FREMANTLE, Western Australia - Warm greetings from Down Under! Pleased to let you know that I opened my exhibition 'Playing by Ear' at Gallery East here last week. It was a quiet opening but I hope people do come in and see the show.

‘Playing by Ear’ is basically an installation with 15 pairs of 'piano wings' installed on a large tarp print of Santa Cruz, Manila. Individual piano wings are titled.

Gallery East “represents emerging and established contemporary Western Australian artists, and specializes in the traditional and contemporary arts and crafts of Japan and those Australian and international artists who have been influenced by Japanese aesthetics.”

From my experience living here for more than a decade, people in Western Australia don't know much about the Philippines, except from media images, and are generally not interested in the art that comes out of it.

The small 'piano wings' are set before a large tarp print of Santa Cruz, suggestive of the terrain where I draw many ideas from. I chanced upon this vantage point while getting off at the last station of LRT2 in Recto on my last visit. From a bird's eye view, parang installation ang kabuuang Maynila (Greater Manila is like an installation).

I chose the image not only because it is a somewhat stereotypical representation of the Philippines for most Australians, from which I can contextualize and engage people in the complexities of our history and contemporary reality. This approach is risky, because it may reinforce cultural stereotypes, but I hope that with the other inserted elements such as images of grand pianos on the roof, people would have a rethink of what I want to convey.

This also parallels the context of how we developed the grand piano project last year. Kung baga (It’s like) I'm substituting the decrepit interior space of the piano workshop with this outdoor urban terrain contrapuntally.

Ang daming dead/found objects na naka-disperse sa mga bubong. Pero ito rin yung mga materyales/ sitwasyon na pwedeng bugahan at bigyan ng bagong buhay (There are many dead/found objects scattered on the roofs. But these are the self-same materials/ situation you can breathe on and give new life to.)

I just came from Townsville in North Queensland, quite close to the Great Barrier Reef. While setting the tarp background, it just occurred to me to alternately call it the Great Barrier Roofs!

Yung mga pakpak (The wings) carry images from Filipino history – some culled from Gilda Fernando's book on Pinoy folk architecture, others from old children's books – flying like kites around the space. The wings are both moth-like and butterfly-like, again contrapuntal meanings of life and death.

I included some old works to suggest the urban setting. I am currently working on a new set of similar wing works that will later 'migrate' to Manila for the second piano project -- the Nicanor Abelardo Grand Piano Project –at the Vargas Museum in UP in November.

There will be a part 2 of ‘Playing by Ear’ in Manila where I plan to also have a similar large tarp print of suburbia but taken from here in Perth/Fremantle area. There will be around 15 new pairs of wings, with mixed images mainly drawn from Australiana. Tale/tail (wings/winds) of Two Cities. Pares-pares (in pairs). But there will be large-scale versions of some of the works.

This will be ‘Playing by Ear (Oido)’ at Galeria Duemila in December. I plan to fill up the whole gallery space with these wings in large-scale versions and other smaller versions. I hope may tugtugan uli at (there will be music again and) shadow play at the opening.

See you then?