Kimsoy

He saw a painting by Jose “Kimsoy” Yap when he was still a young man. It was a watercolor painting of a shore line, waves crashing into crags and rocks, foam flying outwards in a burst of white; in the background, a dark sky. His older sister taught at the University of San Carlos. She liked art and bought it. She knew Kimsoy. How so eloquently this painting reflected the social texture and turmoil of the 1970s, this ferment quite suddenly overturned by over a decade of selective repression under martial law in 1972.

He remembers how those were the true “democratic” times, if by democracy is meant the slow crumbling away of state control, the teetering near the brink of revolution. And that was exactly what many young people thought and, perhaps in many ways, wanted at that time. Years of colonialism and feudalism had resulted in wide-spread oppression and poverty. And those who were young at that time dreamed of change. And they thought change was possible. But it would come along only by challenging the fundamental habits of those in power.

One fundamental habit was that they could parade their wealth and power all over the place in the face of so much starvation, so much oppression, and so many people who were poor. The political ferment was everywhere, flying in the wind with the banners of the National Democrats, the Social Democrats, and every shade in between the liberal reformists and the revolutionists. The theology of liberation was not yet a dirty word among the Philippine clergy.

All these would seem to disappear with martial law. But in time it would be realized how it did not disappear as much as go underground. As if to give the strongman Marcos free-reign to solve the problems of the country according to a vision he announced through raspy loud-speakers and his government controlled press. This empty noise would go on inside a deafening silence for over a decade; All the way to 1986 when it became common knowledge how Marcos robbed his country blind while he announced to the world his illusion of freedom and progress for his country. There is no doubt that when Marcos finally fell, this fall came mostly because of the people who were young in the 1970s.

Jose “Kimsoy” Yap came of this generation. He is the son of the late Jose Yap Sr. They had an art studio called “Art Center Studios” established in the 1960s at Leon Kilat Street. Jose Yap Sr. was a close friend of Martino Abellana. They went to school together at UP Manila. They were a generation of young hopeful artists who went to Manila in the mid 1930s to study the fine arts there. This generation includes besides Abellana: Julian Jumalon; Virgilio Daclan; Lucille Agas, all of whom have passed away; Carmelo Tamayo who is a bit younger and is living; and of course the late Jose Yap Sr.

Thus did Kimsoy have two influential art teachers in his life, his father and then Martino Abellana. Both Yap and Abelllana studied under Fernando Amorsolo. But Kimsoy remembers how his father taught a more formalistic classical approach to figure drawing. He was more interested in anatomy and line while Abellana was more predisposed to the Impressionist-Modernist approach of space, value and color. Kimsoy learned the best of both worlds. He took the free-hand drawing courses of Abellana as an architecture student at the Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT), starting in 1960 until 1966. After he was 18 years of age, he lived his summers in Carcar learning under Abellana, with only a few exceptions when he spent summer vacationing with his parents in their old ancestral town in Sara, about a hundred kilometers from Iloilo.

In 1971 he went to study in the United States at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1991 he went to California to live in Daly City with his sister Jesusa Yap. He was a green card holder who traveled constantly between the US and the Philippines until finally in 1998 he decided to resettle here. He continues actively to paint and do shows here.

He is one of a whole generation of artists, musicians, dramatists and people of theater who came of age in the 1970s and are now going into their golden years. This page cannot include everyone by name but a few immediately come to mind, Claude Al Evangelio, the late Alan Jaime Rabaya, Fr. Rudy Villanueva, and so many others. They all represent the proud richness of the Bisaya culture. They ought to be written about more often and sooner.