{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":58432,"auction_id":121,"set_id":155,"lot_number":"68","artist":"Ang Kiukok (1931 - 2005)","title":"Bottles","starting_price":6000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1995 (upper left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"24\" x 48\" (61 cm x 122 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Ang Kiukok’s still life pieces, in their entirety, encapsulate the personal triumphs and tribulations that colored his life. A first-generation, Philippinesborn Chinese, Ang is smack dab in the middle of two Chinese identities – the huaqiao and the Tsinoys. His father and grandfather, two generations of huaqiao or overseas Chinese, both grappled with what it meant to be miles away from one’s motherland. Ang’s children, on the other hand, are the quintessential Tsinoys; they are more comfortable with Tagalog than Hokkien, more accustomed to the Philippines’ peculiarities and culture. In between is Ang’s generation, with unsteady feet on unfamiliar soil. <br /><br />Even within that community, there are divisions – more than a Filipino-Chinese conflict, the huaqiao community is also alight with political division and generational gap, creating both tension and traditions that cling still. When Ang chose to pursue his art as a career, for example, the Chinese community first perceived this as a slight, a rejection of his filial duty as a firstborn son. Though this pressure eventually let up as the years went by, that expectation weighed heavy within Ang, his paintings creating a world that is as visceral as it is familiar. <br /><br />In this 1995 still life entitled Bottles, Ang’s rough, grainy brush strokes create a sense of urgency in an otherwise unoccupied canvas. Though cubism remains fundamental for Ang’s works, the playful manipulation of depth and space remains very much his, with this lot’s exaggeration just enough to place the scene a smidge fantastical. <br /><br />“The essence of modern painting is fidelity to the twodimensional quality of the pictorial surface,” writes Ramon E.S. Lerma in his Philstar Lifestyle article ‘Beyond anguish: Ang Kiukok (1931-2005)’. “Foreground and background meld, while line, form, color, and texture take precedence over figurative exactitude. Ang Kiukok best expressed this idiom in his still lifes, where the shapes of fruits and bottles become visual notes masterfully orchestrated into harmonious conceits.” <br /><br />Indeed, bottles form the focal point of this particular still life, bright-colored cubistic groupings on table tops in a masterful interplay of color, line, and shape. As Alfredo Roces put it in his book ‘Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair’: “While striving for a harmony of forms and colors, Kiukok provokes challenges from the work before him, avoiding the predictable and formulaic. A well-partitioned symmetrical arrangement is quickly broken into smaller, misaligned, or disproportional forms to create tension and thus break up the much too easily accompanied balance. Colors not generally friendly to one another are juxtaposed to war with each other and then are resolved by black or soft and neutral gray and brown planes in the surrounding neighborhood.” (Hannah Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":7500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":7500000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":9012000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":63694,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/68.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":63940,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/68b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63939,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/68d.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63938,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/68c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63937,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/68a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":67,"next":69,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}