PROPERTY OF A VERY DISTINGUISHED FAMILY
Morning Mist, Hangchow
signed and dated 1973 (lower right and verso)
oil on wood panel
48" x 64" (122 cm x 163 cm)

Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. Alexander Richard Joya Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot
PROVENANCE: The Luz Gallery
EXHIBITEDThe Luz Gallery, Joya: New Paintings, Makati, 8 - 27 November 1973
LITERATUREKalaw-Ledesma, Purita and Amadis Ma. Guerrero. The Struggle for Philippine Art. Manila: Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974. Captured in a black-and-white photograph (page 132) at the opening night of Joya's 1973 exhibition at The Luz Gallery titled "Joya: New Paintings."

Joya’s Triumphant 1970sBy the 1970s, Jose Joya was not only the brightest name in Philippine art but the most “booked and busy” of them all. Joya had become the first-ever Filipino visual artist to be granted the Rockefellerscholarship fund—in fact, twice successively: the John D. Rockefeller III Foundation grant in 1967 and the Ford Foundation Assistance in 1968. Joya also participated in a 1970 traveling exhibit that visited New York, the Smithsonian Institute, the Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Atlanta.Upon returning to the Philippines, Joya mounted a homecoming exhibition. In 1970, he was anointed as an Associate Professor and new Dean of his alma mater, the UP College of Fine Arts.In 1971, he added another award to his string of accolades—the “Patnubay ng Kalinangan Award,’ bestowed by the City of Manila during its 4th centennial celebrations. Two years later, in 1973, Joya would be listed (along with Rod. Paras-Perez) in the prestigious London-published “International Who’s Who in Art and Antiques.”Winding back just a few years, in 1964, Joya, along with Abueva, represented the Philippines in its historic first participation at “The Olympics of the Art World”—the Venice Biennale.Joya’s Visit to the People’s Republic of ChinaIn mid-1972, as chairperson of the Philippine First Educators’ Group Delegation, Joya flew to China for a 16-day trip to formally present a letter of invitation to the Art Society of Peking to attend the Southeast Asian Regional Artists Conference, of which he was also secretary-general.Joya was also tasked to travel to Hong Kong to invite its artists to the conference and personally request that the influential Asia Magazine publish a special issue of Southeast Asian art.In China, Joya found more than spare time to immerse himself in Chinese culture and society, sketching people and places and visiting iconic landmarks: the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Peking Palace of Fine Arts. He also visited major cities: Beijing, Canton, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, from which Joya drew inspiration for the work at hand, Morning Mist, Hangchow.Painted on February 4, 1973, almost a year after his Chinese sojourn, this work shows Joya’s fondness for his visit to China. “In fact, I had just left the border when I thought of going back. That’s how much I liked the place,” Joya said in a 12 July 1972 Manila Bulletin interview. Joya likely depicts in this work Hangzhou’s famed West Lake, which, especially on mornings, becomes laden with mist, seemingly transforming the lake and its surrounding landscapes into a Chinese ink-wash painting. West Lake has inspired many painters and poets since the 9th century and was declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2011 for influencing garden design in China, Japan, and Korea. Joya’s employment of a cool and sweet pastel-like palette illuminated by a bluish-gray tone captures this scenario.Festive Homecoming Celebrations at The Luz GalleryMorning Mist, Hangchow would become part of Joya’s blockbuster exhibition at the Luz Gallery in November 1973, from which the owner acquired the work. Titled “Joya: New Paintings,” it showcased oil paintings and was the show that first introduced to the public his career-defining acrylic collages. The work encapsulates Joya’s consummate evolution from his artistry-defining abstract expressionism of the ‘50s and ‘60s to geometric expressionism characterized by a succession of weaved block-like forms, which borrowed elements from the seriality of Pop Art, the dominant art style in America in the 1960s when Joya pursued his Rockefeller grant.Joya and His Rediscovery of the Filipino SensibilityBut Joya’s venture into geometric expressionism aligns more with a Filipino sensibility. While Pop Art’s seriality critiques mass production, consumerism, and media saturation, Joya’s geometricabstraction was influenced by an intimate reconnection with the cultures of his motherland. In 1967, when Joya had just settled in New York for his scholarship, he became engrossed with the study of Philippine history— probably a sign of part homesickness, part curiosity, and part reawakening in him."At this time, the study of Philippine history engaged me,” Joya says in Leonidas Benesa’s Joya: Drawings. “Digging into rare sources, I came across materials that gave light facets to Philippine history." Furthermore, this reinvigorated spirit in Joya coincided with the resurgence of nationalistic and progressive ideals during the tumultuous 60s (also the era of the wars of national liberation against imperialism in many nations like Cuba, Vietnam, and the Philippines), in which the search for a pre-colonial past became intertwined with the concept of nation-building and the decolonization of Philippine history. Joya’s interest also coincided with the rise of nationalist historiography fostered by the eminent Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino. Said Joya in Benesa’s book, "Artists respond to interests prevailing during their times."Joya had even envisioned a design center at the UP campus laden with indigenous designs. As Dean, he also espoused the idea that “art has a big role to play in these troubled times, and the artist must realize that he, too, has a social commitment.” “Before they get a diploma from the state university,” Joya says in the Panorama interview, “I will require them to serve the communities in terms of sharing the things that they have learned in school. This country can be a leading producer in local handicrafts, and our artists can certainly improve the design.” (Philippine Panorama, 3 January 1971)Iconography inspired by old coins, anting-anting, and pre-colonial articles, such as pottery shards and metal fragments excavated in archaeological sites, e.g., Santa Ana, Manila in the late 1960s (in which nationalist anthropologist F. Landa Jocano formed part of the archaeological team), was Joya’s first answer to an increasing nationalistic impulse in his art. The shapes—which Joya says are “rich in visual vocabulary” and would later transform into the recognizable block-like forms in the early 1970s, evident in Morning Mist, Hangchow—and their seriality evokes the dynamic rhythm of repetition and progression found in Philippine indigenous art, particularly in weaving, embroidery, and ornamentation.Notice in Morning Mist, Hangchow the incised markings evoking various old Philippine alphabets, “almost as if they were cryptic Malayan symbols,” as Joya puts it in Cid Reyes’ ‘Conversations on Philippine Art.’ “I have always thought that we Filipinos suffer from too much Western influences. It is good for us to start rediscovering our past.” In doing so, Joya transforms the entire composition into that of a meditative space, an avenue to reclaim our past and redefine the present. Joya had liberated his art from the Western influences of the Abstract Expressionist school and had now identified himself and his art with the collective cultural psyche of his native motherland.Joya’s incorporation of indigenous elements, thus emphasizing his Filipino sensibility, proved to be the pinnacle of artistic maturation for the artist. Joya’s renewed interest in Philippine culture and history birthed his newfound creative expression. His integration and consolidation of various indigenous elements not only underscores the virtuoso of Joya but more so, a heightened understanding of the collective cultural—harmony in solidarity, as evoked by his contiguous forms. As Francia Jr. writes, “[Joya] takes us out of the temporal sphere or plane into the purer and eternal one.”Despite the foreign subject matter, Morning Mist, Hangchow is a sublime articulation of a Filipino visual language that would reach a high point in his monumental 1976 painting “Pagdiriwang” (PICC Collection), which Joya said is “the celebration of the Filipino’s struggle to discover himself and assert his own position in the universal society of men...a tribute to the Filipino’s pride in his own identity.” (Adrian Maranan)