, Quezon City, 2009, p. 242 (illustrated)

ABOUT THE WORK

Despite hundreds of years of Christian influence, the Philippines cannot defy its attraction to the esoteric. Even if they lack conviction in the power of magic, the process of certain rituals provide many convenient metaphors for them to explain misfortunes, providences, and everything in between. For Karen Flores, her triptych works become easily comparable to their inspiration — the Tarot de Marseilles, which divines outcomes through pastoral personalities and infamously features among its major trumps a female pope. The form of the triptych easily corresponds to the common three card spread configuration: the first card representing the past, or one’s historical identity; the second card representing the present, or one’s needs; and the third card representing the future, or the path one must take in order to succeed. Assigning the same meanings to the triptych, the viewer can come up with an immediate interpretation of the set. In this case, the triptych Asuwang, Asawa, Alipin represents the manners in which the female spirit is suppressed by male efforts. How this reading arises, of course, is largely dependent on the arrangement of the three panels. Each panel presents a woman whose appearance is undermined by the indiscreet intrusion of male arms and legs. In keeping with the tarot motif, whose images seem archaic to us now but still manage to represent the archetypes of our day and age, the panels borrow largely from colonial imagery but suggest that very little has changed since then. “My work is my own mythology,” Flores once said in an interview. “How I see things to be.” The granddaughter of National Artist Hernando Ruiz Ocampo, Flores is counted among the most important Filipina artists of her generation, favoring feminist interpretations of her works, as these match her own vision of the world. In the 1980s and 90s, she was especially active in the formation of significant art collectives like Grupong Salingpusa and Sanggawa, alongside her similarly prominent contemporaries Elmer Borlongan and Mark Justiani. In 2000, she was among those chosen by the Cultural Center of the Philippines to receive its prestigious Thirteen Artists Award. Many of her works have found their way into the permanent collection of the Pinto Museum, where they are considered major entries. Among these works, Asuwang, Asawa, Alipin is the largest and possibly even the most significant of Flores’s work to enter the market in recent years. With its deft blending of occult imagery and Filipino cultural archetypes, the triptych is definitive of Flores’s style, viewing the realities of day-to-day living through the lens of the impossible. The work signals a coup not just for feminist and social realist art, but a paramount entry into the canon of Philippine contemporary art.