{m} Artist interview:

Champoy.

written by Jennifer Co

We are continuing to hurtle towards our unknown futures, and it seems we’ve been made to console and brace ourselves for still more in the same breath. It is under all of this and a dusty blue 6:30 pm sky that {m}aganda Magazine and creator and teacher Champoy Lim made our way onto zoom for our first ever artist spotlight. 

Champoy, a current Berkeley MFA student, was born and raised in Bukidnon of Mindanao. He begins by acknowledging the Ohlone people whose land Berkeley’s institution is on, and welcomes us into conversation from the black and white lens of his video feed. There’s an unspoken acknowledgement of the circumstances we are in, of the world in which we are making space to connect with each other. But the complexity of the moment is one that he’s been tasked to hold from even a young age. Champoy talks about his upbringing in Camp Philips, a westernized plantation in the province of Bukidnon. “I just remember walking and running with our friends and neighbors or riding on our bikes and just trying to find when these fields would end... but it was just a vast ocean of pineapple,” he says, in recounting the vivid imagery of playing and wandering in the seemingly limitless expanse; named after Mark Phillips, an American war hero. He notes how much contrast it held to the rural area where his grandmother lived, and still more to the strict social interactions between neighborhood kids he sees as a parent in America, especially during quarantine. But Champoy honors the sensitivity that all this has instilled in him: “I’m fortunate in that sense, to be able to cross these worlds.”

It is a sensitivity that he also accredits to the political environment of his childhood, just before the EDSA revolution. “There was something in the air,” he says, while also acknowledging the suppression of knowledge to him as a kid. “That’s kind of a cultural thing… maybe generational or religious,” he says, describing the tension of growing up at that time: “you’re never fully engaged into the reality that you are aware of but can’t seem to contextualize, I guess.” 

I think about all of us in our corners of the world, learning and unlearning what is becoming an increasingly bigger picture, and can’t help but feel that same tension. But Champoy does not shy away from the reclamation of this circumstance. “In my artwork I take out from a lot of these places, which is in some ways a kind of healing...But in a way I should be the one that’s responsible for that… knowing all of these things,” and from my side of the screen I am moved by the consolation of self alongside the call to uphold this experience for the next. Champoy remarks at the huge fraction of his upbringing that he was able to learn about only after enrolling into UC Berkeley, which poses an interesting question in our endeavours for bigger pictures: who has the knowledge, and why?

Champoy Lim, born Janeil Sumampong Lim, studied in the University of San Carlos, Cebu, as an advertising major; admittedly out of an evasion for mathematics. “Though the irony is that my dad was a math teacher before being an engineer,” he jokes. He describes the impulsive nature of his decision to come to the states: “there’s something about leaving the country that people really aspire to, and I want to say that I was never really attracted to that concept.” But he also acknowledges that he was not fully exempt from romanticising his move, “I was reading a lot of beat poetry at the time,” he laughs, “but this is a layer of colonization that I had to overcome,” be it in family or religion or the culture, “my choice of being here and just staying… I feel like that was more about me choosing this as a way to find a full expression of myself” that he knew he wouldn’t attain in the Philippines. “I felt that I already had a sense of who I would be if I stayed,” he says. “This is where I can do my work, the work I’m intended to do as an artist, as a person,” and he references the blood memory of our ancestors present in our own physical bodies, “I felt like my body could not move, when I suppose it was my time to go.”

In his time in LA before being admitted into Berkeley, he describes the deep sense of community he experienced in finding his footing in the US, calling it a “manifestation of the notion of kapwa, seeing yourself in the other,” and in a broader sense, the realization of what questions we must ask ourselves in forming community in this country: “how do we play out and position ourselves to counter, in a way, the empire of this colonial project that is the United States?”

Even in regards to the current discourse over filipinx versus filipino or filipina terminology, Champoy emphasizes the preservation of kapwa: “these are all just signifiers, in the end it’s just about finding each other.

But Champoy talks about this quality of community as something transcendent as much as it can be something to surmount as he transitioned from working textiles and office jobs into formally pursuing art. He references the feeling of indebtment, utang na loob, he had to counter in order to leave the opportunities that he knew had been gifted to him. “I just felt like I needed to do something more... How do you get up and keep working if you’re rotting inside?” and he recounts his vow to never work in an office again.

Champoy has since upheld that vow to himself, but the notions of kapwa and holding complexity has cemented itself into his current practice as both an artist and teacher. “Even until now, I still don’t see myself as an academic,” he admits, “am I just perpetuating this ‘art world’ that I’m also commenting about? It’s tricky… But I still think it’s an important space to occupy and be present in. The symbolic significance of being someone like me and taking up space and engaging with it,” especially in an institution like UC Berkeley. 

There is an urgency and significance to this moment that is specific to our time here alone. “The paradigm of how academia has been working... the white supremacist structures that have held it in place are shifting, and it’s important to really be there, and be part of the conversations being made,” he says. He goes on to talk about the critical feeling of being a fish out of water in these systems: “having that vulnerability, and really finding the strength within that knowing that you carry community with you. That kapwa, knowing I’m not just here for me.” As a teacher, Champoy lives this in his view of the classroom: “I’m always learning. The teaching hierarchies are so normalized, the teacher being the expert. But I try to be more of a facilitator.” He tells us that half the time it’s just a matter of being present, “meeting any student and engaging with them in a way that’s generative for them,” he continues, “it’s just learning how to be in relationship, and with anybody.”

In what inspires his art, he talks about assessing “what the dominant narratives are, and how do I counter them?” Something that he finds himself situated right in the middle of as a student at Berkeley. “Who holds all the knowledge, even the knowledge of our people. Who are the people between the knowledge and you? These institutions,” he answers, recalling a textbook on Camp Phillips and Bukidnon that only existed in UC Berkeley’s libraries. “I am crossing worlds where I’m never fully in both,” he says, but later continues, “I sit with the contradictions of this. Because there is a lot. This concept of being consistent. It’s a professionalism that I feel I’m always trying to be good at evading.”