It is the same with the Sys who were Chinese immigrants who did very well in the country and made the Philippines their home. I went to study abroad but I always came back.”

My father was buried here, my mother was buried here. “My father never talked of going back to Spain. Without really thinking about it there was mutual sympathy that we are doing well in our adopted country,” he says. “I said last night (at the unveiling of the mural) and I’m going to repeat it: We are sons of immigrants. It is, Sanso says, a “beautiful, beautiful, cloudless friendship.”īut how did a “Kastila” and an “Intsik” ever bond and form a most enduring friendship? Known to only perhaps but a few until recently, Henry Sy Sr., founder of the SM Group, and Sanso were childhood friends. In the artist’s own words, the artwork was inspired by no less than water, past summers, secret gardens, landscapes and seascapes, people and places and colors of the currents of life.īut how Sanso’s largest mural came to be mounted at what is now the largest convention center in the country beside Asia’s largest mall is the more interesting story.

The mural “Tides of Fortune,” at 6.5 x 2.5 meters and by far Sanso’s largest artwork, is reflective of how life changes with the seasons. “In Brittany (also a seaside town in Northeastern France),” writes Sanso in his column in The STAR on the day his mural was unveiled at the grand opening of the convention center, “you can revisit the same spot again and again and find an ever-changing landscape.” When you gaze at Juvenal Sanso’s mural mounted on the wall of the lobby of the newly inaugurated SMX Convention Center beside the SM Mall of Asia, you stare at an unembellished, almost naked truth about living in a country surrounded by water: life is fluid, always changing, much like the advancing or receding tides at sea that move in synch with the cyclic rising and falling of the oceans.

Pirates tides of fortune first look