Random Numbers, the new exhibition by Filipino artist Rodel Tapaya, depicts a chaotic, dense reality where a multitude of fragmented objects and living creatures entwine and decompose. Inspired by Filipino and Mexican mural painters, but also by surrealist artists, Tapaya draws a carnivalesque portrait of the Philippines and, beyond, of our contemporary societies driven by excesses and never-ending consumption.

Born in 1980 in Montalban, in the Philippines’s Rizal province, Tapaya is known for his neo-traditional paintings inspired by Philippine mythology, folk tales and beliefs, which he converts into allegories for our times. Scrap Paintings, the artist’s new series of works, is a departure from this, instead focusing on the concept of disaggregation. The nine paintings presented at Tang Contemporary Art are based on relatively small collages from magazine cut-outs, mostly from the National Geographic, that the artist enlarges and turns into acrylic works on canvas. He uses different coloured whiteboard markers to erase some pigments from the original images, playing with their glossy surfaces and printing ink to obtain various textural effects. This primary material is thus transformed into abstract forms that have partially lost their identity, a process that the artist defines as “subtractive”.

Tapaya had the idea of pushing the technique of collage further in 2018 while he was preparing an exhibition in Manila. Originally, he was planning to create figurative collages, but as he was working with pieces of paper, he realised that their forms were similar to the heterogeneous material people use in the surrounding slums to build homes and shelters. “The concept is about slums and poor people living in crowded spaces,” he says. “I am like a scrapper, collecting images from magazines and making sense of this available material to create an environment that looks cluttered, chaotic and complex, as if it reflected a fear of empty space.”

Tapaya remembers growing up in such an environment. His parents sold smoked fish and he had to buy newspapers in a junk shop to wrap them. He would cut out images he liked before bringing the magazines to his mother, pasting them in what became his first art book. With the Scrap series, the artist experiences again the gesture of collage from whatever he can find, although he deconstructs the images and recomposes absurd scenes, in which their original topics and figures are hardly recognisable. Layer after layer, he accumulates forms, colours and textures, as if this process of accumulation will hide the fact that these shapes, objects and figures are half-broken, disintegrated or decayed. The large format of the paintings strengthens the feeling of a useless, anarchic excess.

In most of the paintings, unidentified objects and ghostly human faces are shown melting, like Salvador Dali’s watches in The Persistence of Memory. The idea of decay is at the core of this new body of works. With the current ecological crisis, Tapaya sees not only our environment but also ourselves slowly collapsing in a symbiotic movement. In the painting The Couple (2021), two workers seem to operate an industrial machine against a cold, metallic background. One, at the back, is represented through vivid brushstrokes that give the impression that he is disappearing. The face, hands and feet of the second worker are on fire, while his legs liquefy. Their respective bodies intertwine with their environment and the machine to the point that they all become one. Similarly, in Even the longest day has its end… (2021), a dismembered, yellowish human body with a sleeping child nestled in his arms is recessed in a fragmented car carcass, the whole of it encased in an abstract nighttime seascape. Although some familiar forms are recognisable, their outlines are either open or embedded within each another. For the artist, human beings belong to and participate in the gigantic scrap heap that the world has become.

Among this jumble of fragmented forms, there is no hierarchy, no order. The painting Random Numbers (2021), which gives its title to the exhibition, exemplifies the chaos that links people and objects. The work refers to a popular illegal Philippine money game, jueteng, introduced by the Spanish during colonial times. In the work, a man, whose face seems to have been ripped off, is about to bet on a combination of numbers, hidden behind a wall of red bricks. Today, many poor people continue to play the game in the hope of getting rich quick. According to the artist, the practice is backed by the police and by the government as it involves a massive amount of money. As such, it embodies corruption and the absence of the rule of law that would be necessary to engage in political or any other kind of change, including ecological.

Despite these dark topics, the paintings are paradoxically rather joyful. Some mutant individuals turn into comic animals or flower-like creatures, and the general palette is bright and colourful. The series could be read as a gigantic, grotesque carnival or as a way to keep going amid this general crisis.

Perhaps a more solid component of Philippine culture, and a figure of hope, is portrayed in Grandmother’s Tale (2021). An old, seated woman is represented on the left part of the painting, her eyes closed as if she were sleeping. Her name is Lola Basyang and she is a well known figure in the Philippines for telling children stories in the 1980s and 90s through a series of books and television programmes. On the right of the painting, a young girl has climbed on a ladder and, although her face is not depicted, the viewer can sense that it is inclined toward the grandmother. She was probably hoping to listen to a story, but there is a great deal physically separating them, including a shadowy, mysterious black silhouette striped with red lines. The viewer is tempted to ponder if the older woman is dying, as her face has already turned yellow. In the Philippines, many traditions, and the art of storytelling in particular, are on the verge of extinction, with the threat that ancestral knowledge will disappear.

Tapaya has been collecting ancient tales for many years, especially from his native province. His earlier works were based on folk tales compiled by ethnologist Damiana Eugenio and on precolonial narratives by historian William Henry Scott, but he continues to be inspired by anthropologists, in particular by the work of Felipe Landa Jocano, a Filipino researcher who spent three years living in a slum to observe the social and cultural behaviour of his neighbours. For Tapaya, transmitting these stories and showing the beauty and complexity of Philippine culture is also the role of the artist, who can thus contribute to the local production of knowledge. This exhibition is a great opportunity to do so.

---

菲律賓藝術家羅德爾·塔帕雅的最新個展「隨機數」描繪了一個混亂又擁擠的現實情形：許多殘缺破損的物品和生物纏繞在一起，開始腐爛瓦解。受菲律賓和墨西哥壁畫畫家以及超現實藝術家的啟發，塔帕雅創作了一幅如同菲律賓嘉年華的繪畫，旨在展現在過剩和無節制消耗推動的當代社會。

塔帕雅1980 年生於菲律賓里薩爾省蒙塔爾班鎮，以菲律賓神話、民間傳說和信仰為靈感構建當代新傳統形式的寓言創作而享有盛名。但此次新系列作品《剪貼繪畫》卻另闢蹊徑，轉而關注分崩離析的主題。於當代唐人藝術中心展出的九幅作品均來自雜誌剪切而成的拼貼繪畫，其中大多取材於《國家地理》雜誌。藝術家將這些雜誌素材放大並轉化為布面丙烯。他用不同的彩色白板馬克筆從原始圖像上擦去某些色彩，留下光澤的表面和印刷油墨從而呈現出各種各樣的紋理效果。如此這般，原始素材被抹去了一部份特質後成了抽象狀，塔帕雅把這個過程稱之為「消減」。

2018年在籌備馬尼拉個展時，他萌生了推進拼貼技藝的想法。起初他計畫畫一幅形象油畫，由於所採用的都是紙質素材，他忽然想到它們的形狀很像他附近貧民窟人們用來搭建房子和住所的不均勻材料。「創作理念是關於貧民窟以及住在逼仄空間裡的窮人，」他說。「我就像個收廢物的人，從雜誌上收集圖像，然後利用這些現有素材構建了一個擁擠不堪、狀況複雜的環境，彷彿反映了一種對空曠的畏懼。」

塔帕雅回憶起自己就是在這樣的環境中長大的。他的父母是賣熏魚的，因而他會到雜貨店去買報紙用來包魚。在把報刊拿給媽媽前，他會先剪下自己喜歡的影像然後貼在後來成為他的首個藝術冊上。在這次的《剪貼繪畫》系列裡，儘管他將畫面解構然後重建荒誕場景，讓原始主題變得難以辨認，但實際上他再次體驗了這種利用任何現有素材進行自由拼貼的創作手法。一層又一層，他將各種形狀、顏色和紋理疊加起來，彷彿這樣做就能遮掩住這些形狀和物品原本或支離破碎或衰變腐爛的事實。這些繪畫偌大的框架則加深了這種無用且混亂的過度感。

在多數繪畫中都出現了呈融化狀的無名物體和可怕人臉，像是薩爾瓦多·達利《記憶的永恆》中的手錶。衰敗是這些新作品系列的核心。面對當前的生態危機，塔帕雅認為不僅是環境就連我們自己也會在這場共生運動中慢慢崩潰。畫作《配偶》（2021年） 中，在冷淡的金屬風背景下，兩個工人像是在操作一台工業機器。位置靠後的那位以鮮明的筆觸呈現，讓人感覺他正在消失。第二位工人的臉和手足在著火，而雙腿卻在液化溶解。兩者的身體與周遭環境及機器相互交融成為一體。與之類似，作品《即使最漫長的一天也有終結》（2021年）描繪了一個被肢解的淡黃色人體和依偎在他臂彎裡睡覺的孩子，兩人歇息在汽車殘骸中。整個畫面被包裹在抽象派的夜色海景下。其中可以識別出一些熟悉的形狀，它們的輪廓線不是開放，就是嵌入其他形狀中。這表明了塔帕雅的觀點：人類屬於也參與貢獻了地球正在變成的那個巨大的廢物堆。

在這堆雜亂破損的形狀裡不存在等級和秩序。繪畫《隨機數》（2021年）也是今次展覽名來源，充分表現了把人和物連繫起來的混亂。作品關於菲律賓流行的非法博彩遊戲jueteng，由西班牙人在其殖民期間引入。它描繪了一個躲在一面紅磚牆後、面部像是被扯掉的男人正要給一組數字下注。如今，很多窮人依舊沉迷於這個遊戲，幻想著能一夜致富。塔帕雅覺得，這涉及到龐大的資金，背後一定是得到了警方和政府的支持。作品反映出腐敗的現狀，以及缺乏法治而無法促成政治領域或生態等方面的改變。

儘管這些話題頗為沉重，繪畫風格卻頗為歡樂。某些變異個體轉變成了卡通動物或花樣的生物配合著整體明亮多彩的色調。整個系列畫可以解讀為一場龐大而怪誕的嘉年華，抑或是一種在這場危機中繼續前行的方式。

或許在作品《祖母的傳說》（2021年）中可以找到某些更為純正的菲律賓文化元素和一絲希望。繪畫左半部分有一位坐著的老婦人，她閉著雙眼像是在睡覺。她叫Lola Basyang，是菲律賓一位家喻戶曉的人物，在1980至90年代通過一系列書本和電視節目為孩子們講故事。繪畫的右半部分有一個小姑娘爬上梯子。雖然看不到她的臉，觀者依然能感受到她想靠近祖母。也許她是想聽故事，但卻有很多東西隔開了她們，包括一個朦朧神秘的帶著紅色條紋的黑色剪影。觀者猜想或許老婦人已經奄奄一息，因為她的臉已泛黃。在菲律賓，很多傳統尤其是講故事的藝術都已瀕臨絕跡，祖先的知識面臨消亡。

塔帕雅多年來一直在收集古代傳說，特別是來自他故鄉省份的。他的早期作品取材於民族學家戴米安娜·尤金妮歐所編撰的民間傳說以及歷史學家威廉·亨利·斯科特撰寫的殖民時期之前的故事。同時他持續受人類學家的啟發，尤其是菲律賓研究者Felipe Landa Jocano的作品，後者曾在貧民窟住了三年以觀察鄰里的社會和文化行為。對塔帕雅來說，傳播這些故事，呈現菲律賓文化的瑰麗和複雜多元是其作為藝術家的職責，為本土知識生產做出貢獻。而今次的個展就是一個好機會。