Sunday, August 12, 2007 Box Booty By Mayette Q. Tabada
BOXES deserve a break.
From ordinary speak—“don’t box me in”—to idioms and figures of speech—“think out of the box,” “Pandora’s box”—this object is often miscast as unsavory or ignorable.
Fortunately, such stereotypes don’t hold water with Nelia G. Neri. When not covering for and editing lifestyle pages, Nelia forgets time when she’s rearranging her Bauhinia Drive home, in particular fixing up her collection of almost 200 boxes collected over a span of 25 years.
Long before she developed a nesting instinct, boxes entered her life when a suitor presented her with a jewelry box in Chinese lacquer that, when opened, tinkled music while a ballerina twirled.
The Valentine’s Day gift was eventually followed by other boxes after Nelia, married now to the giver, lawyer Julius Neri, traveled to the World’s Fair in Knoxville in 1982.
Unlike his inveterate shopper of a spouse, Julius was a typical husband in that he wanted to indulge his wife but desired to get the shopping ordeal quickly done with. He invited her to buy anything she wanted, on one condition: Nelia had to find a way to ship back her purchases.
This logistical snarl turned out to be a minor bump when she discovered souvenir boxes were not only charming and plentiful, but handy collectibles.
This began a fancy that assembles, from A to Z, all the countries the couple has visited: Australia, Africa, Bali, Burma, Cambodia, China, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, U.S., Vietnam, and the Philippines, of course.
Met by displays of boxes starting at the foyer and then spilling over to the family room, sala, dining room, music room and lanai, visitors will notice that the most prosaic boxes are the American-made souvenirs while Asian nations can boast of the most artistic, most intricate, and most valuable containers.
While boxes usually serve only to set off or hold an object deemed more valuable than its setting, this collection focuses the spotlight on the artistry, patience and skill artisans put into carving, painting or embellishing containers that are works of art in itself.
The most outstanding in the collection showcases the ancient Chinese method of cloisonné, which makes the enamel glow like rippling silk. Some of the Japanese boxes display gold and silver engravings, which demonstrate the traditional craft of choking once used to decorate the armament of Samurai warriors.
Nelia points to a tiny hand-painted box created by a Vladivostok folk artist as the most expensive in the lot.
Aside from different kinds of wood, from plain to the delicately scented camphor, the boxes are wrought from crystal, silver, stone, ceramic, reeds, leather, beads, wrought iron, pewter and even cork.
The most unusually shaped must be the box masquerading as a baby grand piano, from Pisa, Italy.
Indulging Nelia’s penchant, family and friends have made her collection grow through the years. Younger sister Elma, an educator based in Bangkok, brings her a memento of each place visited every time she goes on study tours. The biggest box in the collection, unforgettable in Chinese lacquer, was hand-carried by this persevering sibling past many checkout counters before it reached Nelia in Cebu.
No wonder for Nelia, it’s not the contents but the box that counts.
