EP71: Seriously, Romeo Lee & His Unapologetic Visual Language | UP, Punk, Satire, Chabet, Ocampo скачать в хорошем качестве

EP71: Seriously, Romeo Lee & His Unapologetic Visual Language | UP, Punk, Satire, Chabet, Ocampo

To many conservative people, Romeo Lee may be regarded as an affront to their so-called “convent-bred” sensibilities. Everything that tends to offend issues forth from Lee's words and images as naturally as sunbeams streaming through a tangled forest: the unmentionables of bodily fluids and emissions from concealed orifices, the stark and graphic Filipino words for the censurable human genitalia, causing his listeners to cringe and wince. To Lee, it is as lyrical as birdsong, as startling as a thunderclap, and as hilarious as a stand-up satirist. It is difficult to separate the artist’s personality from his work: each is an intimate revelation of the other. Romeo Lee is singular, individual, uncommon – there is no one else like him - and yet, in his persona, he reflects a facet of the Filipino artist caught and trapped in the urban jungle of commercialism and materialism. The fact that he can talk about such matters without a sliver of self-consciousness is itself inspiring and, more importantly, shows an awareness of his condition. Lee speaks in a pop-contemporary context, now that a market has awakened to him and his works, gripped by impostor syndrome and fearing he may be found out, as he references the Discayas’ plunder of the people’s money. “I plunder, therefore I am.” In that regard, he is sui generis: “of its own kind.” It is not a posture, a stance, or a pretense. Weathering all “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” Lee remains, today, as much a university student in the UP College of Fine Arts as when he fell under the aesthetic influence of Roberto Chabet and the lifelong friendship of Manuel Ocampo. Romeo Lee's art is like a naughty, misbehaving child, teasing and taunting the limits of his mother's tolerance until she becomes catatonic with despair and exasperation. Indeed, a prototypical image is that of a mother rolling her eyes upward, a nonverbal gesture signaling annoyance and impatience. In the game of one-upmanship, it upends Marcel Duchamp’s “Urinal” by foisting a rococo-ornamented toilet bowl on our face – and nose. The stench may be imaginary, but not the recoil and disgust the viewer feels. In flood-drowned Cainta, where the artist resides, he swims with the tide, as it were, painting with his rubber boots on in the knee-deep waters. As if to say: When the waters rise, can the Discayas be far behind? Certainly-lee!