“Romeo Lee’s Chaos Theory” |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2010 09:32 AM PDT WELCOME to the House of Stereo. The moment one enters painter Romeo Lee's home, one is literally assaulted by a wall of sound. The Beatles' "Revolver" is blasting from the garage system, a leaning tower of stereo components – amplifiers, speakers, CD and DVD players. Some are obviously high-end but others are junk decks bearing the marks of numerous hack repair jobs. The CD is ejected midway through "Taxman," to be replaced by a pirated copy of Brian Wilson's reimagining of George Gershwin. The unearthly vocal harmonies waft and weave their way through the rest of the house, which is literally wall-to-wall audio components. Some space has been carved out for Lee's paintings and art supplies, but the rest is almost all stereo. A big-screen LCD monitor dominates the living room, which is filled with audio and video components. Piles of pirated DVDs and CDs crowd the shelves. Upstairs are two more large rooms devoted almost entirely to Lee's consuming passion for stereo and home theater equipment. All sorts of media are piled on the floor in a promiscuous heap: CDs, DVDs, vinyl LPs, VHS tapes, even laser discs. Lee puts on a newly-acquired pirated DVD of "The Sex Pistols in Japan" in one system. It takes a while before he determines which of the dozen or so DVD players are connected to which amplifier, digging through piles of remotes for the right one. "I had to throw away seven sacks of cassettes after [typhoon] Ondoy," he informs me. Not to mention several speakers and amplifiers ruined by floodwaters in the garage. There was literally too much stuff to bring up the stairs to safety. Lee rummages through a pile of even more stuff to show me one of his new toys. Presently he finds one of his several iPods and connects it to a Fatman tube amp, and the Rolling Stones' "Beggars Banquet" begins to clash with Johnny Rotten. Lee isn't exactly an audiophile, although his hoard includes several names that hi-fi snobs would recognize, such as Fisher, Magnepan, Acurus, and Harbeth. He's not a collector either, although his collection includes some choice vintage Marantz amps and JBL studio monitors in very good condition that eBay hounds would kill for. Lee is an accumulator. High end and cheapo junk – he loves them all – as long as the price is right. One thing he can't resist is a bargain. He confesses to buying 15 DVD players and recorders recently because they were cheap and on sale at a local surplus house. In fact, Lee's lifestyle revolves around bargain hunting. A typical day involves making the rounds of the pier, Bangkal and Quiapo, scouring the surplus shops, second-hand dealers and pirate stalls for bargains. In between, he stops at the ukay-ukay (second-hand) stands hunting for T-shirts and sneakers. Lee's ukay-ukay lifestyle is already part of the personal mythology he has created for himself which, if I were pressed to describe it, would be as some kind of Bizarro world renaissance man. (In the Superman comics, the Bizarro world is a parallel universe where everything is the opposite of the normal world. Ergo, Lee's accumulation of stuff is a distorted mirror-image of trendoid yuppie consumption of high-status items.) "When I was a baby, my mother would dress me in ukay-ukay clothes, that's why I like it," he used to tell people to explain his mania. Born to an artistic clan (brothers Mon and Rox are cartoonists and filmmakers, brother Ruben is a cinematographer), Lee was already a prolific doodler in high school in Naga City. "Rod Stewart pa ako noon," he confesses. The memory sends him rummaging through piles of stuff, grocery bags full of photo albums, looking for a particular image. It takes 20 minutes before he manages to locate the particular snapshot he was looking for – a young skinny Romeo Lee in overalls standing on the PNR tracks. Even then, he was already emulating his rock 'n' roll heroes. By the time he entered the University of the Philippines as a Fine Arts major in 1984, his "Wild Thing" persona was already formed. A March 1984 "Who" magazine cover subbed "Punk: The Whys of the Weirdo" shows Lee in rockabilly quiff, Wayfarers and ripped jeans. He became an instant celebrity in UP, a campus fixture, the village eccentric. Lee graduated in 1990 but he never really left. He continued to curate and emcee the UP Mountaineers' annual "Elvis" rock concert until the final one in 2006. Among other things, Lee's annual concert helped birth the "alternative music" boom of the mid-1990s. The highlight of each "Elvis" concert was Lee's "Wild Thing" freakout, which in its later stages of evolution was backed by a full band, Romeo Lee and the Brown Briefs. Lee held his first one-man show in 1990, "Oil-Lee" at the West Gallery. He has continued to insist on using corny puns to title his shows, such as "Religious-Lee" and "Romeo Must Paint." This refusal to take himself seriously, though a refreshing change from the humorless self-importance that afflicts many "serious" artists, might have hampered his acceptance in art circles. It has only been in the last few years that critics began to note that the savage humor and grotesque vitality pouring out of Lee's canvases were the mark of a true original who had found his voice. It took a while before they could reconcile Lee's "Wild Thing" rock 'n' roll persona with the wild visions that he was steadily putting on canvas. Today, however, Lee has joined the ranks of other mavericks such as his UP classmate Manuel Ocampo at the forefront of visual art in the country today. In fact, he is to take part this October in a group show curated by Ocampo at the Freies Museum in Berlin called "Bastards of Misrepresentation: Doing Time on Filipino Time." In the meantime, he'll probably be doing his rounds, chasing the elusive high of finding even more stuff to add to his pile. • This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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