A brush with savage beauty: fashioning identities in the art of Juan Luna (1884-1895)

• Main Author: Khua, Kelly Janine Xiao Rong
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English; Humanities::History
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/172970
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Renowned as one of the Philippine’s leading artists in the late nineteenth century, Juan Luna (1857-1899) is often celebrated as the first Filipino to receive international critical acclaim. His monumental work 'Spoliarium' won the gold medal at the 1884 Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid, a triumph that nationalists of the Propaganda Movement viewed as a sign of racial equality. Luna’s association with Filipino nationalist historiography, however, has resulted in a sanitisation of his biography and the scholarship on his artworks is dominated by political interpretations. Considering Luna’s peripatetic life, his aesthetics were constantly in flux. His artworks amalgamated academic painting techniques and that of the European avant-garde, attesting to how his works resist simple art historical categorisations. Shuttling between Europe and Southeast Asia, Luna occupied an intermediary position where his paintings catered to diverse audiences from the metropole and colony, capturing different facets of European and Filipino life. Given such a dynamic oeuvre, the connection between Luna’s positionality and depictions of how individuals dressed has yet to be studied. Drawing on a selection of his canvases, I suggest that Luna’s artistic practice presents a hybrid development between academic and avant garde art forms that synthesised Filipino and European paradigms. The deployment of dress in his works reveal how clothing facilitates the construction of masculine and feminine identities, reflecting and contesting social values. Though Luna and his subjects appear to have autonomy over how they present themselves, clothing is an ambivalent site of resistance and submission towards colonial authority and patriarchal power structures.