Jeanne F. Jalandoni
Happy Birthday, 2019
Oil on canvas, rice noodle plastic sewn to jean, fabric, cotton, trimming, fringe, fondant
Courtesy of the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

Jalandoni highlights the cultural and personal histories that enrich the Filipino diaspora. In this artwork, she reacts to the Boxer Codex. Produced anonymously in Manila during the late 1700s, the Codex describes the people and customs of several different Asian countries. It includes fifteen pictures of people from the Philippines in traditional costumes. Jalandoni responds by foregrounding her existence as an individual person, not a costumed stereotype.

In Happy Birthday she is celebrating her first birthday. The rice noodle packet alludes to the pancit traditionally eaten on Filipino birthdays to symbolise a wish for a long healthy life. The patterned cloth around the edges of the picture resembles the clothing she wore as a child. Through these references to the tactile realities of her own life (clothing, food, aging, family) the artist reveals her Filipina American reality with personal nuances that were unavailable to the authors of both the Boxer Codex and Filipinos, an American nonfiction book that, like the Codex, was created to explain Filipinos to a non-Filipino audience.