Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

ABOUT THE WORK

The cubist fragmentation of the two chickens initiates a sense of sharp, shifting movements, like a flurry of bladelike planes flung outwards in centrifugal motion against a background of primary blue and red. The technical virtuosity growing out of the speed of execution delights the eye. Throughout the years, the artist has mastered how to wield a powerful brush. While the intense red maintains the high emotional temper, the blue tones, modulating from dark to light, have the quality of the metallic, inorganic, inhuman and alienated. The angular jagged forms are balanced by the strongly defined black and red backdrops. In 1983, Cid Reyes asked the artist: “Are you conscious of doing a Filipino painting?” Ang Kiukok answered:”No. We are all Orientals. What is more important is to show Oriental feeling.” The Oriental/Chinese side in Ang Kiukok plays on the stark contrast of bright and dark, or pits red against black amid intense streaked hues of blue in an antagonistic yin yang relationship. The reds magnify the fact that the scene is a blood sport due to the physical trauma the cocks inflict on each other. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many tangible dualities (such as light and dark, fire and water, expanding and contracting) are thought of as physical manifestations of the duality symbolized by yin and yang.