Tribes 2004

About the Exhibit

“And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or a found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer.”

-- Michael Ondaatje

TRIBES is a collection of stories about secular worlds. It explores the idea of the sacred.

The faces that form a long gallery are not of this world , yet they are of it—arcane presences invoked by the artist Mark Lewis Higgins, both from his fervid imagination and from his journeys into remote times and places. They are human, nonetheless, and they bear their humanity with utter grace: the women with soft doe eyes and flawless skin, the men with a deep penetrating gaze and a darker teint—no one can escape their spiritual aura. At the same time, they bear the signs of their noble rank with natural ease, in costumes laden with jewels and sacred symbols. They face the viewer frontally and assert power through their steady, unflinching gaze. At other times, their gaze is below eye level, avoiding secular contact. But the pharaohs among them gaze through you and beyond you to the distant horizon where they seek their vision of infinity.

Male and female, they are also creatures of ritual —with their choreographed gestures and their long, fascinating fingers given to perusing sacred texts or writing messages in strange calligraphies. Sometimes, their hands displayed as separate icons on both sides of their heads reveal their personal mark and symbol as letter or fruit. In the series Tribes, these personages of ancient nomadic race do not belong to a particular country of origin, nor do they have distinct physiognomies to link them with any tribe or social group. They possess a pervasive hybridity that associates them both to ancient times, and to the postmodernist, multicultural and multi-ethnic themes of today.

And yet, these personages who seem to live in a liminal, dreamlike world have a real claim to human history. Hybrid beings though they are, such was the social and cultural condition that arose in the years of the Silk Road which linked together a multitude of nomadic tribes, cities, and civilizations from China, to Central Asia to the West. This lasted for many centuries from the time of the Greek statesman Pericles to the Mongol warrior Genghiz Khan. The great import of this remarkable historic project was that it made possible a lively exchange in terms not only of material wealth, but also of ideas, religions, and the latest human innovations. This nourished the Eastern and Western civilizations and the whole extensive cultural gamut in between with all the subtle nuances of belief and ritual. It was of this time that Marco Polo wrote about his travels to China with a tinge of romantic nostalgia that stirred the adventurous spirit of the seafaring Venetians.

Consequently, the Silk Road created a unifying bond around the world, as well as sophisticated human communities that developed their own arts, literature, and music. Cities grew and flourished along its path: on one end, Peking in China, Karakorum in Central Mongolia, Samarkand in Transoxania, Tabriz in Northern Iran, Astrakhan in the Lower Volga, and on the other, faraway Constantinople in Turkey. Through these places, often divided by barren deserts such as the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Kalahari, as well as forbidding cliffs and terrains, passed the caravans of the Silk Road. They carried innumerable chests filled with all kinds of luxuries which the traders sometimes gave as gifts to emperors or kings: silk and lapis lazuli, pearls and jade, gold and ceramics.

With these products also came a vast intellectual awakening to the variety of human thought possible and a general tolerance and co-existence of the different faiths and philosophies. The cities along Silk Road invited the Nestorians, the Manichaeans, the Buddhist and later Islamic clergies into Central Asia, China, and the whole of the Mongol Empire. They basked in the unlimited speculative possibilities of the human mind.

Thus in Mark Higgins’ trilogy of the Invisible Cities, Tribes, and the later Diaspora, there is an underlying awareness of human potential and fulfillment. The cultures of these men and women do not follow a cut-and-dried distinction: Greek intermingles with Egyptian, Chinese with Indian, the tribes of Karakorum with those of Astrakhan-- they all come from the same rich mélange of culture that emerged on the Silk Road. They likewise display the opulence of the culture with their gem-encrusted costumes, fantastic headdresses and gilded calligraphies.

Their very names hark back to this universal source: Rashaida, Basileus, Tarquin, Amalric, Salamis, Belisaurus—names resounding through time and place and evoking distant kinships. It is they who have inherited the wealth of the Silk Road. In the twin paintings entitled Architecture 1 and 2, the man on the left wears a luxurious printed silk robe, an exquisite headdress of the Hagia Sophia and holds a large illuminated tome in his hands. The woman on the left wears a headdress of the Rialto Bridge while she peruses a formidable volume. The pair Milutin and Simonidas, wearing sacred symbols on their lantern headdresses, carry models of Russian churches in their hands. For architectural design, along with mathematics and the arts, was likewise borne on the currents of the time. Semiramis, wearing a halo and touching her lips with painted fingers, displays a fantastically illustrated book of geometry produced in the time of the great Islamic scholars Avicenna and Averroes. Nectanebo wears the air of an enlightened satrap as he sprawls in a large space surrounded by various cultural symbols.

In Diaspora, these various personages disperse and seek the four corners of the earth, if not their ultimate end. Now, they possess an even greater hieratic quality in their solemn frontality which here acquires a three-dimensional aspect. Enhancing their solemn mien, the glowing gemstones project from their costumes and headdresses in inexhaustible designs, even gilded ornamental bands following the line of the eyes and the nose. But in this series, while the faces retain the color of life, they are sometimes embedded or encased in sarcophagi amid thick rope coils or sackcloth. As such, they convey the appearance of a newly-excavated figure recently revealed, an archaeological marvel. The artist has likewise expanded his figures to three or four in a single frame, with the central head projecting three-dimensionally as molded in terracotta or shaped as a lapis lazuli mask.

To create these images, Mark Lewis Higgins primarily uses gouache, chalk pastel, acrylic, gold leaf, semiprecious stones and gems. And with these, guided by his artistic wizardry, he is able to bring to life the infinitely alluring personages of the vanished world of the Silk Road.

Alice Guillermo, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Art Studies Department
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City