Quick Overview:

I’m an older Filipino American artist whose parents never talked much about their past, but who left me boxes stuffed full of letters they wrote to each other from the late 1940s—1960s. My parents have passed on, and I’m finally going through the letters, doing research to understand the local and larger global forces that shaped them, as well as my own art, writing, and other curation passions: music, culture, and history.

Why “Eulipion Outpost”?

Eulipo comes from Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s jazz piece, “Theme for the Eulipions.” The word also sounds like oulipo,1 game-like rules and rituals to make art. Experimental poet Harryette Mullen writes about Oulipo in Eulipean terms:

“. . . when I first heard of Oulipo and Oulipeans I thought of them in relation to the Eulipeans in Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s jazz classic, ‘Theme for the Eulipeans,’ the ones he calls ‘the artists, the actors, the journeymen’ who come from a planet in another galaxy, Eulipea. I’m not an Oulipean but I can call myself an Eulipean . . .

The most liberating aspect of Oulipo for me was their demystification of ‘inspiration’ in favor of ‘potential literature.’ This puts less stress on writing as a product and more emphasis on writing as a process that might result in a work of literature.”

Questions

Finally, several questions tend to drive this newsletter: How do you survive and thrive as an artist (in any of the arts) during an era of great exponential change and instability? How does color, culture, gender, differing ability, and age factor in? What art addresses these issues? What ideas and processes help us to stay curious, playful, and hopeful? I have a PhD in English (focus on ethnic and AAPI studies and literature), but I have no formal training in visual arts; I am learning as I go!

P.S. Last name pronounced: Ven-gwah, i.e., ven as in “venom,“ “gwah“ as in “guava.” In Mindanao (Philippines), where my father was from, it’s written (and pronounced) as Bengua. It’s an unusual surname in the Philippines, and could have either sephardic or Chinese roots. In the latter, it could very well refer to “a fool” (imagine “the Fool” in your favorite tarot deck).

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