By MA. THERESA ANGELINA QUINTANA-TABADA
Gregory Fernandez worked for 10 years with a community paper in Cebu City. By the time he led its art department in 2009, the newspaper’s design team “was on its way toward innovation.”
Fernandez also acted in pocket theater plays and independent film productions that had a small but loyal following among Cebuanos.
He left all these when he became a senior designer with the Times of Oman, one of the oldest English dailies in the sultanate.
Fernandez said he is willing to return to Cebu and share what he learns in graphic design.
“Cebu is always home for my art,” he said, adding that, through the Internet, he remains active with Bathalad, a literary group seeking to revive the “balak,” a traditional form of Cebuano poetry.
The decision to return, though, is made complicated by his current earnings in Oman, more than five times his last pay in Cebu.
Between choices
Fernandez illustrates the tug-of-war of choices that confront many overseas workers: stay or leave?
Overseas Filipino workers numbered 1.8 million in 2012, up by 46 percent from the 1.24 million in 2008, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).
But while overall overseas employment is on the upswing, the POEA has recorded a decline in the deployment of creative industry workers like Fernandez. This group of professional and technical workers also includes composers, musicians and singers, as well as choreographers and dancers.
From 2008 to 2010, the number of OFWs in the creative industries declined by 16 percent: from 49,649 in 2008, to 47,886 in 2009, and to 41,835 in 2010.
Like other parts of the country, Cebu has “lost” creative industry workers like Fernandez to other countries. Many Cebuanos in the creative field, however, have an option to stay in the community while exploring a global audience and market.
In July 2011, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Ministers of Culture and Arts Plus Three (AMCA+3) formally launched Cebu City as an ASEAN City of Culture.
For its association with artists of worldwide renown, Cebu was the British Council’s Creative Choice in 2008.
In 2008, “at least 414 enterprises” were engaged in the creative industries of Cebu, according to an industry mapping project done by the British Council and the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) provincial office in Cebu.
DTI-Cebu itself has been conducting a campaign to get Cebuanos to recognize “the value of creative industries in (contributing to) the (local) economy (trade, tourism and investment),” particularly the “value of creativity as a ‘wealth asset’” present among local creative entrepreneurs and creative professionals, said senior trade and industry development specialist Marivic Aguilar.
Hirota Paint Industries, Monique Lhuillier and Kenneth Cobonpue are among the Cebuanos who have earned worldwide repute for creativity.
With offices on Gorordo Avenue in Barangay Kamputhaw and Long Beach, California, the Hirota Paint Industries (HPI) employs Cebuano artists that created the visual effects of Hollywood blockbuster movies, like “New Moon,” “Watchmen” and “G. I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra”.
Born and raised in Cebu, Lhuillier owns a fashion house in Los Angeles, California. Her gowns are Hollywood red carpet mainstays. She designed the bridal gowns of pop celebrities Pink, Natalie Imbruglia and Britney Spears.
Cobonpue is arguably the most famous Filipino designer. His Lolah Chair won for him the Design for Asia Award of Hong Kong in 2005. Perhaps the most celebrated of his award-winning designs is the Voyage Bed, which Brad Pitt bought for himself, partner Angelina Jolie and daughter Shiloh. His furniture, fusing native materials and organic forms, was featured in “Oceans 13” and other Hollywood productions.
Following the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), DTI-Cebu groups the province’s creative industries into heritage (such as traditional arts and festivals, and cultural sites), arts (visual and performing), media (printed and audiovisual) and functional (design, new media and creative services).
With its creative core of professionals and entrepreneurs, Cebu can vie for a greater share of the copyright-based industries, which contributed 4.82 percent to the gross domestic product, Aguilar said.
The 2008 study by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) also established that copyright-based industries in the Philippines accounted for 11 percent of employment and 13 percent of total exports.
Digital gateway
For sculptor and art professor Raymund Fernandez, the new media exposes Cebuano artists to a global network “where art can be viewed, commented on and sold.”
The Fine Arts professor of the University of the Philippines Cebu said using social networking to present art is cheaper and more effective than holding traditional exhibits.
He cited the seafaring Sugbuanons who, during prehispanic times, traveled afar and returned later to enrich local culture as a foreshadowing of the global village new media opens to artists.
Fernandez said the academe should lead in carving Cebu’s two niches: teaching art and investigating the potential of social network marketing.
“There are other areas to consider, such as animation, digital virtual sculpture, and digital comic books. We have hardly touched the surface of new art for new media,” he said.
His colleague, Palmy Pe-Tudtud, was with other Cebuano artists in Paris from Sept. 8 to Oct. 8 for an Artist in Residency Program, which included a Paris exhibition of the Cebuano artists’ works.
A visual artist and cultural worker who was an officer with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in the Committee on Visual Arts, Tudtud views Cebu as her home and has no plans of working abroad. She has taken part in more than 50 art exhibits in the country and abroad.
“I hope to be able to visit other countries, learn and be inspired by their art, and then share the knowledge with the community,” she said.
Home, good and bad
Digital designer Jethro Estimo had offers to work abroad in 1999. But the UP Cebu Fine Arts graduate and his UP Cebu High School friends decided instead to stay in Cebu and establish a design and printing company that year.
Recently, his company redesigned the websites of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA)-7, Regional Development Council (RDC)–7 and UP Cebu.
“We decided we better make what we’re doing work,” said Estimo, who still finds time to teach art part-time and pursue other creative work.
Cebu’s business process outsourcing industry absorbs a lot of creative workers. But Estimo said the “compartmentalized work” in BPOs limits creative workers to repetitive tasks, such as designing only logos or icons for a client. Among his contemporary artists, burnout and hopping from one BPO company to another are common.
Estimo believes artists should be exposed to a basic course on entrepreneurship so they can start their own business instead of working for a company or getting an overseas post.
For Ian Zafra, chairman of the Artists and Musicians Marketing Cooperative (Artist KO), making Cebuano artists understand intellectual property rights lies at the core of the challenge to organize the local music industry.
Zafra leads 18 musician-members and four music production studios in its partnership with the Filipino Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (FILSCAP).
A nonstock, nonprofit association established in 1965 to administer the public performance and reproduction rights of music copyright owners, FILSCAP started operating in Cebu on Nov. 12, 2012. Artist KO is its exclusive licensing agent.
Through agreements with the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, Performing Rights Society in London, and the Korean Music Copyright Association, FILSCAP also represents the rights of foreign composers, lyric writers and music publishers, Zafra said.
Artist KO requires companies that use music in their establishments to secure the necessary public performance license from FILSCAP. He said failure to obtain a license for works belonging to FILSCAP’s worldwide repertoire makes a company criminally and civilly liable under the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines.
Zafra plays the lead guitar and provides the backup vocals for Sheila and the Insects, a band of New Wave revivalists frequently associated with Manila’s alternative rock scene but is actually based in Cebu. The band has toured Southeast Asian countries.
But the proprietor of the ICO Music Publishing and Merchandising and vice president of the Creative Cebu Council Inc. (CCCI) said: “Music licensing is the core of the business. The performance and the bands are just the tip of the iceberg. With the implementation of the law that requires a license for establishments using music, artists can earn from their creations.”
Brain gain
Providing business development services to enhance entrepreneurial capabilities and protecting creators’ intellectual property rights are some of DTI-Cebu’s initiatives to support Cebu’s creative sectors.
By convening the CCCI, a private sector-led, nonstock, nonprofit association of industry stakeholders from the different creative industries, Aguilar said DTI-Cebu hopes to promote “more linkage-building and B2B networking among creative professionals and entrepreneurs, business sectors groups such as the CCCI and the academe,” particularly for the implementation of Republic Act 10557, the Philippine Design Competitive Act of 2013.
Professor Fernandez, Tudtud and Aguilar echo the recommendation of some of Cebu’s creative sector leaders to expose local students and artists to educational and professional stints abroad as a means to learn more, gain experience and contacts, and later share their knowledge and expertise with other Cebuanos.
“In today’s knowledge economy where borders are increasingly erased by digital technology and ease of travel, and economies are being integrated (ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, for example), our creative workers are more mobile and receptive to changes, especially toward an environment that offers more financial security, education and professional stimulation,” Aguilar said.
But she acknowledged the possibility that a good number of Filipinos will settle permanently with their families abroad, decide not to share their learning in Cebu, or not take part in any local effort to regain lost talent.
“Then again, the possibility of brain gain is there,” Aguilar said in the same breath.
Professor Fernandez said an exodus of artists is not only inevitable but welcome.
“It is not so bad if only a few of our products stay in Cebu. Experience has shown they will always maintain their attachments to home,” he said, citing Cebuano poets Butch Bandillo, Myke Obenieta and Larry Ypil who are now based abroad.
Earning a living as a journalist in Cebu for decades before he left with his children to join his wife in Topeka, Kansas in 2007, Obenieta observed in himself and most of his Cebuano artist-friends a paradoxical “impulse for rootedness and for branching out.”
“This idea can be gleaned from the creative enterprise of Kenneth Cobonpue, probably the most internationally famous Cebuano artist whose work is not only grounded on the ethos/aesthetic of being Bisdak (Cebuano specifically in the use of materials and its context) but also transcendent in pushing the boundaries (beyond parochialism) of what he can do and reach. I think his art can be a template for the opulent possibilities of being a Cebuano artist in any field of creativity,” he said.
Obenieta moderates “Kabisdak,” a blog that publishes Cebuano poets from around the world, as well as emails an English column twice a week to Sun.Star Cebu and a weekly column in Cebuano to Sun.Star Superbalita.
So, will he return to Cebu for his art?
“In the context of the diaspora…the mode of production/creation is less constrained by space and time, especially if you as an artist are aware of where you come from and you bring that awareness wherever you are,” he said. “I may be out of Cebu, but Cebu can never be out of me.”