Patches of Remembrance
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Mik and May Gaspay’s sculptural quilts combine quilting techniques and artistic concepts (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
You note the smooth, mellow tone in his reply when you ask him if he knows why you’re meeting at all. “My mom says it’s about an interview,” he says serenely, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Right. I hope you’re ok with it,” I say.
He smiles and says, “No problem.”
We missed each other the week before, when he cut short his trip to the studio and returned to San Francisco where he lives with his wife, Amanda Luu, the owner of Studio Mondine specializing in destination floral design, and their son, Amihan Manuel.
Past meeting
What you notice next is his Clark Kent-like demeanor, but without the clumsiness. A first-time meeting, in my experience, generally has the other person being formally stiff, if not awkwardly standoffish, or excessively ebullient. Mik is anything but. He’s welcoming and refreshingly perceptive.
May shouts out an introduction from her workspace at the back to establish my connection with them and interest in their work. Mik and I met decades ago in Escondido Village, Stanford University’s housing area for graduate students.
Naturally, that meeting is a vague memory. Mik was in grade school when his father, Manny, was on a scholarship at Stanford in the late 1980s, while I was on a gap year from the Philippines. My mother had been granted a John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford; the program encouraged fellows to bring their families with them, and she brought my father, my sister, and me with her for the academic year.
The Mik of my memory has metamorphosed into an interdisciplinary artist working, first, with found objects, painting, and sculpture, and now sculpting quilts with May. Their collaboration began during the pandemic, but May’s a pro in quilting. She first tried her hand at it using a regular sewing machine after settling in the United States with her family in the 1980s.
Collaboration
“Fibre Structures” (2019) was Mik and May’s first quilted project for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Main Gallery. Together with family friend Malleva Abenes, they reimagined buildings as a series of quilts.
In the beginning, the division of labor had May overseeing the quilting techniques and Mik taking care of the conceptualization and approach. Today, the mother-son team’s discussions have led to works dealing primarily with familial oral history, such as Balikbayan (2023), a quilt series about home exhibited at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco that includes Ancestral Home (aka Enrile House), Doorway to Enrile, and Bug.
Mik explains in his IG (@mikgaspay): “…[Ancestral Home] was a way to work through ideas of home, connection, and loss. My mom [had] been trying to resurrect her Lola [grandmother] and Lolo’s [grandfather’s] home that was lost through neglect and a typhoon. This piece is an attempt to have something physical stand in its absence.”
Mik and May Gaspay’s “Ancestral Home” is exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose, California (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
Their relationship is amicable, but do artists related by blood make better collaborators? The answer is yes and no. It’s smooth sailing with prepping and quilting. Mik readies the Longarm quilting machine – something like a large sewing machine -- by placing the fabric under its arm to get the quilting going. They alternate quilting based on their schedules, with Mik driving from San Francisco and May walking over from her house, leaving The Frog Pond Daycare, the children’s day-care center that she operates, to an employee.
The quilting process is what has them at loggerheads. May, master quilter and member of the nonprofit Peninsula Quilters Guild, insists on perfecting the quilting techniques (pieced/patchwork, appliqué) whereas Mik’s focus is on the quilt’s “conceptual vision,” having trained in graphic design/illustration (undergraduate) at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and in painting (postgraduate) at the California College of the Arts.
May Gaspay quilting “Ong’s boat” on the Longarm quilting machine (Photo by Liana Garcellano)
Textile art
Mik’s strong feelings of gratitude (“utang na loob” in Filipino culture) mixed with his old-world sentiments and status as firstborn among four siblings have had him reflecting on his role as an artist and his legacy to his son, Ami.
“What is it you’re leaving behind? How can we contain it? Do we write it down?” he asks constantly.
One thing Mik is certain of is folding his father-in-law’s story into his own, and thus leave Ami, who is now almost three years old, a “historical record.” Mik’s keen on having conversations, documentations, and a physical object synthesizing all personal stories.
Ong’s Boat is Mik and May’s new project, a quilt form of a 30-foot-long refugee boat that Ong “Gibson” Luu, Mik’s father-in-law, escaped in from Vietnam when he was 13.
Mik Gaspay working on “Ong’s boat” (Photo by Liana Garcellano)
A quilt is perfect in transforming Ong’s harrowing experience into textile art because, as Mik acknowledges, writing isn’t his forte, and he loves the functionality of quilts as passed down through generations. But he has modified its traditional two-dimension quality, making three-dimensional sculptural quilts with various shapes (house, car, balikbayan box, trees) that “break the usual shapes of quilts.”
The project had them traveling to San Jose to measure a genuine refugee boat (the Viet Museum has one), then quilting two identical panels (the second panel is under the machine) to replicate the boat. The finished quilt form, Mik visualizes, is a “waterlogged” boat that people can walk through. The “sea water” will be a dyed quilt that he says he’ll dunk in parts in a vat of blue dye placed at the center of a tarp while wearing a raincoat.
Panel one of the two-panel quilt of Mik and May Gaspay’s “Ong’s boat” (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
Boat people
Mik tells the story: When the North Vietnamese overthrew the South Vietnamese government in the mid-1970s and poverty racked the country, Ong’s parents, fearing for their children’s safety, put him and his brothers in refugee boats to escape. Mik adds that gold was also inserted in Ong’s teeth for extra measure.
The journey was dangerous, with the North Vietnamese army shooting at them and, later, pirates boarding the boat and taking their food. The waterlogged boat, its engine disabled, floated on the sea for weeks. Thailand could have been a haven, but they were chased away with bullets. They “floated into Indonesia,” where they stayed for three years in a refugee camp.
Mik says that with church sponsorship of the refugees, Ong, with nothing but his shirt, shorts, and flip flops to his name, was flown to Alameda, Texas, then to Mountain View, California, where Ong said he lived in an apartment with seven other teenagers.
In the United States, Ong reunited with the brother he was originally with but got separated from in Indonesia, and another brother who was in another boat. The reunion was completed when other family members made it to America sometime between the 1980s and 1990s. They now “all live in San Jose.”
One thing Mik is certain of is folding his father-in-law’s story into his own, and thus leave Ami, who is now almost three years old, a “historical record.”
Artists in residence
Last Nov. 9, curious guests were peeking into Studio U5 and so May invited them to enter. We alternated as docents for “Meet the Artists — Open Studios.” Mik couldn’t be there. He and his family were then moving into their new home on a hill with a huge driveway and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco’s East Bay. The house had been designed and lived in by Chinese American architect Roger Lee.
From 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., visitors were made privy to the upcoming works of the 24 artists in their working studios at wings E, F, and U of CCC. The artists are on a long-term/short-term residency with the city of Palo Alto through the Cubberley Artist Studio Program, which, per cityofpaloalto.org, provides rent-subsidized studio spaces and a creative community in exchange for community service where artists offer free public programming. [hyperlink]
Studio U5 is teeming with sculptural quilts, textiles, and the massive quilting machine. The “El Palo Alto” quilt hangs near the entrance, its texture and dark hues captivating visitors. May tells them that her and her son’s quilt guide was Mik’s photo of a trunk of one of the old redwood trees after which Palo Alto was named.
May Gaspay explains to a guest the “El Palo Alto” quilt at “Open Studios” (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
She redirects their attention to the unfinished, white single-panel quilt tacked on the wall across the entrance and begins reciting the backstory of Ong’s Boat.
“There were 100 people on the boat. Some sat on top of the engine room. Ong’s mother chose him and his brothers [to take the journey] because their chances of surviving the journey were higher than the daughters’,” says May, who worked as a nurse at Stanford Hospital for 25 years.
She continues: “When the boat was shot at by the North Vietnamese soldiers, Ong and his brother, who couldn’t swim, jumped [overboard] and clung to the side of the boat. The Australian Red Cross came to their aid while they were floating at sea and treated their wounds.”
The visitors' body language is an interesting read. Some are moved by the story and look fixedly at the boat as if seeing the young refugees. One guest’s expression is grim: “I know a woman whose sister didn’t survive that journey,” he says.
The others’ eyes glaze over after hearing the words “Vietnamese refugee boat.” It becomes our cue to quickly wrap up our story so they can politely retreat from the studio.
Those with abiding interest learn the other reason May and Mik embarked on the project that, she describes with a chuckle, as an ambitious one. “We didn’t experience it, but it’s a story worth telling. We want to honor their bravery and endurance, and the resilience of the human spirit,” she declares gravely.
The “El Palo Alto” quilt honors the redwood trees after which the city of Palo Alto was named (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
Storyteller
Mik’s musings on his career and how to honor family history intensified while he was going through a divorce, moving house, and grappling with Covid-19 in one fell swoop. He found it difficult to pursue a career without financial support and as an immigrant. He felt that he had reached a point in his life where right or wrong no longer mattered, and he wondered how people measured success. Also, he kept asking himself why he wanted to do art.
His introspection led him to do collaborative works with his mother, to discover what made sense to him in moving forward. Notably, he asked himself again what he wants to leave his son Ami in the absence of documents.
He had an epiphany on what he is as an artist: “A documentarian — that’s my role — when there are no records and photographs.”
He recast the story of his mother’s ancestral house in Enrile, Cagayan, in the Philippines into Ancestral Home, quilting it based on old photographs. The four-panel quilt is part of the “Allegedly the worst is behind us” exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in San Jose. The exhibit, on view until Feb. 23, 2025, underscores the 12 participating artists’ personal and collective acts of rebuilding fractured and stolen memories.
“Ancestral Home” was based on a real house with six bedrooms, a “dirty kitchen,” and a garden (Photo by Liana Garcellano).
Furthering quilting as a form of documentation, Mik and May held a quilt-making workshop on Dec. 12 at the ICA.
And there’s Ong’s Boat to finish so Mik can tell Ami about his mother’s family history.
“Memory is flimsy. We’re constantly building memories, [but] we’re unreliable,” Mik says. “[Yet these] unreliable documents…will spark a debate or will be talked about by future generations.”
Liana Garcellano was a youth columnist for The Manila Times, a lifestyle writer for various local newspapers thereafter and editor of a business travel magazine in Singapore, where she also taught English, as she eventually did in Indonesia. She returned permanently to Manila during the pandemic.
