Junkscape
signed and dated 1977 (upper left)
oil on canvas
35” x 35” (89 cm x 89 cm)

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist by Mrs. Bella Ancheta

In 1965 Ang Kiukok travelled to New York with the late Vicente Manansala, who was both mentor and friend. Culture-shocked by the stark alienation and dehumanisation he found in the industrial American landscape, Kiukok began filling his canvases with distortions.

In time, he persisted in developing an expressionist style, and appreciation developed within the Filipino public. Jagged shapes vibrate in strong colors in this industrial cum mechanical landscape by Ang Kiukok. The upper part of this machine-scape seem like the mouths of screaming creatures bespeaking both outrage and agony, but suffering does not liberate man from his fate, suggesting a void of existential agony.

Alice G Guillermo writes: “The subject of Ang Kiukok, such as junkscapes… cannot be ascribed to any particular period in chronological order. 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 subjects first appeared in the mid 1960s and 1970s in the context of local and international upheavals.

These include the scarred land of the junkscapes, piles of technological and mechanical debris, which are a complete reversal of the traditional sunny landscapes of abundance and folk piety. These paintings, in contrast, are unrelentingly modernist and cubist of influence in the sharpness and angularity of their forms. The heaps of twisted bluish metal on a blood red ground are like livid innards of some behemoth of war or god of technology gone haywire. The images of a hostile world rise before our eyes: lethal scraps and fragments that are the end products of the armaments race; weapons, crude or highly sophisticated, and all manner of devices precisely fashioned to split, cut up, fragment, and blast into a thousand bits one’s all too mortal frame. Yet the war machiens lie cold and silent now, ironically elegiac, with no human in sight and only a distant moon to bear mute witness in the vast post apocalyptic scenario.“