Super Robot – Suffer Reboot by Toym Imao

Regalado, Vhon Jhon Oliver P.                                                        May 17, 2018

2015-09206, BS Civil Engineering                                 Sir Clod Marlan Krister Yambao

Art Studies 2 THV 11:30am-1:00pm

Super Robot – Suffer Reboot

        “Super Robot – Suffer Reboot” is the title given to the series of three sculptures created by the Filipino artist Toym Imao. The sculptures were made in the span of three years, specifically from 2014 to 2016. Each sculpture was inspired         by a particular Japanese animated television series which were prominent in the Philippines in the 1970s. The sculptures were made to symbolize the sufferings and treacheries experienced by Filipinos, with an accentuation towards the season of martial law amid Ferdinand Marcos' administration, when numerous Japanese mecha enlivened television series wound up famous among Filipino kids. Super Robot - Suffer Reboot is the aggregate name for three separate sculptures. The names of each sculpture are alliterations - a stylistic literary device which is identified by the repetition of the same letter sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase.

        Toym Leon Imao was born in 1968, only four years before President Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed Martial Law in the Philippines. There were few viewing channels in 1970s television, having just five communicate channels to browse. Amid this time, Toym and his kin were eager aficionados of week after week Japanese kid's shows, the super robot cartoon Voltes V and Mazinger Z. Be that as it may, with just four episodes left before the finale of Voltes V, the cartoon were prohibited from communicated because of its asserted "unnecessary viciousness", leaving its young fans crushed and upset.

Presently, just about four decades later, Toym utilized that underlying sting of outrage experienced amid the Marcos years to make this installation work. This craftsmanship installation was the result from the beloved memory and experience of the craftsman, molded and shaped with scholarly education in architecture and fine arts, utilized with the meticulousness of expert practice, and propelled by the heroes and standards of history, and the character and gravitas of open workmanship.

“Last, Lost, Lust for Four Forgotten Episodes”, first of Imao’s “Super Robot-Suffer Reboot Series”, was created in September of 2014. President Marcos is portrayed as the Boazanian Skull with Horns starship - the famous "Sky Rook." The horns are the adapted front end of an M16 assault rifle. The wings depend on the 1960s T-28 planes, nicknamed the tora toras, which were widely utilized as a part of counterinsurgency strafing activities in the '70s and amid the few overthrow endeavors against President Cory Aquino in the mid-'80s.

On the peak of the head is a portrayal of four structures: at the front is Malacañang, on its sides are the Batasang Pambansa and the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and at the back is the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

The center zone is populated by portrayals of industrialization by means of various smokestacks. These notable structures related with the late tyrant, each having their own particular exceptional accounts on how the state has appropriated their assets of what the Marcos imagines as his "New Society."

The top part delineates the exemplary fight pursued amongst good and malevolence, a heavenly attendant against the devil enlivened by the Ginebra San Miguel bottle workmanship. Lead celestial host Michael wears a Voltes V-propelled protective armor and draws his laser sword against a four-armored portrayal of a mob police and the Constabulary, equipped with a metal truncheon and a .45-gauge gun, with antiriot shields as his wings.

The whole sculptural totem outwardly recommends a kind of holy place statuary structure like a carroza, lit by a collection of Molotov bombs. It consolidates characters from the "Voltes V" arrangement as portrayal of the Philippine experience under martial law.