Silverlens New York’s ‘Fugitive Land’ exhibition re-examines United States’ ‘benevolent assimilation’ and the interrelationship of place and memory

Bose’s 1976 assemblage Baguio Souvenirs is one of the pieces that holds a centripetal force for the exhibition. Born in Baguio City after the Second World War, Bose witnessed firsthand how the American-designed and -built city allowed him and his fellow Filipinos to be exposed to Western cultures. In addition, American military bases nearby were uninviting to them, who were treated like second-class citizens in their own country.

The composition made by Bose resembles the corridors of an administrative building, with surveyor photographs of his hometown embedded into the “wall”. The illusion thus creates a perspective for the viewer looking out onto the landscapes, like seeing through windows from a commanding height. What we see beyond are manicured renditions of Baguio, organised and pacified, devoid of any people.

“With a trickster’s wit, Bose appropriates the very images initially used to survey and control the land and have them speak back against the legacy of imperial might,” Lew added.

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Besides medium-specific things—land, earth, soil, place, location, locus—that complement each of the artists’ works for the exhibition, Lew shares with Tatler in an interview that Bose, Syjuco, and Joo share a connection to the subject matter, that is, investigations of place and land.

Filipino-American artist Syjuco’s three-channel video Body Double, which Lew included in his curation at MoMA PS1 years ago, resurfaces in the Fugitive Land exhibition. Like Bose in his Baguio Souvenirs, Syjuco used a different set of source imagery for this work by excising sections of footage that depict foliage and landscape, devoid of humans, from Hollywood films about the Vietnam War shot in the Philippines.

“Three famous Hollywood Vietnam war movies (Platoon, Hamburger Hill, and Apocalypse Now) were actually filmed in the Philippines. As an actor or ‘body double’ for Vietnam, the Philippines occupies a strange place in the imagination of the American public,” Syjuco to Tatler. “This video project ignores the original filmic war narrative in order to focus on my own attempts at discovering my place of birth—a kind of reworked ‘home movie’. The resulting video looks like ambient imagery of landscapes and close-ups of flora and fauna.”

Although Syjuco did not grow up in the Philippines, as she moved to the US at the early age of three, she experienced first-hand how the US sees itself as a benevolent force across the globe.

“Historically, the US famously coined the term ‘benevolent assimilation’ as a euphemism for taking over and remaking the Philippines in its image,” explains Syjuco. “Importantly, I think instead of seeing the US-Philippine relationship as an isolated example, we need to see the overarching arc of the American empire as it existed not just in Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also Hawai’i, the continental US, and all the overseas imperialist excursions it has attempted—sometimes attempting this overtly, and sometimes fugitively.”

Lew comments on Syjuco’s manipulation (blocking out portions to highlight the landscapes) on the Body Double video as a sense of refusal or kind of eliminating something else within those three films.

Similarly, Lew finds this sense of refusal in Joo’s paintings in the exhibition about specific places under transformation as abstractions—“literal rubbing impression of that place”.

Together, the works of the three artists turn their respective materials coming out of American colonial history to critique the history behind them and their very own materiality.

“I wanted my own contributions to the show to reflect a related distortion of space,” Joo shares with Tatler. “Whether abstract images made from photographically developing textured impressions taken from squatted, abandoned mansions, civic ruins, and contested territories, or sculptural displacement and presentation of inaccessible spaces in the form of a marble billboard, they deal with thwarted perspectives, combined with literal references to strata and sky that literally displace a buried landscape on one side while reflecting an unfixed and unreachable horizon on the other.”

Growing up in rural and pre-suburban America as one of Korean descent in the wake of the Korea and Vietnam Wars, Joo recalled being eased into the paradigm of US imperialism and soft power. “It was clear that the underlying agenda was about expansion and territory,” he says.

One of the exhibition’s highlights is Joo’s Epi- (Montclair Mariposa Cross-Cut), a 2024 marble work sourced from the Danby Quarry, held up on a steel truss as if it were a roadside billboard.

“I’ve been working with an ancient geologic suture fault that created the US East Coast called ‘Cameron’s Line’, which manifests at one end as a mountain of marble in Vermont and that’s been mined since the mid-19th century,” Joo explains. “This same stone has been used in the construction of some significant monuments and buildings across the country—from the United Nations Plazza to the Beinecke Library, as well as interiors and countertops in upscale homes. It’s a material signifier of classical empire and I like the opportunity to use it in alternative ways.”

“For him, it’s really thinking about the specificity of place that it is coming out of this industrial process,” says Lew. “If you look at the surface of the marble, you can still see the traces like cuts... and understand that it’s a product of industrial labour, of how it came to be is purely still there... The back of it is covered in silver nitrate material used to create mirrors and is related to black and white photography...”

Central to Joo’s work is transformation, reconsideration of scale in both time and space, and the Danby Quarry’s material origin and relationship to the once unified oceanscape. “It was disorienting to be cutting and moving 120 thousand pound blocks from the inside chambers,” admits Joo.

“For me, to have that kind of tension, that physicality in there that appears very light since it’s high up in the air and almost seems weightless, was very interesting,” comments Lew. Moreover, he explains that that because it acts like a billboard, it reflects light and things around the gallery like some form of advertising or imagery one would expect on billboards. “But there’s no landscape to see. It’s kind of suggestive but again, echoing that sense of refusal, it doesn’t give you any of that to see,” adds Lew.

Silverlens New York’s exhibition for the last quarter of 2024 was well received by artists, critics, and art aficionados when it opened in October. What makes Lew proud of this exhibition is how three artists from different generations were able to dialogue and reunite families and friends interconnected by interculturality and shared histories.

Coinciding with the exploration of this concept of fugitive land, renowned writer Jessica Hagedorn celebrated the republishing of her acclaimed novel Dogeaters as a Penguin Classic by having a talk and book launch at Silverlens New York together with Patrick Rosal and Christine Bacareza Balance.

For Syjuco, fugitive land as a term evokes a nostalgic, romantic tone. Hence, she purposefully made Body Double a serene artwork to look at—denied of the colonial gaze.

“For me, the title Fugitive Land evokes complex and even contrary relationships to one’s place of where they ‘belong’... Just because a power dynamic ends does not mean that the structures put in place are removed—for instance, the Philippine government, notions of democracy, education system, and institutions were modelled after the US’s, and these structures linger,” Syjuco says. “Moving beyond that early empire/colony relationship, which formally ended almost 80 years ago now, I think about how the United States and the Philippines also individually embody problematic spaces of nationalism and authoritarianism and turn to common tropes of ‘nation’ or ‘land’ to see through their ideals.”

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