Museums / Things Filipino provide one rich strand in the fabric of local color and custom. This centennial year of the arrival of Filipinos in Hawai’i–sakadas (contract agricultural laborers) brought in to work on the plantations–provides an occasion to celebrate that presence. It also creates a timely opportunity to interrogate the entwined history of the Philippines and not one but two colonizing powers as a context for contemporary identity politics.

That spirit of interrogation informs the work both of independent curator Koan-Jeff Baysa and of a number of the 27 artists he has selected for Alimatuan: The Emerging Artist as American Filipino, now current at The Contemporary Museum. ‘Alimatuan,’ a term meaning ‘the soul of the spirit’ in one of the several tribal dialects used in the Philippine archipelago, suggests a connection to traditional culture and indigeneity, while also invoking the dispersion of people and culture across time and space. Baysa, whose paternal grandfather was one of the first wave of sakadas, further suggests that the reference to ‘American Filipino’ (rather than the more common hyphenated ‘Filipino-American’) underscores the fact that the artists, regardless of place of birth (about half were born in the Philippines), claim the U.S. as their locus of residence and work, while also acknowledging their Filipino heritage–transplanted rather than hybridized. What remains Filipino in a post-colonial, post-modern world?

It is the ‘emerging’ nature of this exhibition that ultimately proves the most problematic in both political and aesthetic contexts. A key question raised (but not necessarily answered) by the exhibition seems to be: To what extent should this be about being Filipino as an anchor to a distinct (and distinctive) ethnic collectivity, and to what extent should it be about the ways in which artists emerge from that matrix, even subdue its influence, as they create individual identities in and through their work? Put another way, this exhibition operates in an atmosphere of tension between a perceived obligation for artists to make their culture visible and an inherent presumption that such an endeavor is, in fact, possible.

Ultimately, being Filipino may be more a point of departure than a place to rest–psychic infrastructure rather than a visible face. Several artists, for example, choose instead to foreground aspects of gender and sexual orientation. Instead of coming out of the closet, Brad Capello invites us in. Michelle Lopez and Jasmin Bardo Sian engage an erotic biomorphism, while Maria Dumlao, in a series of projected film stills, uses a faceless female presence to invoke a feminist critique of the voyeuristic gaze.

The use of electronic media, part of a global visual currency, is particularly effective in two works that also are most successful in probing the issues of being Filipino. ‘Balikbayan,’ an intimate film by Riza Manalo and Larilyn Sanchez, is both affectionate and ironic in its depiction of a fusion of practices both traditional (sending a body back for burial in the homeland) and modern (sending hard-to-get consumer goods to family back in the Philippines.) ‘Body Double (Platoon)’ by Stephanie Syjuco is a tour-de-force of re-appropriation. In this video the artist has edited the film Platoon, one of a number of films in which the Philippines provided a stand-in (that is, a geographic body double) for Vietnam, editing/censoring everything but the landscape, laying bare the ways in which another kind of ‘colonization’ still persists.

For other artists, including Ernest Concepcion, Carlyle Micklus and Jose Guinto, ethnic issues are also subsumed in the articulation of a more generalized angst, rendered with focused passion, even obsession. These and other drawing-based works remind us that the mark of the artist’s hand may be the ultimate signifier of individual identity.

Alimatuan includes artists from across the United States. The work of Trisha Lagaso Goldberg makes clear the local connection in a trio of plexiglas panels that incorporate the tools of the sakadas in stylized and gently subversive cut-out Hawaiian-style quilt patterns. (Goldberg is one of 10 Filipino-American artists of Hawai’i whose work is featured in a concurrent exhibition at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center. That exhibition will be reviewed separately.) Adjacent to these works are the maps of Lordy Rodriguez, whose visual fusion of locations in the Philippines and the U.S–an inspired subversion of longitude and latitude–is a potent reminder of the ways in which mapping and geography are implicated in colonial projects, marking the extent of an imperial grasp.

The first and last word belongs to Michael Arcega. His trenchant wit is visible in ‘Spam/Maps: World,’ a world map constructed of carefully contoured sections of that ubiquitous and virtually indestructible meat product. Arcega’s strategic use of humor is even more evident in the tongue-in-cheek historicism of an installation that includes a captain’s log, a coat of arms and a large map of the voyages of the galleons that were part of the Manila Galleon Trade between the Philippines, China and Mexico from 1565 to 1815. The centerpiece of the installation is a large-scale, actually navigable model of a Spanish galleon, constructed of manila file folders and christened ‘El Conquistadork.’ Deftly fusing fact and irony, Arcega’s work is a potent reminder that while being Filipino may be tied to a place, a state of mind, it is also a continuing journey, plying its trade between the old, the new, the perpetually emergent.

Alimatuan: The Emerging Artist as American Filipino, at The Contemporary Museum through August 6.