For me, a painting is something that goes beyond thought. . . . In order for it to be an artwork, I need to put a lot of trauma into it.
Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8.
Manuel Ocampo laments the contemporary art market boom in the Philippines. When he moved to Manila in 2005, the local art scene was made up of small independent galleries “in shopping malls and next to McDonald’s”1 showing experimental art that served other artists, musicians, and writers.2 When the market for contemporary Asian art boomed around 2008, an artist’s worth became defined by auction houses, dictating the style of Filipino art.3 Having lived outside the Philippines—in Los Angeles, Rome, and Seville—and participated in international exhibitions and biennials since the early 1990s, Ocampo’s reputation and the value of his work grew, and with it his desire to critique the market-driven notion of success and to create more informal spaces for art to thrive at the margins. In 2010 Ocampo curated an exhibition called Bastards of Misrepresentation: Doing Time on Filipino Time at the Freies Museum in Berlin, asserting aesthetic autonomy amid what he saw as the misrepresentation of Filipino artists, their politics, and their community.4 He included artists who had been ignored by the art market but had long been part of the local art scene. In 2013 Ocampo curated the second iteration of this exhibition, called Manila Vice, at Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète, France, where he used black painted walls, calling the space an “anti-museum.”5
Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎
Manuel Ocampo, “A Rant and Rave,” in Manila Vice (Lyon, France: Fage Editions, 2013), 35–36. ↩︎
Manuel Ocampo, “A Rant and Rave,” in Manila Vice (Lyon, France: Fage Editions, 2013), 36. ↩︎
Susan Gibb, “Never Give Up Before It’s Too Late: Manuel Ocampo,” ArtAsiaPacific 79 (July/August 2012), available at artasiapacific.com/Magazine/79/NeverGiveUpBeforeItsTooLateManuelOcampo. ↩︎
Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎
The San José Museum of Art acquired Manuel Ocampo’s Untitled (Burnt Out Europe) (1992) in 2001, ten years after the controversial work was censored from the main gallery of Documenta IX for its use of swastikas. In the painting, anachronisms and disparate signs appear on a common plane.1 The crucified head of Jesus on the body of a bird of prey, whose wings are adorned with swastikas, hovers over the courtyard of what could be a Spanish colony’s Catholic mission or a Holocaust concentration camp; perhaps a hybrid combination of the two, the barracks are run by demons. Founded in 1955 with the express intention of countering Nazi censorship of avant-garde art, the contemporary art exhibition Documenta opens every five years in Kassel, Germany. That Ocampo’s painting was censored from its prominent position in the 1992 exhibition corroborates the artist’s belief that virtue and vice are interchangeable attributes of moral being that must be constantly negotiated and that often intertwine despite efforts to discern one from the other. Those desiring to be free of censorship become censors themselves. Within Untitled (Burnt Out Europe), Jesus is likewise subject to this duality. He is depicted as suffering at the hands of Roman soldiers, who placed a crown of thorns on his head, and yet he extends his own talons to catch and punish the demons below. This figuration critiques the attempt of powerful individuals and nations to deem themselves of higher virtue in order to justify their vice.
Kenneth Baker, “Perverse Beauty,” in Manuel Ocampo: Fear of Kitsch Existence, ed. Menene Gras Balaguer (Barcelona: Casa Asia, 2017), 57. ↩︎
By the late 1990s, Manuel Ocampo had become internationally known for his unapologetic paintings invoking the sanctity of Catholic imagery with the legacy of Spanish colonial violence on the Philippines. After living in Los Angeles and Rome, he moved to Seville, Spain, where his work shifted from using iconoclastic motifs to pop culture imagery. In his paintings for Torta Imperiales (2017), layered references to Disney movies, heavy metal music, Balikbayan boxes that are used by Filipino migrants to send goods back home, and US President William McKinley—whose 1989 Spanish-American War annexed the Philippines from Spain’s colonial rule—address contemporary colonial trauma.1 The Torta Imperiales paintings, along with earlier works by the artist, were included in The Spectre of Comparison, an exhibition of work by Ocampo and Filipino-Canadian artist Lani Maestro for their representation of the Philippines at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Manuel Ocampo, interview on the occasion of The Spectre of Comparison exhibition for the Philippine Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017 (posted January 20, 2019), video by Mickey Mayer, 3:38 minutes, available at youtu.be/P3T8bwBUKfI. ↩︎
Born in Quezon City in 1965, Manuel Ocampo moved at age twenty to the United States, where he briefly studied at California State University, Bakersfield, before dropping out to work at McDonald’s and paint at night. He credits his mother—a journalist—for encouraging his career as a professional artist by asking him to draw editorial cartoons for her newspaper. He later worked for a Catholic priest to create facsimiles of Spanish colonial paintings. Simulating the wear that would typically appear on true antiques, the experience led the artist to seriously question the ethics, power, and credibility of history painting. Such experiences informed his stylistic approach, which includes cartoonish illustrations, large text, and bold religious figuration. Ocampo often calls his work “bad painting”1—a term coined by curator Marcia Tucker in her 1978 exhibition of the same name to describe painting that deforms the figure and uses fantastic and irreverent content to reject conventional attitudes about art.2 In his large-scale confrontational paintings, the artist deploys art-historical and literary references and iconography like crucifixes, emoticons, and sausages that pile up to amass complex meaning. As the artist explains, “For me a painting is something that goes beyond thought. It’s sort of like an accumulator of thought . . . at the limits of language.”3
Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎
Marcia Tucker, press release for “Bad” Painting at The New Museum, New York, January 14–February 28, 1978, available at archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/5. ↩︎
Manuel Ocampo, “First Look: Manuel Ocampo,” conversation with Karin Oen at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, September 3, 2015, video, 58:10 minutes, available at youtu.be/xNeHU1q4hz8. ↩︎
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