Bottles

Ang Kiukok is a leading modernist painter within the Philippines. Born of Chinese descent, Ang's works are strongly influenced by modern and cubist expression; particularly reminiscent of Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. As a young artist, Ang studied with cubist pioneer Vicente Manansala. However unlike Manansala, Ang's works are not obviously charged with social or political messaging, and he refrained from painting genre scenes. Ang preferred instead to focus on objects or scenes which could be purely abstracted - still lifes, animals, people, landscapes, or views through open windows. Particularly, the granulated texture of his brushwork became a primary characteristic of Ang's. The objectivity of his content is contrasted against the strength of the emotional response simulated by the subjects: a slavering dog, a cat with rising hackles, or a man caught in a silent scream. The subjects are quintessentially Filipino in nature, but born of a subtle love for commonly seen things or people.

Bottles reflects Ang's interest in still lifes, rendered within a shallow pictorial plane with a strong emphasis on the interaction of shapes, spaces and colors. By situating the bottles within uniformly alternating positions, Ang forces us to consider the composition as a whole rather than focusing upon the individual objects. Ang's precision in expressing juxtaposing angularity is clearly in evidence within this work, supplemented by some of his key motifs of an exposed table top, local fruits, and the scavenged bottles of different shapes and sizes.