The artist as missionary - RAJADHIRAJA YOGA

The artist as missionary
By Radel Paredes
Cebu Daily News
First Posted 12:35:00 03/28/2010
Filed Under: Arts and Culture and Entertainment
It’s hard to imagine Florence Cinco as a “missionary artist”. That is how he is described in the introductory text to “Tunhay”, his first solo exhibition in Cebu, held recently at the Bluewater Gallery in Maribago Bluewater Beach Resort in Lapu-Lapu City.

In my mind, a missionary is one who wears either a frock or a black necktie and always has a Bible in hand. But Florence sports uncombed long hair, a big backpack, sandals, unpressed shirt and jammies.

Occasionally he carries a big water gourd, his organic canteen (unlike plastic bottles, it doesn’t leach and actually improves the taste of water) which he bought from Vietnam. This way, he looks more like the usual green-minded, island-hopping bohemian artist than an evangelical nomad.

Yet Florence is now past all the party-hopping of his former life. I first met him in the University of San Carlos as a fellow fine arts student who, although one of the most talented in his batch, wasted his time playing football or hanging out with campus junkies.

He got hooked on drugs and alcohol, and went through the lowest point in his life. Then he met a group of vegans belonging to the yoga group Ananda Marga. He was introduced to yoga, meditation, and ethical vegetarianism or the belief that it’s wrong to eat meat since animals could be people in their previous life.

With transcendental meditation, Florence discovered that he doesn’t need drugs to experience the ultimate “high”, which is that brief moment of cosmic oneness. Realizing that detachment from material pleasures is the only way to encounter God, he gradually abandoned all his vices and all forms of toxicity including meat eating.

He became a vegan and went through a detox process with the help of other members of the group who now called him Paramesh, his Sanskrit name.

Ananda Marga is a contemporary variant of Hinduism and local practitioners look forward to a “renaissance” of our former Sanskrit culture as an archipelago once called “Maharlika”.

Artists like Florence who are ardent members of Ananda Marga, took it as their mission to use art to promote such spiritual renaissance for the Philippines. They bonded together in nationwide group called the Maharlika Artists and Writers Federation.

The artists draw inspiration from their imagination of how life was in prehispanic Philippines as a province of the Java-based Majapahit empire. Indeed there is evidence of Hindu influence in native art and culture, such as the alibata syllabary and that golden figure found in an excavated prehispanic settlement near Butuan, that showed stylistic similarities with sculptures of deities in Java and India.

In seeking to reconnect with these roots, the Ananda Marga artists try to learn from what little is left and known of our precolonial artistic heritage and use it in their art. Florence, for example, updates the bulol and incorporates in his usual mix of industrial refuse and organic elements in assemblage or sculpture.

But beyond the allusions to culture and the environment, the artist wanted viewers to contemplate the connection between the design or form underlying his work and the cosmic order. In this sense, art becomes a form of meditation. In his work, the ephemera occasion the encounter with the everlasting or “tunhay” in Cebuano.

Such is the paradox of Florence’s art. This scavenger of junk, literally a rehabilitated junkie, has kicked out his bad habits. He has come a long way from trying to make a goal in soccer to becoming an artist with a mission.