As we enter another year, another period emerges where we try to recollect the life we have lived and measure its worth. Precisely, in the passing of such a life, a part of ourselves fails to move on and ends up left in the past, and in the process of how such a past deserts the present, a line is drawn to imagine a period of one’s life where it is finally collocated in the past tense as lived. 

Having this kind of distinction of a temporal longevity, we should not let the years pass without reflecting on artists like Ling Quisumbing, who bravely but also tenderly locates lived lives by not fully accepting their end and foregone conclusive tense of action. By foregrounding the pairing of the past tense of love through loved, and life with lived, Quisumbing brought us to an exhibition at Calle Wright in 2024 with the title, Lived/Loved, figuring on the posters like traces of one another, related through shadow reflections, and, at the same time, haunting one another. 

With the spectral appearance of the very title of the exhibition, I wonder: How do actions committed in the past, such as lived and loved, continue to be relevant to the presence of life and love? Why does the visual articulation that one can animate from past actions, such as lived and loved, remain in the form of a shadow, traces, reflections, and even in the form of haunting? Why do categories like lived and loved seem not to be frozen in such temporal distinction, and continue to unsettle themselves, looming around the presentist character of life and love? 

In this manner, why does this pairing need to appear with eerie spectral relations? Does it imply that when we finally live and love, we could only behold them as specters or ghosts that will inevitably haunt those who happily perform such actions in the present? If so, why love at all when we are all going to be loved, and, at the same time, accept our mortality as lived? Will the lived and the loved appear as the permanent traces of life and love? 

Closet

One of the reasons this exhibition lives in my memory, and harbors a sense of love, is Belonging, a video installation of the clothes of Quisumbing’s mother nestling in a closet, filing and displaying the clothing items as archived images surrounded, punctuated, and decorated by her scribbled poems, packed letters, and a few of her favorite books. Within the assortment of personal mementos, the closet also brims with other artworks like Butterfly, Quisumbing’s clothes from age 1 to 62; Labored, tattered denim shorts displayed with a hanger; and Off Duty, a sculptural piece of leather shoes covered with cement, peacefully lying on the floor. 

With such an ensemble, the closet transforms into a dwelling place where the spaces for storage also become the place cohabiting with the dead, transcending its notoriety as a place of secrecy, a nook for hiding ourselves—or, for Eve Sedgewick, an epistemological frame for people to let gender recognition be warped by ignorance. 

Instead of persisting with perspectives that the closet functions as a space for queers, trans persons and lesbians to be in seclusion, Quisumbing challenges the paradigm by allowing us to marvel at the closet as a storage of accumulated archives that queer the boundaries between life and death, inside and outside, interior and exterior. The closet serves as a composition of memories about people who have lived and passed away, accounting for relationships that have ended, and acknowledging the affinities that have lapsed. Through the wealth of kinships that can be traced in this space, the closet’s collection unravels a history that queers for it keeps the traces of our quotidian acts of dying, whether as part of our self in relation to a departed mother, an imposed identity we wish to finally disavow, a bodily memory that cannot anymore fit into those clothes, or a piece worn out by time’s passing. 

The closet supersedes its tendency to be viewed as a mere place for disclosure of our sexuality, gender orientation, and desire; instead, it shelters the very history solidified by the forms of our desire that allow categories like life and love to signify, gain meaning, identify a desiring sex, and eventually recede into the past, becoming possible, not only by ourselves alone but also with other people.

Discarding 

Yet this community emerges through a constellation of objects that bear witness to our lives, where a part of ourselves is passing into death and, unfortunately, our beloved part of ourselves is released into the past. Quisumbing crystalizes this perspective by demonstrating her practice of conceptual art, such as redeeming objects whose temporal existence is due for discarding because of their maximized utility or signs of wear and tear. It can be seen in the work You don’t die in one day, you die slowly, in which Quisumbing restitutes a rotten roll of canvas, a personal art material infested by termites, redeeming it into a patchwork. Meanwhile, Seasonal, Vicious Cycle, and Landscape, made of used metal palettes and sandpaper, put to the fore the discoloration and corrosion on the surface. 

These pieces find their respective artistic possibilities as they are turned into abstract minimalist works, and, within the brushstrokes and patterns made by time and object usage, show how part of the discarding process inscribes the duration of an object’s utility and the intensity of the artist’s process. The objects, as a result, communicate the social and communitarian movement of the artist as well as the dedication of Quisumbing to her art practice. 

Unfortunately, in enabling the role of the social realm for the art practice to become possible, painful sacrifices are also needed. In her works, Quisumbing foregrounds how kinship is constituted through pain, suffering, and sacrifice. For example, Mata appears like a portrait that foregrounds the chicken wishbones spiraling out with the floral pattern lace as the background, and Wish appears as a collection filled with collected wishbones in a mini glass house box. 

These works dawn to us as premised by a process of recollecting the leftovers from the chicken, making us realize how such a life form reaches our presence and such artistic form by being a product of an animal sacrifice, allowing other lives to live; and, for some, to finally have a resting home, giving each consumer a chance to wish, and with the last bones left, ending up tracing a life that was once lived. But the sacrifice marked by the works should not be viewed as a reason to mortify other lives. Instead, the barebones will always mark the history of the present, revealing the truth that no presence is guaranteed without someone’s remains. 

Death

Death, after all, is the norm of life that we must learn to live with and manage with love.

In this case, works like Mapping Geography, a collection of empty jars whose labels are peeled off, transforming the traces of their function, label, and previous appearances into a collage, showing how death also diminishes life into a speck of color and is captured through the silhouette of a glass bottle. 

This is also seen in Quisumbing’s two pencil-on-paper works—the series Deux Joies (Two Joys) illustrating a woman receiving labial titillation, and the series Lover’s Quest tracing a woman’s naked body—drawings that seize the body of a woman through its outline, bereft of the density of gradation, texture, and depth. Through these works, the drawing of the woman’s body spreads across the paper, similar to the act of mapping a place in which the body, whether as a geography or a beloved, can never be possessed and can only be traced, used, touched, or stroked, leaving us only with imprints of their presence.

The imprints must also be understood as lives and loves that depart and return to the past as lived and loved. By returning to such temporal periods, works like Zigzag Madre (a wood sculpture that appears phallic), Miyawaki (recycled wood from the artist’s studio turned into a bookshelf made of wooden books), or Work in Progress (made of old scraps turned into a wooden cage) return to the body parts of a tree that gets dismembered, falling to the ground as log, wooden debris, or decaying earth matter. The scraps of wood turned into a bookshelf, a cage, or a phallus are not mere figurations. Instead, these present the origins of forms such as nature, characterizing the tree as the raw material for our imagination; at the same time, the material is made raw because of the tree’s dying parts. Death, in fact, is natural. 

The death, in such a frame, is similar to one of the last works, such as the epitaph Wish U Were Here, an engraved marble, which is sonically ushered in by Permiso, an audio activated by a motion sensor contained in a wooden casing. These works certainly acknowledge the existence of someone in the past but already nonexistent in a grave. In wishing the dead to be with us, it is an act of summoning back the absent and missing, relinquishing their absolute disappearance to be the final reality, which is somehow settled by the epitaph. In heeding the folk saying that one should ask permission from the unseen, the desire to bring back the dead to the present is also in sync with our practice of seeking guidance and permission to go on with our lives. These two mark our supreme effort to reconstitute the world in which we once lived and loved from its process of falling away. 

Perhaps, a lot of the works in this exhibition are also forms of wishes, and in their presence, we are left to deal with the poignance of lives finally lived and the love that they contained. 

In the present

Through her works, Quisumbing unfolds as an artist who returns and revisits the loved and lived, making her someone who seems to be perpetually celebrating the many returns of the day, and also arguably someone who lives in a state of decomposition. Works of art are constituted, created, and developed, aiming for their permanence and invincibility from the forces of nature, and even man’s mortality. But having them live and loved, Quisumbing’s works allow us to welcome the new year, not by wishing for the immortality for our principles that we wish to live with and love, but by enabling the traces of imperfections to have artistic merit. 

By giving a more tender outlook on the flaws of lives lived and loved, this exhibition also allows us to dwell in the present with such a past without hostility, fear, or trauma. We allow such temporal period to be safely kept in the past as a part of ourselves, a time we have eventually passed through, and finally, just like death in one’s life, loves and lives become finally over, yet only within a distance. This has brought us from such a grammatical tense of our action, for the verb tense is a form of stretching the action in time, coming from the past to the now, then dawning to us an economy of dying, living, and, finally, loving. CS

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, where he teaches Asian literature and creative nonfiction. He is also currently working as research associate for the “Sea of Love: A History of Movement,” which will represent the Philippine Pavilion at the 61st Venice Art Biennale with featured artist Jon Cuyson and curator Mara Gladstone.

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