WHY PINK?
 

PINK up the pieces? Pink positively? What do we mean, please?

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Let's Pink Up the Pieces! (Pinking Positively) is a concept for a 2022 pre-general-election group show on the pages of diskurso art magazine, dedicated to the color pink. It is also a show concept dedicated to things positive (or to positive messages accompanying negative critiques whenever present).

 

But, again, why pink? Well, others in the present did assign themselves the role of presenter of all things red or black from either the past, the recent past or the present (as well as the foreseeable future). Our Let's Pink Up the Pieces! group assigned themselves another equally important role, that of being presenters of positivity through that inarguably lighter color, pink.

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But why, indeed, pink? Why not pale yellow? You could say the show also aims, as per the times, to reference the Leni Robredo pink movement, or perhaps ironically what may have seemed as Bongbong Marcos' favorite dress shirt color. Or even the pinkos (socialists) in our midst who survived the past and present red-baiting years. Or, being in an election year, is it here to solicit politeness or sensitivity towards each other in what we hope would be a new era of post-toxicity? Or is it to campaign for sweetness amidst everybody's ongoing harshness on the Internet? Or, in the wake of a receding macho government, to scream for the feminine in each and everyone of us, even to take pride in things feminine as well as female instead of being apologetic about their visibility in society? Pink, however, has almost always been worn without regard to gender, thus already feminist by itself (the Nazis aside).

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Now, many would aver that the recent and past have been dark. But should that be the case, or not, we still must not lose sight of any impending hope, instead continue to pray for rosy (or rosier) times. After all, didn't Cimabue and Duccio give us that common habit of theirs of dressing the Christ child in pink, at the same time that Raphael let this same child hold a pink flower?

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We can go on and on about the history of pink. But be assured that this show is not aiming to be political, at least not overtly (not overtly, in cognizance of the semiotic principle that says we cannot escape the politics in anything, however much we wish to). Or, perhaps it is very much overtly political. For perhaps it is raising a middle finger to the Nazis' limiting usage of the color merely for a ludicrous and despicable pink triangle. A show against rightism, then, should that be the common preferred reading here.