Betis artist starts Huk monument in Pampanga
MAQUETTE A monument for peasant guerillas who fought the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II is shaping up in the woodcarving district of Betis in Guagua town, Pampanga through this maquette, or a small clay study or model, by young artist Josef Andre “Totek” Layug. TONETTE T. OREJAS
GUAGUA, PAMPANGA—A monument for Luis Taruc and other peasant guerrillas is taking shape in the woodcarving district of Betis of this town in Pampanga province in time for its unveiling in San Luis town by October this year.
Josef Andre “Totek” Canasa Layug, a local woodcarving artist, has finished the clay maquette, a small model or third study of the monument last Thursday.
Commissioned by a native of San Luis, businessman Abel Manliclic, the trio of life-sized figures are to be sculpted using concrete. It may be the first Huk monument in the country.
Resistance movement
It will feature the images of the late Taruc and living guerrillas Praxedes Clarin and Antonio Sumang as representatives of those who joined the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Hukbalahap), which was touted to have waged the country’s staunchest peasant-based resistance movement against the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II (WWII).
“While growing up, I learned that Huks and non-Huks in our town made many sacrifices at the cost of their lives and their families,” said Manliclic in a phone interview on Friday. “The monument is a humble way of honoring and remembering them.”
Clarin and Sumang were both in their teens when recruited by Taruc, a Huk supremo. Clarin and Sumang, now both in their 80s and still living in San Luis town, are still strong in old age, according to Layug, 27, and the youngest son of ecclesiastical sculptor Wilfredo Tadeo Layug.
Homecoming
The younger Layug said the monument will be installed sometime in October at Memorial Garden of Peace in San Luis, the hometown of Taruc and where the Center for Kapampangan Studies reinterred the ashes of Taruc in 2018, or 13 years after his death in 2005 at 91 years old. Taruc’s remains were exhumed from Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina City in June 2018, cremated and brought to Pampanga for what the late National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose called as a “homecoming.”
The reinterment rites happened after the National Historical Commission of the Philippines installed a marker recognizing Taruc and the Huks in 2017 as heroes.
Taruc joined the Socialist Party of the Philippines before it merged with the 1930 Communist Party of the Philippines at the outbreak of WWII. The Huk guerrillas fought the abuses and cruelty of the Japanese Army, war records in the care of the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office showed.
Taruc sought for and won government pensions for the Huk guerrillas, saying they had liberated many areas in Luzon and the Visayas before United States forces returned to force the Japanese Imperial Army out of the country. INQ
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