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Jose John Santos III (b.1970) Untitled signed and dated 2002 (lower right) oil on canvas 24”x 20” (61 cm x 51 cm) One of the foremost mid-career artists working today, Jose John Santos III is an iconoclast, not settling on a particular visual idiom but instead looking into different approaches to address urgent concerns. But he does work in phases, and this painting belongs to a relatively early period in which Santos explored the dichotomy of the East and the West. In this work, a man — a colonial flaneur — garbed in a suit balances himself by a doorway as a woman in a Filipiniana props herself by an armrest. Though they share the same pictorial space, they don’t necessarily belong to the same scene. The lamppost, as an extension of this point, appears to be the third element. The juxtaposition of the man and the woman, however, is pivotal to the narrative content: they expectantly wait for each other but seem to be taking their time. This open-endedness allows Santos to enter history through imaginative speculation. For instance, a question emerges: to what extent colonialism was propagated through collaboration and co-optation? Regardless of the possible answer, what Santos foregrounds through this masterful work is the complexity of motivation in people’s allegiance and refusal. 129