This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Finale Art File confirming the authenticity of this lot.

Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

Exhibited: Metropolitan Museum of Manila, "Ang Kiukok; A Retrospective", Manila, Philippines, 2000

Literature: Roces, Alfredo, Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair, Finale Art File, Mandaluyong City, Philippines, p. 309 (illustrated)

ABOUT THE WORK

This work by Ang Kiukok deconstructs the human figure screaming into the abyss as if he were disintegrating, with his flesh peeling from the bone and the blood clotting heavily turning into black soot. Considered as the earliest in this series, Kiukok contemplates the plight of a human struggling from a depraved environment as the body decays to just its skin and bones. The despair found in the works of Kiukok makes us yearn for a glimmer of hope outside, for which there is none. The man is trapped in a dark solitary space, where starvation and torture causes for a never ending scream into the wilderness, that society looks and turns away. For Kiukok, the people in his art as shown here, are victims of a condescending society that being exploited and tormented at every turn. Art critic Alfredo Roces commented in his book Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair (Finale Art File, 2000) on how Kiukok portrayed pain and suffering unto his oeuvre: “Does Kiukok extract some measure of catharsis by releasing such torments onto his canvas and into our complacent world? Do the viewers, especially those who own and hang Kiukok’s personification of pain, get relief from their own injury by identifying with the suffering…before them? You do have to put in something in what is before you. Art is, after all, the recreation of an experience.”