Tag Archives: Junyee

Penman No. 488: Artists in Residence

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Penman for Sunday, August 2, 2026

IT ISN’T every day that I get to spend time with two outstanding artists, and while I’ve become something of a recluse myself, exhausted by literary polemics and limiting my social life to very close friends, I couldn’t say no when my wife Beng asked me if I cared to join her on a day trip to Los Baños to visit the sculptor and painter Junyee. Junyee was a good friend of Beng’s from the UP College of Fine Arts, and while he lives in Los Baños with his wife Tess, Junyee has done many art installations around Diliman and often comes by our house on campus to drop off some buko pie. I’d enjoyed chatting with Junyee whenever our paths crossed, taking in his stories about his arduous struggle to become an artist, including a time when he had to work as a make-up artist for the dead in a funeral parlor in Cebu. But more on that later.

I was doubly pleased to learn that we would be accompanied to Los Baños by another artist-friend, Fil de la Cruz, whom I had known for over fifty years, and by his son Janos, also a talented and highly regarded young artist. Fil stands among our most brilliant, versatile, and accomplished printmakers; both he and Junyee have been nominated for the National Artist Award.

We had long been planning to visit Junyee in LB, where he and his wife Tess, who taught in UPLB, have lived for decades. When Tess retired a few years ago and they had to give up their home on campus, they found and bought a private lot just beyond the university property line, and built a new house there. Since anything that Junyee built was bound to be interesting, we wanted to see it, but the house was honestly just an excuse; we were going there for the artist himself. Now 84, Junyee recently hasn’t been in the best of health.

Though younger at 75, Fil has been facing serious challenges of his own. They had a lot to talk about, for sure—but we resolved to undertake this trip in high spirits, to celebrate art and life in joyful company. 

First we picked up Fil at his home in Muntinlupa. Aptly named Bahaysining, the three-story brick house is part (if not largely) studio, part gallery, and part living space, but immediately the visitor knows it’s a house made by artists for artists in both form and function. “This was much smaller early on,” Fil says of the place, ”and then I just kept adding to it as my practice and capabilities grew.” He shares the space with his son Janos, who keeps a studio of his own on the premises and helps his dad with both work and the daily business of living. 

The rooms teem with paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and most visibly, printmaking presses in various sizes that Fil himself designed and had made over the years. Much of his equipment rolls on wheels, the better to move them around when the studio has to meet a commission, and Fil and Janos have to labor long days and nights to get the job done. Fil is amazed that clients remember him and his work from way back and return to order new pieces. 

Fil also paints and sculpts as does Janos, but it’s in printmaking—the art of producing numbered copies of a design pressed on paper in limited editions—that you know his heart truly lies. I met Fil in the early 1970s in one of my past lives as a printmaker. He had graduated from his studies at UST, and I had just come out of martial law prison—where, to pass the time, I had taken up drawing with my fellow detainee Orly Castillo, who then took me under his wing at the Philippine Association of Printmakers in Ermita. The PAP was a hotbed of production for young artists then, and I was lucky to run into the likes of Bencab and Tiny Nuyda (not to mention a pretty girl named June “Beng” Poticar, who became my wife)—and yes, Fil de la Cruz, who even then was already establishing himself as a master of one of printmaking’s most difficult techniques, mezzotint, which produces an almost velvety texture. 

Perhaps because prints are relatively cheaper and come out in multiples, they’ve never quite gotten the respect they deserve, especially here in the Philippines, where the art market is enthralled by multimillion-peso paintings by the masters and by the exclusivity they exude. (Around 1974, when we were all working and hanging out at the PAP studio on Jorge Bocobo, it was a big day when a dealer came by to purchase our prints in bulk for as low as P15 per print, so she could stick them into frames she sold as décor to American servicemen in the bases.)

Fil’s come a long way from those days, and Bahaysining is a testament to his professional success, which has traveled a long arc from his youth in Bulacan and his student days at UST to further studies in New York and Paris, to over thirty solo exhibitions that have brought his prints to France, America, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Spain, Belgium, and throughout the Philippines.

As it was a sunny weekday, the drive to Los Baños didn’t take long through the Jamboree route. Junyee had offered to take all of us out to lunch, but of course we first had to see and tour his and Tess’ three-year-old home. 

To know Junyee—“Luis Enano Yee Jr.” on his birth certificate—is to understand how inseparable art and life can be in the person who, from his youth onward, has seen art not only as descriptive or decorative but liberative, rooted yet transcendent, impermanent yet memorable. Widely acknowledged to be the father of installation art in the Philippines, Junyee has always been testing and pushing the boundaries of art, unbothered by commercial trends. Whether he works with discarded wood, woven metal, or wisps of sooty smoke, Junyee seems compelled to give physical shape to our thoughts and emotions, often using outdoor space as his canvas.

Born in the South and discouraged by his father from pursuing his artistic inclinations, Junyee fled to Manila and UP, where he apprenticed with Napoleon Abueva and found support from Jose Joya—masters whom he would soon surpass in competitions. Caught in the insurgent politics of the sixties, Junyee crafted work like his “Balag” trellis on which protesters could hang their slogans, but unlike many other artists of his time, he never let ideology dictate his insight and technique. He would later devote most of his art to environmental themes.

This was most evident in his new home, a modestly modern structure from the outside, nothing showy, but warm inside with wood, stone, and other natural elements, from the balayong door to the leaflike tapestry to the upturned hammock serving as a lampshade. 

Welcoming our party, Junyee points to a blank wall and remarks with a chuckle that something big used to hang there but had to be let go of, presumably for his crushing medications. It’s one of the few times he’ll advert to his maladies, of which he—and Fil for that matter—don’t make a big thing. When Junyee learns that Fil is similarly afflicted, the men knowingly embrace and call each other “classmate.” They smile, they laugh, they speak excitedly of the work that occupies their waking hours. There’s no time to be glum. Fil and Janos keep racks of sporty bicycles at home, hanging from the ceiling; Junyee shows off a gleaming high-performance BMW motorbike which he received from a patron, adding with a chuckle that “I don’t even know how to ride one!”

Over lunch at a favorite restaurant nearby, we have an animated discussion of AI and its likely effects on art and literature. I expect them to resist, but Junyee in particular is surprisingly open to the possibilities of hybridizing art and technology, as I am. “I’ve always been a fan of science,” he says, “and when I write my memoirs, which I’ll be doing soon, I’ll make sure to include a section on how science has influenced my life and work.” But even more useful and valuable than science for both men right now is faith, and Fil and Junyee speak unabashedly of how their faith strengthens them through their trials. As an installation artist, Junyee has never worried about transience and impermanence. “Everything in this world will pass anyway,” he says.

We pay a visit to the Sculpture Garden that UP Los Baños has put up on campus to showcase some of Junyee’s most important pieces. It is an outdoor gallery of some of his finest pieces, displaying the full range of his concerns, techniques, and capabilities. It’s hugely impressive, but Junyee makes it clear that he isn’t done yet. Across his home, he is constructing an art museum that he hopes will help spark a cultural renaissance in Los Baños, better known for agriculture and forestry, which Junyee’s art has also tapped into. His labors have not gone unnoticed; on top of his numerous local and international awards, Junyee will soon be receiving the highest recognition his alma mater can confer, among the worthiest of its recipients.

Neither is Fil de la Cruz resting on his laurels. He’ll be showing his newest paintings in an exhibit titled “Ephemeral & Eternal” opening next Saturday, August 8, running until the 22nd at Art Camp in Greenbelt 5, Makati. “The central thesis of the exhibition revolves around the duality of existence—the fleeting ‘ephemeral’ moments of lived experience versus the ‘eternal’ span of divinity,” according to the exhibit notes. “De la Cruz does not present time as a linear progression but as a divine force, encompassing all. In this series, he treats the passage of time not with anxiety, but with a refined serenity and deep reverence, seeking to capture the precise point where the transitory nature of life intersects with the infinite.” 

It’s as good a description as any of that trip to Los Baños and of our visit to these artist-friends’ homes, at this point between our shared past and the eternity that beckons to all of us.

Penman No. 272: A Poet of Nature

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Junyee

Penman for Monday, October 9, 2017

 

 

IT’S NATIONAL Artist season again, with the deadline for nominations for the next group of NAs falling last September 30. It’s a triennial exercise that raises some very fundamental questions about how the arts figure in our national life and consciousness, and what we value in art.

There’ll surely be an impressive roster of nominees to review, each name with its own merits to recommend it. But among all those presumptive candidates, the one I’ll be rooting for is a lanky, genial, youthful-looking septuagenarian who goes simply by the name “Junyee,” short for the Luis E. Yee, Jr. that only his family and closest friends probably know.

I’ve known Junyee and his work for some time now, but I was even more impressed by its breadth and quality as I listened to him address a large crowd that had gathered for the launch of his artistic biography Wood Things at the CCP lobby last Tuesday.

Like many artists, Junyee has a certain shyness about him that prevents more aggressive self-advertisement, so let me sing his praises for him in the hope that he finally gets the recognition due his lifetime of labors.

If you’ve never met him but read the book (written with grace and deep insight by the equally gifted artist Jose “Bogie” Tence Ruiz), the first thing that will strike you will be the life itself, the engrossing narrative of how a boy born in the hinterlands of northern Mindanao at the height of the Japanese Occupation nurtured a native talent that would, much later in life, see his works celebrated in France, Cuba, Israel, Japan, and Australia, among other cultural capitals.

The boy drew his first inspirations from the bales of scrap paper his father imported to use as wrappers in their general store, bundles that contained American and local comics depicting worlds far removed from Agusan del Norte. Later moving to Cebu, he found a job with a funeral parlor, first as a janitor and a clerk, then as a beautician for corpses, and later as an embalmer, all the while ogling the art supplies in the local department store, never yielding his dream.

In 1964, he received a scholarship to study Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, and apprenticed with the renowned sculptor and later National Artist Napoleon “Billy” Abueva. The opportunity opened Junyee’s eyes to a whole new world of modernism, and eventually he broke out on his own, even as the prevailing forces of the 1970s—the psychotropic seductions of Carlos Castañeda on the one hand and the First Quarter Storm on the other—pulled him in different directions. While Junyee held progressive sentiments, Tence Ruiz notes that “He was inherently a maverick individualist who, while recognizing the need for collective actions to affect change, saw how formulaic and uncreative propaganda could get.”

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And that’s key to the kind of visionary and yet also political art Junyee would produce over the next four decades—an art that manifests an abiding love of life, and of nature as the bringer of that life. In his preface to the book, artist Hugo Yonzon III writes that “The dominant and recurring theme of his installation is nature or, more precisely, the respect for it. There is none of the theatrics of LED lights or the electronic sounds that characterize such art especially in the Western world. A twig, a pod, a tree bark, local hemp, and then some. Period.”

“Installation” is a word that would inextricably be attached to Junyee’s art, as he explored and promoted the genre well before the term itself became fashionable, always and again drawing on nature for his materials and inspiration, from the seminal Balag of 1970 to the installations now dotting the campuses of Diliman and Los Baños, in which latter place he has found his literal and spiritual home, amid the trees and rocks that he never sees just as objects but as bearers of messages, like the 10,000 tombstone-like stumps of wood he laid out on the CCP grounds in 2007 to bemoan illegal logging and the catastrophic flooding it induced.

Junyee is a master sculptor and painter, and a wordsmith as well—his sensitive lyrics add a more personal touch to the book—but he is, ultimately, a poet of nature, who can make wood and stone speak and sing in joy, sorrow, and just the sheer excitement of living.

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Speaking of artists, let me draw your attention to a younger painter in mid-career by the name of Lotsu Manes, whose seventh one-man exhibit titled “Handumanay” (after the Visayan word for keepsake or memorial) is now running at the Eskinita Gallery on the 2nd floor of Makati Cinema Square until October 23.

We’d known Lotsu since he was a small boy running on the beach of our hometown in Alcantara, Romblon, and took notice when he won the Grand Prize in the Shell Art Competition of 1996. “Handumanay” shows him maturing well beyond the meticulous craftsmanship that distinguished his earlier work to a more conceptual understanding of time and memory, and of the preciousness of what remains in his termite-ravaged portraits and landscapes.

At the opening, I was also glad to speak with curator and sculptor Renato “Ato” Habulan, who has been mentoring younger artists like Lotsu toward a less technical and more philosophical appreciation of their own work and vision.

Seeing Lotsu in his prime, chatting with Ato Habulan, and applauding Junyee at his book launch all left me warmly reassured that—even and especially in these terror-stricken times—art, like music as the poet Congreve put it, “hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak.”