THIS artist is indefatigable...
Amid the preparations for the first Alveo Ironman 70.3 Davao where he was putting up a one-man-exhibit on top of the unveiling of a sculpture and the medals and trophies he designed last March 24, 2018, Davao artist Rey Mudjahid "Kublai" Ponce Millan was also busy setting up another one-man exhibit, his first in Tagum City at the Gaisano Mall of Tagum, last March 21, 2018.
He pulled off both, to an awestruck audience.
His Tagum exhibit is a homecoming of sorts, a tribute to the city that nurtured him in his formative years.
While Kublai made his name as an artist of Davao City, his formative years were spent in Tagum when this was yet more commonly called Magugpo, from kindergarten to Grade 6.
Thus, the title, Kahidlaw sa Kagikan, Visayan for a longing for one's origin.
Kublai went to St. Mary's Academy of Tagum for Kindergarten and Grade One before moving to Magugpo Pilot Elementary School to complete his elementary education.
Tagum was a quiet provincial town in Kublai's boyhood in the 1970s as it only became a city on March 7, 1998.
He grew up at the time when the abaca and coconut industries were on their twilight years and cavendish banana was the sunrise crop.
A regular in art contests whether in school, among other schools or even across the region, Kublai only had gratitude for his teachers for always fielding him out to compete.
It was through these contests that he honed his passion for the visual arts, and it was his environment that implanted the joyful provincial scenes in his painting that he is most famous for.
He attributes this inclination to paint the colors, movements, the joy of living close to nature and multi-faceted cultures and people in his paintings now as a full-fledged visual artist to the surroundings he imbibed in as a child, which he complemented with his interactions with tribal villages and people along less-travelled roads in his adulthood.
"He imbibed the rustic life and colors and made these into his art," the literature on his exhibit read. "These colors, movements, nature, and cultures are the very essence of his long-running series Probinsaya, which underscores the joy of living in the 'probinsya'."
The 4 feet x 4 feet paintings he showed his experiences as a boy in Tagum, including a jeepney that is packed full of people up to the roof, a very typical scene in the provinces.
Gaisano Mall of Tagum provided the whole Atrium not just for Kublai's exhibit, but also for various activities that the other major sponsor Star 360 Philippines Inc. (Star 360) set up for both children and the youths. Star 360 is a marketing and distribution company for quality school and office supply brands from all over the world including the favorite Sharpie markers.
There was the poster-making contest and the doodling contest where winners got whole art sets from Star 360.
To top it all, Star 360 also donated 550 school sets of which 400 goes to the Community Technical College of Southeastern Mindanao Inc., the lumad college in Mindanao, located in Maco, Compostela Valley, and 150 sets to the Mariphil Children's Village in Panabo City, Davao del Norte. These two are Kublai's chosen beneficiaries.
With his first one-man exhibit, Kublai acknowledges his link to the city where he had already been helping beautify through his art starting from the giant sculptures at the Christ the King Cathedral created in 2005 and made up of the 40-foot Resurrected Christ, the 14 Stations of the Cross that are 14 feet high, the 18-foot Calvary, the 30-foot Twin Hearts, the 20-foot 5 Loaves and 2 Fishes fountain, and the 5 Filipino Cherubim that are 6 feet tall.
In 2009, he made the Musikahan Facade Sculptures of the New Tagum City Hall made up of 78 figures playing different indigenous music instruments of Mindanao, and in 2015 he made the Scouting for Peace Monument for the 2015 National Jamboree at the Tagum E-Park, and the Tagumpay sa Panagat Monument at the boundary of Tagum City and Carmen Municipality.
All these he made as a way of expressing his gratitude to the city that nurtured him as a boy, which he now capped with the one-man exhibit formally acknowledging the city's contribution to his art.
The artist has been tapped to be part of the Tagum City Historical, Cultural, and Arts Museum, which will be built from the Old City Hall.