Rice paddy mural

CEBU, Philippines - Even the rice paddy can turn up an art masterpiece. Recently, the Philippine Rice Institute or PhilRice made a tribute to President Rodrigo Duterte and Vice President Leni Robredo, via a paddy art featuring the two officials' faces laid out side by side.The artwork is titled "Rice up Pilipinas." Some people doubt the authenticity of the photo of the paddy art posted in the social media. But the PhilRice say that the photo had not undergone any kind of photo editing. PhilRice further clarified that they used two types of rice varieties manually transplanted by some 30 staff members.

The "Rice up Pilipinas" is located at the Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija.

Three weeks ago, PhilRice also posted on social media another paddy art featuring Duterte's face beside his popular surname contraction "Du30." This paddy art is located at the Palayabangan Field along Biotech Road at the University of the Philippines Los Baños campus belt.

Earlier, in March, PhilRice also launched a rice paddy art with the depiction of celebrities Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza, popularly known as AlDub. The art work was aimed at enticing millennials to get engaged in farming.

Paddy Art, or what the Japanese call 'Tanbo Art', is the art of creating gigantic pictures on rice paddies using different varieties and colors of rice plants. It is said to have started in the year 1993 in Inakadate village in Japan. The art form was supposed to reignite the dwindling interest in rice farming among the village population.  Inakadate used to be a flourishing rice plantation some 2,000 years ago.

The Inakadate villagers started the rice paddy mural with the image of Mount Iwaki, which was the constant design for the first nine years. By 2002, the design already had more intricate details added. At present, images of Japanese legends and some important icons in history such as Napoleon Bonaparte have been subjects in tanbo-making.

The popularity of the art form has even prompted some companies in Japan to use it as an advertising tool. It has also influenced other rice-planting countries in Asia like Thailand, Korea, and the Philippines to use the rice paddy art to promote certain advocacies or bring up certain public issues.

It has to be made clear, however, that the rice paddy art is not necessarily in the league of the so-called 'crop circles' in Europe consisting of symmetrical circular patterns that mysteriously appear in barley fields, creating a design. The 'crop circles' phenomenon first occurred in 1978, drawing widespread curiosity and public attention that it has even encouraged a number of alien hoaxes.

Rice paddy mural is an art form, the product of human creativity and imagination. It is not some mysterious occurrence. (FREEMAN)