"Charmed By China"
February 5 - 17, 2008

The culture of China has permeated our own for so many centuries and has blended into so many aspects of our daily Filipino lives that we hardly know where one ends and the other begins. Many Filipino names and bloodlines, whether hispanicized or anglicized, have origins in the various provinces of Mainland China. Our languages and dialects abound in idioms adopted from the ancient kingdoms of Cathay. We are surrounded with objects and artefacts created in the vast reaches of our largest Asian neighbor. Indeed, since childhood our inherited taste buds have savored and yearned for the ultimate in comfort food: the mami, siopao, siomai, lumpia and pancit of happy days. 

As an artist in constant search of a subject, I am fortunate that I have so very much Chinese stuff within my reach, some priceless and most ordinary, but all beautiful in special ways. Among them are ancient Chinese ceramics, excavated and heirloom, which we modestly collected in the cheap early days of the Sixties. I became addicted to these bits of history which prove our pre-Hispanic trade with China. Soon enough I morphed into a sort of Sino-magpie who lived only to snatch little bronzes, ivories, jade animals, woven fabrics, name it, to bring back to her nest of exotica. But before long, to my guilty relief, the hoard was justified by its being of Service to my Art. For example, a special affection for the obscure but colorful art of cloisonné enamelware is the reason I often place one in my still life tablescapes. 

Each of these objects of my desire is wrapped in a memory: the place and the hour an inanimate lump came alive in my hand, the company of an old friend who egged me on to buy it, the bracing chill wind of the flea market we froze in, the lingering taste of that last merienda dumpling as I haggled the price.

These are the things whose memories I paint and which you see in this exhibit.  The vase, the cup, the chopstick; the lotus, the water, the bridge; the window, the lantern, the bicycle; the remembered spaces, the shared culture and the charmed things of China.
 

Phyllis Zaballero
Quezon City
January 17, 2008