JUNYEE: SEPARATE REALITY - 7 March – 3 April 2004
In collaboration with Jade and Tony Twigg
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"Separate Reality" is a work designed for SLOT by Junyee, the pre-eminent installation artist of the Philippines. The work was begun in conversation, sitting around Junyee’s kitchen table discussing the image of a woman pressed up against the window of SLOT. For me, the image evoked Australia’s phobia of a crowded Asia, pressed hard against our boarders ready to flood into our land. A point of view that has proposed a history of paranoiac rhetoric from the "White Australia Policy" to the 60's "Domino Theory" and the "Pacific Solution" of today. In response, Junyee told me that he was a ‘patriot’ not a ‘nationalist’, and by that he meant he was one who loved his country, rather than someone who followed his nation’s leaders.
Junyee emerged as an installation artist around the time of ‘People Power’, that popularist Filipino movement of the 80’s that replaced the pro-US administration of Ferdinand E. Marcos with the regime of Corozon Aquino. In an expression of national independence she closed the US military bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay. Similarly, the installations of Junyee executed in materials that were drawn from the Filipino landscape such as banana leaves, seed pods and bamboo, spoke of stepping out from the cultural shadow of a past colonial ruler. Junyee doesn’t see himself as a citizen of an expanded China, the home of his ancestors, or of an expanded Spain, the Philippines first European coloniser, or even an expanded USA, the Philippines last coloniser - he is a citizen of his own back yard.
Looking at a "Separate Reality" as it is now installed in SLOT it is Junyee’s idea of 'skins' that is apparent. One skin belongs to Jade, our model. The other, the "Esperanto" of jeans and a T-shirt, belongs to everyone. It is an identity without racial demarcation. In the context of Redfern, this work presents a reading of ethnicity and colonialism that is based on inclusion rather than exclusion. For Junyee, I think it is also an expression of his patriotism.