The complexity of modern and contemporary Filipino culture and its ethnic richness is one which has inspired the work of innumerable artists. The young artist Leonard Aguinaldo's work is an intense and articulate exploration of many themes touched by ethnic cultural symbols, ancestral imagery, and immediate social concerns.

In a plural society such as the Philippines, the sense of ethnic identity runs deep in many artists. Ethnicity has its own particular context in the Philippines where it is not defined along racial lines but in terms of the numerous ethnolinguistic groups with their Austronesian-based languages and cultural traditions associated with particular provinces or localities. With Spanish colonization in the 16th century, lowland and coastal communities were converted to Christianity while preserving their languages and developing a folk culture influenced by the Christian faith. The landed elite that grew out of the indigenous datuships became increasingly infused with Spanish colonial culture, especially in relation to the Church. However, other groups remained relatively untouched in their highland fastnesses zealously guarded by their warriors against alien encroachment, while others fled to the remote hinterlands to escape the floggings of enforced conversion. The colonial divide-and-rule policy gave the Christian converts dominance over the other groups, including those who had earlier converted to Islam, as well as the many groups of indigenous world views all throughout the archipelago. Later, with urbanization and modernization, people from all parts of the country flocked to Manila which became a melting pot where, on the whole, ethnic identity became balanced by the sense of national identity in the perception of common concerns, although, to be sure, it many communities, the old colonial divisions run too deep to be easily healed.

Among the latest artists to take up the ethnic theme is Leonard Aguinaldo who has come up in the past five years with a series of individual exhibitions [around this subject] in the Philippines and abroad, in the Sanctuary Gallery in Baguio, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Hiraya Gallery in Manila, and at the Kongju Literary Art Center in South Korea. The viewer is unfailingly struck by the intensity and coherence of his work as he draws out the different aspects of ethnicity in cultural symbols, images of ancestors, and contemporary social situations.

Born in Baguio City in 1967, Leonardo Aguinaldo lives in the bosom of the northern highlands with its unique interaction of nature and culture. It is an atmosphere that is so easily evoked because it is highly distinctive: the mountainous heights, the fresh aroma of pines, the morning fog and cold. But Baguio City itself (also the hometown of the late Santiago Bose) is a passage between two cultures: on the one hand, the urban migrants from the neighboring Ilocos provinces and the lowlands; and on the other hand, the indigenous ethnic populations collectively called Igorots and including the Ifugao, Bontoc, Kalinga, Kankanay, etc. In the long years of cohabitation, a merging of identities has taken place, but only up to a point. Like Aguinaldo, some Baguio artists may feel trapped and incomplete in this hybrid, transitional zone and may profoundly desire integration with the indigenous groups. Indeed, the title of one of Aguinaldo's paintings is a personal cry: "God! Make me an Igorot!" The god he invokes could well be the Ifugao creator deity Kabunian rather than the Christian god. It is to be noted that for a long time, the term "Igorot" was overlaid with colonial prejudice, but it has been recuperated and its negative connotations shaken off mainly through the efforts of the scholar William Henry Scott who painted out that means "people of the mountains" from i-meaning "inhabitant of" and gorot meaning "height" as in the Filipino word gulod or the crest of a mountain range.

Aguinaldo works in an unusual medium and technique: Most of his works are paintings on rubber sheet in standard square sizes of 90.5 x 90.5 cm. The firm but supple substance of the rubber medium lends itself well to his technique of working with carving tools in acrylic, oil, and printer's ink all in a demanding process which, through his light and sure touch, results in an evenly toned image with fine linear definitions. In some works, the artist likewise introduced the innovation of cut-outs in different shapes, with the space filled in with mirrors. In most of the works, a circular mandala occupies the center of a square, its sides covered with floral and vegetal motifs in linear rhythms, calling to mind illuminated manuscripts or Persian carpets and tapestries. In these rubber paintings, the artist put to good use his training in architectural drafting at the Baguio College Foundation where he developed artistic confidence and discipline in his meticulous kind of artmaking.

One of the most striking works in the ethnic theme is Ninuno ng Asawa Mo (Your Wife's Ancestor) (2002). The central image here was appropriated from a photograph in Dean Worcester's book Imperial Imagings which contains early 20th century pictures of Cordillera peoples constituting a catalogue of colonial subjects. This particular photograph was of special value because his wife recognized the group as her ancestors belonging to the Palsy family of the Attack district in Benguet, Mountain Province. This photographic image was transposed into a rubbercut painting incised in sepia tones conveying a somber mood and elegiac feeling for kin who lived in a distant time, their ethnicity distinguishable by their traditional costumes. Indeed, the distinctive marks of their traditional culture and signs of common identity become a bridge between generations, ensuring an unbroken continuity and emotional bond. Above the central image is a frieze-like motif of curtains of indigenous weave beyond which lurk faces, spirit-presences, that are ensnared in time and space and crying to be free. Trapped by poverty and prejudice, they are impeded from realizing their full human potential. Along the lower border on both sides are cutouts filled in with mirrors in the shape of the artist's arms and open hands which seem to reach out to and encompass the ancestral images as though striving to free them from captivity. But at the same time, the aspiration for completeness, for full assimilation into the Igorot identity always comes short of realization-the hands do not enter the privileged zone of the central image.

Past and present interweave in the work: The artist's hands, living and mobile, are of the present and the two-dimensional image based on the photograph is of the past. The device of the mirror, in fact, signifies a release from the two-dimensional/three-dimensional binary. With an intriguing ambiguity, it is neither quite two-dimensional because it has spatial depth nor quite three-dimensional because it retains a flat surface. At the same time, as mirror and looking-glass, it gives a self-reflecting image and is thus a signifier of identity. Also part of the interaction of past and present are the small computer icons of command that are woven into the curtain motif; they function as communication signs which at one imply connection and dislocation, in the ironic sense of the technological divide. At the same time, they constitute decorative elements in a cultural situation in which they are disrupted from operational use.

Remarkably enough, the works of Leonardo Aguinaldo do not evoke a nostalgia for the precolonial past, for a kind of "dreamtime" in a distant mythological realm. Instead, his visual/intellectual structuration of the Cordillera is not static or frozen in time but is a continuum that reaches up to the present. Although he uses traditional iconography while manipulating it in an original way, as in his use of the bulul figure, ancestral figures or anitos in carved wood, he confidently brings in elements of contemporary technology, as in his several allusions to computers and cellphones. In his particular cultural context, the mobile phone assumes a vivid iconic quality endowed with quasi-mystical properties, as it shoots out blazing rays between the texters and creates an electrically charged atmosphere, as in the work entitled Message Sent (2002).

Nonetheless, a few of his works intimate a regret for the decline of community values in recent times. In "Dear God, Please Make Me Igorot!" (2002), the center is a holy ground, the Igorot dap-ay where the community's concerns and struggles are brought out for collective discussion. All around the circumscribed central space are numerous bulol figures, each in its own space, representing the spirits of the ancestors. However, one is struck by their isolation from each other. Likewise, the stone benches of the dap-ay are empty: Have the elders passed away or gone elsewhere? The artist thus prays to become an Igorot in order to be able to help reconstitute the waning indigenous spirit. To complete the image, two worshippers of the present day kneel in the lower corners of the square, and in the space between the circle and the border is a garden of flowering vines and birds, the details clearly articulated with fresh colors in an overall linear pattern. Another work, Spirit Capture (2002), expresses optimism in the reconstitution of the indigenous community. Here the mandala consists of a flower-like form in which each petal is a family unit, while below, a man and a woman in their typical costumes reaffirm their ethnic identity and invite identification with them, the shapes of their faces cut out as reflecting mirrors.

A feeling of joy in nature's beauty arises in Eyes in my Karma (2002) where the central image is the Creator's all-seeing eye. Surrounding it is a garden of flowers and birds in a traditional Asian style where meandering curvilinear lines do not overlap but form a continuous interlinked series. The artist's sense of color is sensitive and sophisticated in the unusual harmonies. His technique of incising the rubber medium with color lends an unusual textural and tactile quality to his work.

Aguinaldo's mandala paintings are stunning in their richness of imagery and concentrated power. In the Asian, mainly Indian, pictorial traditions associated with religious belief, a mandala is a meditation piece in which the viewer in meditation is drawn inward into the central sacred space, where he transcends all worldly cares. A mandala is both high temple and holy mountain at the center of the universe, as it is also the Tree of Life and vertical axis which joins the heavens, the earth, and the underworld themes present in Aguinaldo's paintings. Indeed, his imagery is profoundly linked to indigenous belief and ritual. Journey to the Underworld (1999) shows the Tree of Life as a dense maze which the soul negotiates while male and female shamans on both sides chant magical incantations to guide it on its journey and various beasts rend the air with their cries. Also in other works are references to the ritual sacrifice of creatures and to the phases of the moon with its influence on the tides which play a part in divination. Figures of l izards, crocodiles, snails, and snakes abound. As amphibian creatures they link the worlds of earth and water, and mediate between the living and the dead.

In an exceptional work, one descends to the familiar level of the present. A vivid anecdotal painting which came out of a recent incident, Dog's Life in a Man' Life (2002) shows a range of emotional responses, anger and sorrow, humor, at the death of the artist's pet dog as a result of a hit-and-run accident for which the chief policeman was responsible. The principal image is that of corrupt policemen and officials carousing over drink and dog meat while most of the townspeople show their support for them, to the artist's consternation. Along the sides of the work are images of spunky canines. In one vertical side panel, a dog is cut up and singed as pulutan, spicy meat to accompany liquor, for the feast; in the opposite panel, a group of dogs lustily feed on a human in revenge. While the painting unwittingly reveals a tension between the artist and his community known for its dog-eating culinary habits, this is overlaid by a sense of class difference between himself as belonging to the masses and the ruling local bureaucracy represented by the policemen and their cohorts.

Everywhere he goes, Leonardo Aguinaldo takes with him his native air and mountain breezes, as well as his social causes and concerns. When he was chosen as Philippines's representative to an outdoor show Le Vent des Forets (Forest Winds) in Lahaymeix, France, in June 2001, he made a large installation of twigs, branches, and stones in a loose circular structure with intervals for breathing spaces. The French press quoted him as saying: "One does not negotiate with the merchants of art, and in the process one takes a militant stand. In our country, urbanization has severely damaged our natural environment, the least that one can do is to pay homage to the victims."