Author: admin
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The Teacher Who Became a Mountain: Fernando Poe Jr.’s Asedillo (1971)
When Asedillo premiered in 1971, Ferdinand Marcos was tightening his grip on the republic, and the air in Manila was thick with student marches, labor strikes, and the metallic aftertaste of tear gas. Celso Ad. Castillo’s film—produced by and starring Fernando Poe Jr.—could have been mistaken for another action vehicle designed to confirm FPJ’s legend…
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Pustaha
The name pustaha is borrowed from the Sanskrit word pustaka meaning “book” or “manuscript.” The pustaha of the Batak in North Sumatra often contained dark and secret knowledge passed down through ritual specialists (datu). Among its most striking tales are those of black magic, where the text describes methods to destroy enemies through gruesome rites.…
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Vertebra in Vial
Questions persist about Rizal’s vertebra. Among them, why was it preserved? The oft-repeated claim that it was precisely where the bullet struck is unproven and, in the end, immaterial, since part of his brain was also preserved. The more curious matter is why these fragments, the vertebra and the brain, were placed in viales de…
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José Rizal’s Drawings of Anting-Anting
Proving yet again that in any field of inquiry Rizal emerges as the ubiquitous scholar, this photograph from the Dean C. Worcester Collection at the Newberry Library (Ayer Philippine Photographs) shows a drawing of objects he reportedly discovered on a hill near Dapitan. The inscription reads: “Anillo de oro con un rubí y una medallita,…
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Amulets of historical imagination
In 2021 after numerous museum visits in Southeast Asia, I began reflecting on what collections revealed and concealed about history. The objects that most profoundly shifted my thinking were not the canonical works of art but the agimat, talismans seized under colonial regimes and now dispersed across museums. Just last week (September 21, 2025), while…
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The Agimat as Matrix: Conceptualizing Islamic Rematriation
In an early twentieth-century catalogue from the Field Museum in Chicago, a Qur’an-inscribed agimat—a talismanic belt from Mindanao—is marked “difficult to obtain.” Composed of cloth, baroque pearls, plant matter, and sacred text, the object was classified as an ethnographic specimen, stripped of its cosmological function and ritual charge. This paper uses that object as a…
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La Bulaqueña: What We Know About The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Latest Attraction
The following notes draw from the wealth of information shared by scholars, collectors, archival researchers, and art history networks following the loan of La Bulaqueña (1895) to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (June 2025). It brings together insights from literature, oral histories, institutional records, and recent findings that have come to light in the wake of…
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Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro
My article, “Irineo Miranda’s Ethnographic Portrait of Nina Rasul and the Philippine Bangsamoro,” is now out in the latest issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 3–43). This piece revisits Miranda’s 20th-century illustrations through the lens of colonial ethnography, visual anthropology, and Bangsamoro history, tracing how his portrait of…
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Suzi Ferrer
Herbert Johnson MuseumJan 25, 2025–June 8, 2025Ithaca, NY In her artist statement for Portrait in Six Dimensions (1973), Suzi Ferrer (1940–2006) described the installation as emerging from her “continuing concern with the relation of the individual to society,” specifically addressing “female stereotypes and role-playing, or perhaps, what this society expects of women, and how they…
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Book Review of Enigmatic Objects for Southeast Asian Studies journal
In Enigmatic Objects: Notes Towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023), National Artist for Literature Resil B. Mojares offers a thoughtful and absorbing meditation on the origins of collecting in the Philippines. Organized like a cabinet of curiosities, the book assembles stories of portraits, phrenological skulls, coconut-shell…
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Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna
Painted ca. 1452–58 as the right wing of the Melun Diptych, Madonna and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by Jean Fouquet constitutes a singular contribution to the visual culture of the French court. Executed in oil on panel, the painting presents a Marian figure suspended between celestial abstraction and courtly specificity. Seated on a…
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The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait
Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s…
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The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia
Summary This essay traces how vernacular spatial logics in Southeast Asia—expressed through myths, maritime movement, and ritual orientations—shaped understandings of sovereignty before the imposition of colonial borders. Drawing on the figure of the pearl as a model of layered accretion, it explores how societies in the Philippine archipelago organized space through concentric and relational forms…
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Goya’s Fight with Cudgels
Two men, isolated in a barren landscape, beat each other with heavy sticks. There’s no clear reason, no visible audience, and—crucially—no way out. Their legs vanish below the frame, long assumed to be submerged in mud. Later photographs taken before the painting’s transfer to canvas suggest they may have been standing in tall grass. Either…
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Felix Hidalgo, Un Rio
The enigmatic painter Felix Resureccion Hidalgo captures a river veiled in the quiet of early evening. The viewer’s gaze glides over the water’s surface, mirroring the way our eyes perceive the fading light by fluidly dissolving into darkness. The glow trembles in the foreground, absorbed by the landscape rather than resisted, as if the deepening…
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Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra
R.L. Archer’s 1937 article, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” provides an early and detailed inquiry into the forms of Islamic mysticism as they emerged and took root in the Malay world. Drawing principally on Malay-language manuscripts held in Leiden and elsewhere, Archer situates these texts within a broader genealogy of Sufi metaphysics, while also attending to…
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Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern
Through March 29MoMA, Floor 2, The Paul J. Sachs Galleries The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern offers a long-overdue reconsideration of a figure whose impact on the institution—and on modern art in America—cannot be overstated. Much like the uprooted pine tree that symbolized the Armory Show, Bliss stood…
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Idolizing Mary: Maya-Catholic Icons in Yucatán, Mexico (Amara Solari, 2022)
Amara Solari’s Idolizing Mary: Maya-Catholic Icons in Yucatán, Mexico examines the role of Marian devotion in colonial Yucatán, focusing on the Virgin of Itzmal. The book explores how Maya communities integrated Catholic iconography into their existing religious traditions, aligning with precontact notions of sacrality, ritual purity, and divine intercession. The study centers on the 1648…
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Manila’s Monument to Queen Isabel II
The statue of Queen Isabel II is one of few public artworks that survive from the time of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. Located in front of Puerta Isabel II in Intramuros, Manila, this bronze monument has weathered the vicissitudes of Philippine history and the shifting tides of politics and empire. Commissioned in the…
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Juan Adán Morlán (1741–1816)
Juan Adán Morlán (1741–1816) is one of the defining sculptors of Spanish Neoclassicism, a figure whose artistic achievements were often intertwined with personal controversies and professional disputes. Born in Tarazona, Aragón, and baptized on March 1, 1741, Adán’s early life was rooted in a family of carpenters. His father’s craft provided the young Adán with…
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The Soldier’s Reward by Jennifer Ngaire Heuer
I just made a purchase request from the library for The Soldier’s Reward, drawn in by Jennifer Ngaire Heuer’s ability to unearth the deeply personal dimensions of a quarter-century of conflict. She reveals how war’s chaos was not just a matter of battlefield tactics but something that profoundly shaped the quiet rhythms of family life…
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Pasig River (1948) by Miguel Galvez
The Pasig River (1948), an oil on canvas by Miguel Galvez, captures two fishing vessels moored along the riverbank—a quiet tableau of industry and resilience. Galvez depicts Filipinos easing back into the rhythms of labor and life, just three years after the devastation of war. The composition feels deliberate and balanced. The two boats, painted…
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Lost and Found (1996) – Ode to Love and Loss
Lee Chi-Ngai’s Lost and Found (1996) is one of those delicate little films that dares to press on your heartstrings and doesn’t let go. It knows what it’s about—love, loss, and the refusal to surrender to despair—and delivers its message with an earnestness so determined that it’s almost disarming. Of course, you know where it’s…
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Marca Demonio de las Comparaciones: Die anachronistische Substitution des Kris Joloano in Rizal und Amorsolo
Diese Studie untersucht die anachronistische Präsenz des Kris Joloano in José Rizals Noli Me Tangere (1887) und Fernando Amorsolos Marca Demonio, dem Etikett für den Ginebra San Miguel-Likör, das 1917 geschaffen wurde. Aufbauend auf Nagels und Woods Untersuchung von Anachronismen während der Renaissance positioniert die Analyse die neugierige Einfügung eines Kris Joloano als zeitliche Brücke,…
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Pearls in Islamic Art from the Umayyads to the Ottomans
In Islamic art and culture, pearls symbolize divine light, purity, and paradise, and serve as markers of spiritual authority and sovereign power. Nacreous objects were central to trade networks across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, integrating them into Islamic artistic and economic systems. Historical studies tell of their layered significance: as royal emblems in Late…
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Galo Ocampo’s Brown Madonna
Fig. 29 Galo Ocampo, Brown Madonna, 1938 Photo: UST Museum Collection A few years after Rising Philippines, Galo B. Ocampo advanced his fusion of local iconography and modernist style by reimagining the Madonna and Child as unmistakably Filipino. Depicted with Filipino features, traditional dress, and surrounded by native vegetation, Ocampo roots this iconic Catholic image…
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Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources
Samuel K. Tan’s Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources examines the historiographical landscape of Filipino Muslim history, emphasizing indigenous written sources over colonial records. Tan highlights the limitations of oral traditions, which vary across ethnic groups, and critiques colonial sources for their biased perspectives that framed Muslims…
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Cornell Anthropology Collection at Mapping Philippine Material Culture
The Cornell Anthropology Collection (CAC) houses an assortment of items from the Philippines, many of which were donated by returning veterans of the Philippine-American War in the early 20th century. These objects not only provide insight into the material culture of Mindanao but also reveal the complex history of military engagement and diplomatic exchange in…
Geronimo Cristobal 