LIWANAG

By Aze Ong

Karanasan 2011
Photo by Albert Labrador

What is light to an individual? Is it a reckoned truth that one may find inner peace? Or is it just a flickering illusion that one may so suggest that there is hope in this bulging world of delusions and enigmatic world with faade of fakeness in what we may say peace and quiet? An art we say may show light, a light that we can call a bourgeois that can finance the lack of color and the abundance of darkness in our universe.

But what is light for real? Of what is it compelled and the derivation of its nature is called light? Could it be light with vagueness or a light that for many of us sees a luminous figure from unthinkable doomed past? So many questions, but so little time. The existence of light can be proximized and estimated. And light as an art form should last forever. The artist is the master of her own light. The artist herself calls for a sanctuary like a trapped alchemist in a hot and vast dessert looking for an oasis for her to quench the thirst of having a divine child which she can call mine. These are the fruit of her hardships to show individuals of decomposing flesh of hopelessness that in life, one may find hope, and this hope is the light that could possibly be embroided in their hearts to relieve and to release them from the pain and weakened drive to survive the cycle of problems invoked for human experiences. Like an acquaintance or a friend, the light that the artist embodies could step by or stay for a while to the houses of the troubled

and the lost. The artist aims to share her piece of individualism which is the light to others to be inspired and to uplift their souls in the grounds of weariness.

The artist is willing to take with her, her children (liwanag) to numerous places and institutions. To mention a few, rehabilitation facilities, art exhibits, schools and universities, rural and urban folklores or any destinations whose norms were nailed to emptiness and those of persons who needed light to see what is their purpose inevitably. The artist also believes that her line of creative artworks can heal and cure peoples illness in some ways. Technically, not saying that this is the answer to their diseases, but as an artist she believes that her art has a resonance to prolong the time of existence of their hopeless dying bodies by consoling them with the beauty of living that the light in an art form for their eyes to see and to devour. It is inspiring one mind that in times of dying hours, one may cast light. Clinical psychology tells us that it is ninety percent psychological and ten percent physical could a man lose his own life. And what is more generous than to give a dying body a fruitful and healthy mind set by means of the light that the artist brings. Throughout the artists long evolutionary journey, her entire career was inspired by light, life and love. And sometimes, in finding the light the artist believes that an individual must first pass to the deepest darkness to further understand the reason of its existence towards peace, harmony and perfection.

-Charlene Hero