Paula Acuin Dr.

Patrick Flores
AS 270: Philippine Art and Society 15 December 2017

Exports and Encounters: The Asian Tour of Philippine Art (1958) and They Call Her Cleopatra Wong (1978)

This essay proposes an initial inquiry into two seemingly disparate modalities--- an exhibition and a feature film--- that
consider a notion of Southeast Asia as region or even, at the outset, an “utterance” to which it belongs, and as audience, of
which it is also part, within the period of twenty years. Lodged roughly in the middle of this timeline is the establishment of
the ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967. The exhibition, the “Asian Tour of Philippine Art” in 1958 is
a direct offshoot of the Art Association of the Philippines’ singular experiment in constructing a kind of pan-Asian alliance
through art in the form of the FSACC First Southeast Asia Conference and Competition in Manila in 1957. Meanwhile the
film “They Call Her Cleopatra Wong” released in 1978, is a Singapore-Filipino co-production which, unlike the Asian Tour,
began strictly as a business proposition between two wily film industry executives. The two are examined in parallel terms
as either purposefully or unexpectedly engaging in the political and cultural project of Southeast Asia while also setting up
the production of a transnational Philippines that is, as in the Asian Tour, accommodating to modernity, but also, as in the
case of Cleopatra Wong, fiercely (and lethally) loyal to the region.

“Above all, contemporary”

In 1957, the AAP Art Association of the Philippines opened the FSACC First Southeast Asia Conference and Competition
in Manila--- largely credited as the first exhibition in and on Southeast Asia--- in the midst of a sudden shift in state
leadership. Ramon Magsaysay, the eighth President of the Republic, had just been killed in a plane crash making then Vice-
President, Carlos P. Garcia the new leader1. I hope to return to this later but suffice to say for now that having well-known
links with the CIA, Magsaysay did not exactly leave the Philippines in a state of idyll. This concurrence would find an
unusual semblance later on in the world of so-called “exploitation film” which, as in real life geopolitics, is truly not
wanting of conspiracy and bedlam.

Going back to the exhibition, the FSACC, while conceived as a biennial affair that would take place in different Southeast
Asian cities (Malaya, was the target for 19592), ended up being a one-off event. What is perhaps singular is that almost
immediately after the FSACC, the AAP began preparations for the 1958 “Asian Tour of Philippine Art” (in some
documents it is referred to as the “Asian Tour of Philippine Paintings”) in a bid to make good on the following resolutions
of the FSACC:

1)Exchange of literature on art and culture between member nations

2) Inclusion and emphasis on the teaching of oriental art in the curricula of fine arts and humanities
3) Exchange of art exhibits
4)Exchange of personnel
and
5) Free flow of cultural and art material between member nations.

The conference also adopted resolutions on

a) a code of ethics among asian art
and
b) the adoption of copyright laws for the protection of Asian artists

It is amongst these weather-beaten terminologies which are now customary in the rhetorics of cultural diplomacy that I wish
to consider the term “export”. In 1957 and even until today, sixty years since, the word “export” has been largely avoided in
visual art in favor of the more tactful and pleasant “exchange”. There is the exception, however, of the word surfacing in the
annals of arts administration particularly within the purview of logistics and exhibition management, the banalities of which
do not seem to make good material for art history books. An exception too is how it is used in metaphorical terms, often

1 President Garcia, it must be noted, is best known in the country for his short-lived “Filipino First” policy and being
an unswerving anti-communist. Within the newly-chartered “Southeast Asia”, Garcia was witness and builder to several
permutations of the region: he was the Chairperson of the SEATO Southeast Asian Treaty Organization in 1954 and co-
founder of the ASA Association of Southeast Asia in 1961.
2 Dominador Castaneda. “The Southeast Asia Conference” in Art in the Philippines. (Quezon City: Office of
Research Coordination, University of the Philippines 1963)
referring to cultures being exported or imported across the world in various capacities and through the bodies not just of
artists, but all sorts of laboring, migratory, and transient peoples.

It is both these exceptional definitions that I wish to consider export with regard to the works in the Asian Tour exhibition
of 1957. Artworks as exports because, as in other “quality goods”, Philippine art’s program to “go international” is one that
also demands intricate administrative prowess, marketing galore, or, in the words of Purita Kalaw- Ledesma, speaking
pragmatically on the Philippines first participation in the Venice Biennale in 1962: “Money, government support,
politicking, and an aggressive promotions campaign”. But exports too because they are self-evidently from somewhere---
even elsewhere--- and that somewhere/elsewhere is the Philippines. The FSACC, as a platform that would bring together
artists from all over Asia side-by-side and even in competition with one another, would occasion critics from the Philippines
to ponder on how exactly Philippine art should be perceived as both Asian and Philippine. Concurrently, this would throw
into relief what John Clark calls the “relativization” of the “discourse of interpretation” with regard to the intricate, and
sometimes convoluted, transfer of modernisms not only with regard to the West but also with and amongst each other in
Asia3.

Jesus Peralta, then secretary of the AAP, thinking through the FSACC exhibition writes in 1957:

“This age when the national bounds are being opened to the entry of foreign with the aim of assimilation, national prestige
in the realms of art cannot better preserved than the development of something distinctly our own, something which other
Asian countries had the advantage of centuries. Where ours is a blending of our own native qualities generated by our
ancient connection with the mainland of Asia, and the Western influences accumulated since the advent of the sixteenth
century, the difficulty of shedding off this disadvantage of creating something Philippine, is too farfetch only to be an ideal.”

He continues,

“The portrayal of a carabao as the Philippine theme, for instance, as is the wont of several artists attacking this same
problem is equally problematic, inasmuch as a carabao is a carabo whether in the Philippine or Thailand. In short, the theme
is not the thing but the technique which at the first glance would imply Philippines as when one sees a Balinese painting and
at the moment state with certainty that is Balinese.”

Here Peralta locates the Philippines at a disadvantageous point where Philippine art is definitely Asian, but indistinct not
because of theme but because of technique. What is Asian about the Philippines, ie. what makes it sympathetic to the rest of
Asia, is deemed problematic for the artist in the Philippines wanting to produce “Philippine art”. Meanwhile the task of
“shedding off” accretions of colonialisms is an impossibility. He later ends the essay by saying that the only possible way
out of this impasse is through the institution, ie. the foundation of a “Museum of Contemporary Art” (one of the AAP’s
proposed projects during this time), which would serve as a conduit for art education.

The Asian Tour, as engendered by the FSACC, can be perceived as a survey exhibition of Philippine art but with the
specificity of having an Asian audience. Whether or not this bears on any of the works is circumvented at the moment. What
I hope to consider is the response to the works of the audiences it managed to reach. In this regard, it is instructive to focus
on a review of the exhibition entitled, “Philippine Contemporary Art Exhibition”, by Thomas Ichinose for “The Mainichi”
in 1958.

“Idols in the Third Eye” by Cesar Legaspi, “Market Vendors” by Anita Magsaysay- Ho, “Come Unto Me” by Napoleon
Abueva, an unidentified work by Jose P. Alcantara, “Decorative Motif” by HR Ocampo, and “Space No.1” by Fernando
Zobel de Ayala are identified by Ichinose, as “striking works”. Here, Ichinose seemingly soothes some of Peralta’s unease
as he describes the exhibition as “select as well as concise. It appears to represent a fine cross section. And above all, it is
contemporary.”

The entire article is enthusiastic and generous even, for a brief moment, identifying a certain “Filipino quality” in the works.
The writer describes some “similarity in their color preferences” to an Indian exhibition he saw previously. Ichinose also
decides to elaborate on the few sculptures in the exhibition, those by Alcantara and Abueva. He describes them as
“definitely modern in ‘feeling’, in form, in rhythm. In their powerful and original evocation of the ‘primitive soul’, the
works bare the very soil of their birth, the raw vitally living textures of their incarnated forms.” An image of the sculpture

3 This analysis of Clark’s argument is attributed to Dr. Patrick Flores who shared this with us during our class discussion
on John Clark’s “The Transfer”.
“Come Unto Me”, which accompanies the article, depicts the work as a large high relief of the profile of a hooded figure---
similar to the artists’ “Kaganapan” from 1952--- reduced to the most basic lines, with the background plane jutting out from
either end in a squat hexagon. Six years later, Abueva, together with Jose Joya, would reperesent the Philippines for the first
time at the Venice Biennale.

The Tokyo-based reviewer’s reckoning of a “primitive soul” which “bare the very soil of their birth” in the Abueva
sculpture could perhaps be apprehended as a mode of implicating the Filipino--- or even the nativist--- in the contemporary
or, in this case, the modern as the two terms were used interchangeably during this period. It was an encounter that, in
contrast to Peralta, elucidated, no matter how provisionally, a Filipino technique.

Global Circularity

Jumping twenty years after the Asian Tour and within a different industry altogether, where the term “export” is more
warmly welcomed is “They Call her Cleopatra Wong”, a film directed by Bobby Suarez in 1978. Suarez, a Hongkong-
trained autodidact from Manila; Sunny Lim, a Singaporean producer/distributor; and Mohamed Ashraf, a Malaysian
producer, embarked on a pan-Asian co-production from 1977 to 1978 swiftly releasing a string of what are proudly non-
American, American movies, mostly shot in Singapore and the Philippines with its cast and crew also “sourced” from the
two countries. The rationale behind the co-production was to exploit the distribution channels and production resources of
each producer. In other words, it was an “opportunistic effort” given the popularity of Bond movies and Hong Kong cinema
during this time.

They are largely a combination of Spy and Kung Fu films with a so-called “Occidentalist” twist: In Cleopatra Wong, in
particular, the villains are a group of vaguely European and American goons--- one can tell from their accent--- plotting to
destabilize the ASEAN economies through the manufacture of counterfeit money. Leong Yew explains:

“In the Southeast Asia of the 1970’s, it is also important to consider the rise of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), the Non-Aligned Movement, and the challenges of constructing post-colonial self-identity as regional and local
events that shape the films’ narrative structures. Indeed, although the Cold War figured heavily in these instances, they were
also attempts by regional leaders to take control of their own political destinies, and in so doing create a Western Other vis-
a-vis a more complex agglomoration of selves.”

Here the Cold War reemerges as a crucial vector both within, the diegetic, and without, the non-diagetic. worlds of
Cleopatra Wong. A female James Bond working for the Interpol, Wong is the ASEAN’s only hope at averting an impending
financial crisis. If in 1957 the FSACC and, consequently, the Asian Tour, were part of the larger cultural program of Cold
War USA in foregrounding the opportunities offered by the free world, in 1977 such a program---- which reeked of the
“’Western’ techniques of statecraft and diplomacy”---- was already supplanted by “alternative forms of collaboration”.

Whether or not the BAS (Suarez, Ashraf and Lim’s new film company) were mindful of this, I cannot say for sure. What is
striking, however, is how their film-industry smarts led them not only to a lucrative production opportunity but also to one
that would, oddly, reinsert them back into the mainstream thanks, in large part, to an endorsement from Quention Tarantino,
Filipino B-movie lover and hot Hollywood auteur.

Yew calls these films “origin-less”--- entities that are continuously, sometimes recklessly, transformed and adapted ad
infinitum. Cleopatra Wong is an excellent example of this tendency towards the “global circularity” of Asian B-movies.
Yew traces the circuitous, complex paths of transmutation: Cleopatra Wong takes her name from the film, “Cleopatra
Jones”, distributed by the Warner Brothers in 1973, playing on the idea of a black, woman- James Bond in the spirit of
blaxpoitation which, in turn, owes its lineage to the Asian-hybrid which is the Kung Fu film---- a blending of Western
gadget-based fight films and a more “traditional form of Asian aesthetics”. Later on, Cleopatra Wong would so inspire the
American director, Tarantino, so as to birth the yellow-tracksuit-wearing “Bride” in “Kill Bill” in 2003--- thirty years since
“Cleopatra Jones”.

Perhaps a productive term that emerges from this circularity and allows us to apprehend it in another way--- which may not
have been available yet to Peralta and Ichinoise writing in 1957---- is the concept of the “transnational”--- what Rolando
Tolentino describes as “the various contending ways that capital, systems of power and knowledge, cosmopolitanism,
urbanity, modernity, and postmodernity are penetrated within the nation’s own being”. It is in the transnational’s continuous
communication with the national that provides momentum for the flow of films like “Cleopatra Wong” which may, in fact,
prove to extend outside the circuit towards the rhizome or even, today, being swallowed into the even more intricate, much-
fretted-over “network”.

Niche Globality

Tolentino defines “niche globality” as the “specificities of the transnational engagements involved in the very peculiar
export of Philippine media texts to specific overseas sites”. I recall Tolentino’s definition as it emphasizes the place of
engagement, ie. relations, between the seemingly monolithic media industries and their dispersed, heavily variegated, and
agential audiences across the globe.

His study of the niche global markets for Filipino telenovelas reveals an almost already banal but telling insight from fans of
the telenovelas from other Southeast Asian countries. According to one of his online respondents “Super_fan”:
“...Philippine actresses to me are the prettiest in Asia. They have such beautiful porcelain skin and all so exotic, yet versatile
with both Western and Eastern audience. Some don’t even look Asian to me.”

Yew’s idea of an origin-less film, ie. Cleopatra Wong, echoes with this determination of a versatile prettiness from
Philippine media, one that smoothly translates and transposes to the Southeast Asian market. This “versatility” too seems to
chime with what the art critic, Leo Benesa, refers to as the unique role of the Filipino artist in his review of the Asian Tour.
Speaking in 1958, Benesa too, reckoning the inherent dynamics of duality (East and West, primitive and modern, etc.) in the
Asian Tour exhibition would be, in his own words, “obliged” to “give Philippine art an Asian habitation and a name”. The
exhibition, for him, would also expose the formulation of an interrogation which he would come back to over twenty years
after the Asian Tour in his lionized essay, “What makes Philippine art Philippine?”

Benesa, in 1958, writes:

“(The artist is) an ambivalent interpreter of human life, through the integrities of his medium in a language intelligible to
both hemispheres because he belongs to both.”

What is pivotal here is Benesa’s deployment of the term “ambivalent” which not only approximates Super_fan’s approval of
the artista’s “versatility”--- it may also have been a manifestation of Benesa’s dealing with the post-colonial concept of the
“hybrid” which would later be developed by Homi Bhaba, together with the concept of “ambivalence” itself, a destabilizing
discourse on the relations between colonizer and colonized.

The productive discomforts provoked by Cleopatra and the Asian Tour may, in the face of the hybrid, be further analyzed in
light of this productive versatility which accommodates and even surpasses the Asian---- being unconvincingly neither
Oriental nor Occidental--- a thread sewn so skillfully, its seams often not readily visible to most, when encounters are often
so fleeting and finite.