The Philippines was colonized by Spain for about centuries, from 1521 to 1898, and ruled by America for around four decades, from 1899 to 1946. After recovering from the Second World War, the government started to harness human labor as export itself. In the present time the overseas Filipinos keep the economy afloat with their steady transfer of money to relatives and dependents. Through the art works, the issue which Filipinos were exploited and exported by its government has been reflected as the various allegories. As Filipinos traditionally follow and keep Catholic belief, themes of Christ's sacrifice has allegorically been represented as salvation, struggle, suppression, and emancipation of people. Through the allegory, we can interpret both the intrinsic and superficial texts. Also we can identity certain modes of the visuality of allegory in selected works from Philippine art history that in their complex mediations materialize the people and dignity of their predicament and their prevailing. Philippine art can be divided as three different features: passion, vagrancy, and mass formation. The passion stage was depicted as deep structure of Christian thought and devotional feeling, harsh capitalist system. In the pictures of vagrancy, under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, the themes of drift, deprivation, and homelessness are reckoned through the images of pictures. The stories represented with allegory have been played an important role to bring local issues up as national ones. Those stages take us to the processes of mass formation or the depiction of the people as a moment in the totality of force. The allegorical sign refers to another sign that precedes it, but with which it will never able to coincide reach back to a previous stage and in this constant attempt at return incorporates a structural distance from its origin. The true people's art is one that radically generates transformative technologies and techniques so that it irrevocably breaks the plane of “art”. In the painting, the truth is represented by functioning as foundation of a rhetoric of the image. And at this axis, the passional, the vagrant, and the mass formation tend to come together because they render the form of contingency that must be suffered and hopefully surpassed, a Filipino subjectivity that must be stitched in time.
한국미술이론학회는 미술이론의 고유한 역할과 방향을 모색하고자 창립되었다. 미술창작과 해석에 필요한 제반이론을 생산하고 다양한 미술현장의 활동을 검증하고 비판하며 연구하는 학회로서 미술의 이론과 실제사이의 분리현상을 극복하는데 기여하고자 한다. 현재 미술관련 학회들의 성격이 대부분 이론영역에 치중해있고, 학과나 전공에 특화되어 있는데 반하여, 본 학회는 미술의 현장과 창작과정을 적극 반영하고 미학, 미술사 등 기존의 미술이론 영역 뿐 아니라 실기와 미술교육, 경영, 행정, 전시 등 다양한 분야를 총괄하는 학제 간 연구를 활성화시키고자 한다. 앞으로 다양한 미술이론 영역에 대한 심도 있는 연구는 물론 한국미술계의 발전과 변화에 조력할 수 있는 실천적이고 생산적인 미술이론의 형성에 본 학회는 최선을 다할 것이다.