Junyee through time & space
If this were a chapter in a biography, the prose would flow like this:
We’ve found our 17-year-old protagonist working as a janitor in a funeral home in Cebu City. He swept the floors of the chapel and down to the morgue, doing errands, and slept on the pews at night—no blanket, swarmed upon by mosquitos. He was born in a city called Cabadbaran and came from a well-to-do family in Agusan del Norte. His father owned and operated a hotel and restaurant, expecting the son to become an entrepreneur like himself, while the mother, Feliza, wanted the young man to take up medicine. Our protagonist’s future was all but mapped out by his parents, but art (just like love) has a way of blotting out even the most immutable of fates. The young man—who had a penchant for drawing and crafting (he constructed floats for fiestas and processions, designed the stage for plays, garnered prizes in art competitions), wanting to pursue art in college—agreed with his father to work in their Palace hotel business in Surigao City for a year, and if the son still dreamt of becoming an artist after that, he was free to pack up and go. After 10 months, he told his father goodbye. The patriarch did not say a word, his gaze fixed upon the book he was reading. A single tear glinted in his eye.
Away from home, in faraway Cebu, the young man had to work to save up enough money for ship-fare to Manila to study fine arts. He found a place to work and a place to stay at the Metropolitan Funeral Home. He did his cleaning duties quietly, diligently. He was promoted later on to be in charge of paperwork (death certificates and the like). And when the owner found out about the young man’s artistic bent, he summoned the employee into his office. “I heard that you’re an artist… here’s some money,” handing out a thick wad of bills, “buy yourself some art materials, get the best brands, first class.” The young man was elated. In his high school library, there was a solitary art book: a book on Michelangelo, whom he adored. That morning with the boss, our protagonist thought he’d found his own Medici. This was probably the break he was looking for. But then the boss cited a particular brand that must be purchased.
Max Factor, the boss blurted out. Go get Max Factor.
Decades later, our protagonist has fulfilled his dream of becoming an artist, a well-respected and very influential one at that, having won numerous awards and participated in acclaimed biennales and exhibitions here and internationally. But, as his friend and art patron Sari Ortiga points out, Luis Yee Jr. (better known as “Junyee”) would almost always share this part of his history: working in a funeral home as a makeup artist for the dead. Junyee’s first “client” was an old woman with sallow skin and very long hair. He was scared shitless. But he would eventually become the best practitioner of his craft in the region’s funeral circuit, even going to other funeral homes to see the work of his competition, remembering how Michelangelo dissected cadavers in a monastery in Florence to perfect his craft. He plowed on and saved up for the move to Manila. It was a hard life.
“That was how I started my calvary, and it was my biggest test whether I still wanted to be an artist or to give up,” Junyee tells us. When you are young, he adds, you are a compendium “of stubbornness, sentimentality and romanticism.”
You can say he was already old and grizzled for a 17-year-old. Junyee, at age 22, was able to finally start college in 1964 and became an apprentice for three years of sculptor and UP professor Napoleon Abueva (who was eventually conferred a National Artist award). Golgotha would extend far beyond his youth. Going all out as a conceptual artist was a struggle, especially in the Philippines with its art scenes and collectors’ indifference in the olden days to challenging, non-traditional, un-hang-able, non-decorative art.
Junyee remembers how he and his wife, Tess, had a visit in the early eighties by a Caucasian art critic who came from Tokyo to interview him.
“Pumunta siya dun sa maliit naming bungalow. Aba’y alas dose na hindi pa rin umaalis. Ang ulam lang namin ay maliit na tilapia and tausi. Hinain namin; hindi kami nahiya. Hinati ko ng tatlo ’yung isda and sinabi ko sa kanya, ‘Since you’re our visitor, you’ll get the best part, the middle.’ Kay Tess ’yung buntot; sa akin ’yung ulo na halos walang laman. When the writer returned, he brought food and a Walkman for me (laughs).”
Junyee’s journey is extraordinary, going from applying blush to the departed, making do with meager meals, and suffering overzealous landlords, to being awarded by the Cultural Center of the Philippines the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining in 2020. If there was another artist deserving to be named National Artist aside from David Medalla, Junyee would be on the shortlist. He cited several people who helped him along the way: Billy Abueva; Senator Ed Angara and his family; as well as Ray Albano, the CCP museum director who was the first to give Junyee space in the cultural center’s Small Gallery (renamed later on as Bulwagang Amorsolo) to mount his art installation. (“Albano said that it was the start of the contemporary art movement in the Philippines,” informs Junyee.) Later on, art patrons who believed in Junyee’s vision include Senator Loren Legarda, who supported the artist in the publishing of the Wood Things, Installation, Junyee coffee-table book by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA), and Ortiga, who does projects with the artist at the Red Barn in Laguna, including the fabrication of installations to be found in the UP Los Baños Sculpture Garden.
Junyee is considered the “Father of Installation Art” in the Philippines with works that come from—what the artist characterizes as—“his backyard” filled with natural, indigenous materials and a mindset untouched by colonizers: from “Wood Things,” the symbolic “Balag,” and Pintados, to his “Angud, A Forest Once” (in 2007) installed at the CCP lawn, which Tess likened to a saddening graveyard of illegally felled trees, and “Kwarantin” (2020), a site-specific installation at the Vargas Museum grounds.
The artist laments how Filipinos are enamored of Western art. He, too, admits loving artworks from the West, but for Junyee, they don’t speak of our experiences, philosophies, and realities. When he put up his first outdoor installation, he was determined to use indigenous materials according to traditional Filipino form and custom.
In a passage in his art book about his move to Los Baños, setting up residence at the foot of Mt. Makiling, Junyee explains: “I was not a researcher discovering, but an apprentice learning from the mountain which reveals and patiently guides me along the path of indigenous artmaking.” By going back to our roots and infusing our contemporary artistic expression with what is naturally us, “we can reclaim our rightful place in the global art community, not as a shadow, but as authentic cultural workers of our people.”
An epiphany: the materials he needed to create unusual, sometimes unsettling, yet always revelatory works that speak about the Filipino experience were in his very backyard all along.
In 2018, one of Junyee’s beloved collectors passed and the artist visited the funeral home. Bothered with the way makeup was applied to his departed friend’s face, Junyee asked for the mortuary cosmetologist. When she arrived, the artist borrowed her makeup kit. Junyeet—the pioneering conceptual artist, maker of site-specific masterworks, mentor, and inspirer of countless Filipino artists—stood by the casket and returned to an old task.
Everyone around him stood in awe.