Kidlat Tahimik and Dengcoy Miel reimagine a hero that we deserve

BAGUIO, Philippines – National Artist for Film Kidlat Tahimik’s favorite story of Jose Rizal was when the Spanish government allowed the exhibition of about 40 ethnic Filipinos including Igorots in the Exposición de las Islas Filipinas in the Palacio Cristal in 1887.

In his letter to penpal Ferdinand Blumentritt, Rizal wrote about the racial mockery of Spanish newspapers of the Igorots wearing nothing but G-strings until one of them died of pneumonia.

Let them die, Rizal wrote in frustration until he settled down and said that at least the Igorots live in harmony with nature, not like the Spaniards who had to create a human zoo.

Kidlat, ever playful, said of Rizal: “Beneath his winter coat he wore his bahag.” He had since collected woodcarvings of Rizal (and Bonifacio) wearing a bahag, which he had gifted to some friends.

Kidlat exacted revenge for Rizal in 2021 when he set up his Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso. 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars, at Palacio de Cristal. He filled up the massive space with assemblages of bululs and other Filipino indigenous figures, Spanish conquistadors, and American pop icons like Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe to create his own postcolonial human zoo.

Some of these assemblages were shown at the National Museum and some donated “The Trojan Horse” and “The Galleon” at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA) Terminals 1 and 2 to complete a weird circumnavigation of sorts.

His Rizal assemblages, however, were shown during Rizal’s birthday in June at the Baguio Museum. 

“Happy Orbit, Pepe,” Kidlat in G-string shouted to the audience. 

‘Kathang Ipis’

Kidlat Tahimik’s exhibit was one of two in Baguio that celebrated Rizal this year. The other one was Dengcoy Miel’s homecoming exhibit last August at the Bencab Museum entitled “Kathang Ipis.” 

Dengcoy, a long-time executive artist of The Strait Times in Singapore, retired and came home this year. 

Like Kidlat, Dengcoy Miel treats Rizal as less a historical subject than a conceptual hinge. The hero becomes a vessel through which questions of power, faith and post-colonial identity can pass. His earlier Rizal portraits like “Rizal in the Land of Lilimut” distill what Miel calls the filibuster spirit of the revolution — defiance sharpened by intellect, resistance fueled not only by arms but by ideas. This is Rizal not as saint, but as provocation, a reminder that dissent is a moral stance as much as a political one.

In “Kathang Ipis”, he paired Rizal with Bonifacio, and as political taxonomies go, the National Hero was again portrayed as a pacifist. This was evident in his “Allergic to Violence” and “The Pacifist’s Nightmare” where the bolo becomes literally too hot to handle. 

His obra maestra in the exhibit, “Walang Katapusang Cuento ng Pighati at Pagdurusa (Revolt-In)” has Rizal and Bonifacio locking arms, while their other hands held a smoldering bolo (for Andres) and a flaming quill (for Jose). Rizal’s measured faith in reason, reform, and the slow labor of words seems present in the work’s reflective pauses while Bonifacio’s raw insistence on rupture and action surges through its more violent, unrelenting imagery. The piece refuses to resolve their debate. Instead, it suggests that Philippine grief is born precisely from this tension: the country’s habit of thinking its way out of pain while simultaneously bleeding through it. 

For Miel, the sorrow continues as the nation is condemned to carry both Rizal’s lucid sorrow and Bonifacio’s furious anguish at the same locked arms.

Kidlat, on the other hand, has Rizal as the supreme “indio-genius,” which is both reclamation and provocation. “Indio,” a colonial slur, is stripped of its insult and fused with intellect, imagination, and resistance. Kidlat always says that it was his late Ifugao friend Lopez Nauyac who taught him that word. Applied to Rizal, the phrase destabilizes the hero’s usual pedestal. Rizal is no longer simply the product of European enlightenment; he becomes a bridge figure, fluent in Western forms yet anchored in native consciousness. Therefore, with a bahag. 

He imagined Rizal holding a pen in one hand, like Miel, and a camera in the other. The pairing feels autobiographical, of course. 

What distinguishes both Kidlat and Dengcoy are their refusal of piety. Kidlat’s Rizal protests human zoos, mocks friars, and lingers uncomfortably in the present, where memory is crowded out by noise and novelty. By framing Rizal as inspiration rather than icon, Kidlat argues for a living relationship with history. 

Miel plays the dyslexic. He said that Kathang Ipis was, of course, a play of isip and he played with it. 

“Why Kathang Ipis? Probably because our points of view are that of the underling, of men and women still being haunted by the dark shadows of our past. It’s these puns intended that reveals our playful and merry acceptance and shielded defiance to the challenges of the past, present and the future,” he said during the opening. 

“The paintings in this show hope to crystallize our collective traumas, make peace with them and hopefully learn from them, too.” 

In revisiting Rizal, Miel, the balikbayan, was also revisiting himself, asking the question that underlies much of his art: not only what Rizal means to Filipinos today, but whether, in an age of distraction and self-inflicted myths, they still deserve him. – Rappler.com