The Eagle and the Lion

An exhibition charts the ties between East Asia and Latin America, from the colonial era to the new Cold War.

By Tim BrinkhofMarch 10, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• History

• Politics

IN JULY 1595, the San Agustín left Spanish Manila and set sail for Acapulco, Mexico. Nearly five months later, after successfully crossing the Pacific Ocean, the 200-ton vessel ran into a storm off the coast of California and disappeared beneath the waves. Legend has it that the surviving crewmates continued floating southward on a makeshift raft, subsisting on the ship’s dog and, later, the rotting carcass of a whale.

Despite several search attempts, traces of the wreck did not surface until 1940, when archeologists uncovered shards of Chinese porcelain at nearby excavation sites. Had the San Agustín reached its destination, that porcelain would have either been sold to merchants in Mexico City—the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain—or forwarded by way of Veracruz to the European port cities of Seville and Cádiz in Spain and Antwerp, Belgium, alongside silk, ivory, and other precious cargo. For the return journey to the Philippines, the ship would have been loaded not with goods but with currency: silver dollars, mined and minted in Mexico, to feed the insatiable economy of imperial China.

This 15,000-mile Manila galleon trade route was the first truly global mercantile network, connecting Asia with Europe and the Americas. Its legacy—long overshadowed by that of its transatlantic counterpart—is the subject of the exhibition Somos Pacífico. El mundo que emergió del trópico (“We Are the Pacific: The World That Emerged from the Tropics”) at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. Featuring art and artifacts loaned from Singapore, the exhibit traces cultural and commercial connections between East Asia and Latin America, from the Spanish conquests of Mexico and the Philippines to decolonization and beyond.

Like the famous murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco that decorate the Colegio’s interior walls and stairwells—sponsored by the revolutionary government and depicting the country’s history and collective struggles—the curatorial narrative told through Somos Pacífico doubles as a political project of national and international import. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Singapore last year, as well as Singapore’s plans to open a resident embassy in Mexico City in 2026, the exhibit nestles the two countries’ current relationship in a historical context, one that is acquiring new meaning as today’s world order moves toward multipolarity.

Somos Pacífico merges two different exhibits that ran from November 2023 to March 2024 at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and National Gallery, respectively: Manila Galleon: From Asia to the Americas and Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America. The former examined the history, logistics, and cross-cultural impact of the galleon trade while the latter placed modernist artists from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia in dialogue with contemporaries from Mexico and Brazil.

As lead curator and current ACM director Clement Onn emphasizes in an essay written for the Manila Galleon catalog, the trade route connecting Mexico to the Philippines “was the longest passage in the world that was regularly attempted.” Arduous travel conditions—without favorable winds, crossing the Pacific could take up to six months—necessitated state-of-the-art naval engineering, financed and supervised by the Spanish Crown. A scale model of a galleon on display at the Colegio, built in collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico using a 1734 manuscript from Manila titled “Navegacion especulativa y practica,” draws attention to its large size, wide hulls, and deep holds, all of which contributed to this type of vessel’s extraordinary durability and storage capacity.

The cargo transported by the galleons contained a disparate mix of geographically distinct forms, styles, and materials that otherwise never would have come together. Responding to tastes unique to the Mexican market, Chinese porcelain makers exported “tibors”—large, ornate vases like the one that dominates the background of an 1883 portrait of artist and educator Susana Robert de Sánchez Solis—and “temblorosas” (or trembleuses), saucers with small, attached cups used for drinking molten chocolate. A Japanese-style folding screen, produced in Mexico and dated to the 1690s, depicts the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan. Elsewhere, an illustration of the Aztec myth of the founding of Tenochtitlan, featuring a crowned eagle perched atop a flowering nopal cactus, adorns the inlay of a foldable, portable writing desk from the Philippines, a curious contrast with its lion-head legs and other Ming dynasty design elements.

Some imported goods proved so popular that, over time, they became thoroughly embedded in the cultures they infiltrated, their foreign origins no longer remembered. Foods like corn, chilis, mangoes, and coconuts have long defined diets on both sides of the Pacific, despite hailing from one or the other. Pottery workshops in Puebla and Tlaxcala, Mexico, like those in the Dutch city of Delft, adopted Chinese earthenware’s signature white-and-blue color scheme as their own, while Manila shawls—large, silken scarves with vibrant colors, floral and faunal patterns, and knotted fringes, woven in Guangzhou, China, to compete with Kashmiri textiles—were duly incorporated into the traditional dress of Zapotec women, the kind famously worn by Frida Kahlo.

Of all the museums in Mexico City that could have hosted Somos Pacífico, none would have complemented the exhibit better than the Colegio de San Ildefonso. The institution was founded in 1588 as a Jesuit school; the religious order, like the galleon trade itself, connected the very fringes of the Spanish Empire. The museum’s many murals, 34 in total, enter into conversation with paintings from the Tropical portion of the exhibition. The through line of this section is that, despite geographic distance, 20th-century vanguard artists throughout the Global South shared certain aesthetic concerns, informed by comparable climates, histories, and aspirations.

In a presentation delivered at the Colegio, Tropical co-curator Teo Hui Min argued that Mexican muralismo provides a useful lens through which to examine contemporaneous art from East and Southeast Asia. Like Rivera and Orozco, artists such as Victorio Edades (Philippines), Sindoedarsono Soedjojono (Indonesia), and Patrick Ng Kah Onn (Malaysia) sought to construct a new sense of national identity. Artists on both sides of the Pacific deployed elements of abstraction, not out of a desire to emulate Western modernism but in order to blend it with Indigenous imagery. Both saw the world in largely materialist terms, reclaiming racist stereotypes of “lazy natives” and “good savages” while often drawing “forceful attention to the physicality of labor” on which plantation and factory owners depended for their stolen wealth. Both saw a didactic value in art, shunning cultural elitism in favor of a direct appeal to the masses through bold colors, familiar subjects, and popular iconography.

Parallels reveal themselves in creative manifestos from both sides of the Pacific. In 1948, Edades wrote that, in the Philippines, “old feelings of inferiority ingrained for four centuries of Western domination are giving way to pride and self-confidence, to the knowledge that [Filipino artists], by the very difference of their culture, have a unique contribution to give.” A similar sentiment pervades Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1923 “Manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors,” which proudly proclaimed that “our people (especially our Indians) [are] the source of all that is noble toil, and all that is virtue,” and that “the art of the Mexican people is the most important and vital spiritual manifestation in the world today.”

Another recurring theme is mass mobilization and the desire for societal transformation and rejuvenation. Soedjojono, in a 1947 pamphlet titled “We Know Where We Will Bring Indonesian Art,” likened the legacy of European colonialism to “a shipwreck in the ocean, of our people’s struggle in this world,” and took it as his mission “to make the whole society become artistic, to become artistically conscious as Indonesia was before.” Siqueiros, whose manifesto bore the signatures of Rivera, Orozco, and others, expresses a similar vision in more explicitly political terms:

We believe that while our society is in a transitional stage between the destruction of an old order and the introduction of a new order, the creators of beauty must turn their work into clear ideological propaganda for the people, and make art, which at present is mere individualist masturbation, something of beauty, education, and purpose for everyone.

The narrative presented in Somos Pacífico draws on a burgeoning, if still limited, body of scholarship. In some cases, like the sinking of the San Agustín, questions persist because information has been lost or destroyed; in others, because it was never recorded. In his 2024 book The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, historian Diego Javier Luis offered the first attempt to write the history of the 100,000 Asians who arrived in Latin America through the galleon trade. Referred to as “chinos”—an often pejorative label imposed regardless of actual country of origin—most came to the continent as slaves, sailors, or hired laborers, settling everywhere from Mexico and Guatemala to New Orleans. Despite their large numbers and geographic distribution, they are largely absent from colonial records. This is in part because many found it expedient to pass themselves off as Indigenous or mestizo, blending into the preexisting categories that made up New Spain’s social and racial hierarchy. Other forces, however, also contributed to this historical erasure. A 17th-century account of the life of Catarina de San Juan, a “china” slave turned miracle-working nun from Puebla—the largest ever hagiography published in colonial Mexico—was censored by the Inquisition.

Born of the same concerns as The First Asians, Somos Pacífico illustrates the potential of what Onn, in a 2019 essay, referred to as “new art historical approaches for looking at hybrid objects.” By focusing less on where, when, and by whom an artifact was made, and more on its journey through the world and interactions with different cultures, scholars and curators might be able to arrive at a different, more complete understanding of its significance. As director, Onn has reorganized the ACM’s permanent collection display accordingly, grouping items by theme and material as opposed to country and chronology.

The opening of Somos Pacífico, held inside the Colegio’s Anfiteatro Simón Bolivar against the backdrop of Rivera’s 1922 encaustic mural Creation, was a diplomatic event as much as a cultural one. The lineup of speakers included Mexico’s secretary of culture Claudia Curiel de Icaza; Singapore’s acting minister for culture, community, and youth David Neo; and Singapore’s president Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Speakers from both sides of the Pacific stressed their mutual interest in challenging Eurocentric biases—cultural, historical, political, and financial. “Looking at the Pacific,” said Curiel de Icaza, “means questioning the narratives that for centuries were constructed from a single center, and recognizing that modernity also arose in other territories, along other routes, and through other exchanges not always remembered.” Eduardo Vázquez Martín, a poet and the current director of the Colegio, put it more combatively, referring to Somos Pacífico and the international collaboration behind it as yet another sign that the Global South will no longer let itself be pushed around by the Global North.

Bilateral trade between Mexico and Singapore reached $4.7 billion in 2024, a 60 percent increase from the previous year alone. Mexico is the 13th largest economy in the world, and a major agricultural exporter; Singapore is the 27th, and one of the world’s leading financial hubs, alongside London and New York. To Singapore, Mexico represents a gateway to the Americas, one whose electronics and automotive industries are expected to be at the center of a nearshoring boom as the United States decouples from China. To Mexico, Singapore offers an opportunity to escape the Trump-shaped shadow of Washington, DC, whose steadfast opposition to the progressive reforms of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party (her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, nationalized the country’s lithium reserves) is now manifesting as threats of open invasion.

The historical narrative proffered by Somos Pacífico and The First Asians in the Americas, based on meticulous scholarship, seeks to revise our understanding of center and periphery in the Spanish colonial world by reconstructing dispersed networks of power, people, and commerce. To the political elites orbiting Somos Pacífico, the exhibition functions as a mirror to their geopolitical aspirations in the present. This account of the past, which highlights the relations between far-flung points in the Global South over their respective connections to the colonial hegemon, is a useful tool as they seek to reimagine the balance of power and trade in the context of an upended global order in which the United States and China are increasingly unpredictable and regionally aggressive.

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Installation view, Somos Pacífico, 2025–26. Colegio de San Ildefonso. Courtesy Asian Civilisations Museum.