Literature: Roces, Alfredo, “Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair”, Mandaluyong City, 2000, fig. 258, p. 150 (illustrated)

ABOUT THE WORK

Remembering the late, mild mannered Ang who always appeared at ease with himself, one could find nothing to suggest a motive for his menacing creatures. For sure they are not mere gothic shockers if one considers them as part of Ang’s vision of a world in which insecurity is the central truth, with aggression or hostility lurking behind the outward calm of conventional order. What better way to jolt us to a heightened awareness of this truth, albeit generalized, than to transform banal creatures into horrifying beasts? Even those served on the hackneyed dinner table such as his many versions of fishes. They suggest not so much perversion, or disease, as the brute instinct for survival. In his chef d'oeuvre, Ang Kiukok seems to be trying to define his role and his influence as an artist in the face of socio-political problems and violence. He himself stresses that they recur throughout the years since they are always a part of his life, and each time they come up, there is something new in their interpretation. A large number of his themes appeared in the mid-1960s and 1970s in the context of local upheavals.