By Paula Melizza Valera & Rhine Bernardino
Listening to Sha Supangan’s latest song, Inside Me, stirs a certain longing and desire to break one’s chains and break free. Inside Me is a raw, vulnerable exploration and the motivations behind this desire. The song has been played in BBC Music Introducing Norfolk in September 2022.
“Pulling out the stitches and breaking the seams, showing all my scars and I’m letting them heal” invites the listener to be broken open. “I’ll never change the tide, but I’m done with fighting” in the ethereal chorus felt like a faraway call that beckons one to surrender and heed it. Overall, the song invokes trusting and listening to one’s intuition and enthusiasm, all the time.
Sha Supangan, known by her stage name So Sha, 34, is a rising Filipino musician and DJ currently making the rounds of the London music circuit. Apart from having been featured on BBC Music Introducing, she was one of the recipients of Drake Music’s 2022 Emergent Artist Bursary award aimed at disabled artists in the field of music and technology.
And here’s more: she was introduced by Louis Theroux in a QPCS Summer Festival, she stood next to David Beckham on a Playstation 5 FIFA advert to promote World Cup 2023, and she was handpicked to perform in front of the then Duchess of Cornwall while a student at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance.
Behind her success is a young woman determined to forge her own artistic path, challenging restrictive cultural conventions and opening up to new ideas and opportunities.
A desire to be accepted and appreciated
Sha’s dream of becoming a musician started in the Philippines which she nurtured while working in Singapore, combining events organising, singing and hosting. Yet she found it challenging to break through a rather rigid standard of being an artist in both countries.
Sha says that living in Singapore and the Philippines meant putting in 200% effort in what you do but only getting a little return. “You give your entire being, your soul, your blood, your sweat and tears, you pour and give everything. But there was minimal appreciation or acceptance.”
Music and singing are culturally embedded among Filipinos, observes Sha. But she points out that Filipinos’ idea of “magaling” (excellence) is “limited by the media they consume, the books they read, the films they watch, the people they speak to, the YouTube videos they watch, the Facebook shares that they see. Kumbaga, one is limited by the things one would see, watch and understand.”
Her father’s sudden passing in 2016 left her shaken and distraught. It also forced her to reflect on her life and her dream of becoming an artist. It was a quick decision. She decided to quit her job and within a few hours, she took the leap and enrolled in Shoreditch-based Point Blank Music School.
“It was my dream school for years. I’ve known about them for ages…By September (2016), I was on my way to London with my two suitcases,” she says.
The UK: nurturing creative freedom
Sha currently performs on an online platform where she reaches a variety of audiences right in the middle of her Norwich flat. As an artist, Sha speaks highly of the creative freedom that people enjoy in the UK. One has the freedom to be oneself that it doesn’t occur to people that this freedom is a privilege for someone like her, she says.
“For the most part, I think they live in a society where they know there is space for them, and that they will be able to find it. So they have a different stance and confidence, even in how they move or speak, and relate to people. You observe it. That’s also what I aspire to be, but also trying to come to terms with it. This is all new to me.”
The UK’s multicultural setting also feeds into this freedom. “You have different Indian music, you have people from Iraq and Iran. When you walk, you could hear Carribean music, Nigerian — halo-halo dito, and walang pagalingan ng isang standard. How can you compare those different kinds of music [to say which one is better]? There’s room for you to be yourself here. Your kind of electronic music, your kind of pop, your kind of punk, your kind of rock.”
For instance, she says that the notion of artistic success does not just mean landing a record deal or that being a musician means pursuing only one genre. Artists are free to collaborate with others who have roots from across the world to create something new.
Finding her place and space
Sha thinks that her biggest enemy is her fears. “Ang kalaban ko yung sarili ko, yung takot ko if they see [the imperfections], pagtawanan nila ako. Dala-dala ko pa rin yun. (My enemy is myself. I fear that people will see my imperfections and that they’ll laugh at me. I still carry that). I perform with a knitted pigeon called Nicholas — he’s very sassy, but the audience here, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s so cute!’ If I do that in the Philippines, my God,” she says with a laugh.
Despite Sha’s self-doubts and the chaos and busyness of London, she found people who championed her. People offered her their homes, their resources, or their expertise, not because they were asking for anything in return “but because they believed in me…, that I have something good to offer… they saw the potential in me. In the Philippines, we live through kakilala to get by.”
Sha hopes that her story can inspire other Filipino artists who want to break free from the traditional mould. Her advice? Find online spaces which will nurture their creativity if physically moving to another region or country is not possible.
“Go join community groups, some of them are free. They need to find their interest groups and people, even if they’re not from the same country. You can be proud of your national roots but also find commonality with other people,” she says.
On being authentic
“If you are as you as you can be, there is an invitation here: Can you be brave enough for you to be who you really want to be? If you can, you can find yourself in spaces where you never thought you could be.”
She laments that in the Philippines, it’s much more difficult for people to explore their authentic – and creative – selves, perhaps because life is harder. She has previously tried to conform to the mould, to what would sell in the Philippines, but she felt that her creativity was being stifled.
She also talks about how people measured one’s humanity and personhood. “‘Ano bang pakinabang mo, pakanta-kanta ka diyan? Magkano ba kita mo? (What’s your use, you being a singer? How much do you earn?),’ those are the usual questions, right?”
Back in Singapore, she was head of a department living the Instagram-perfect life: hashtag living my best life, hashtag blessed. But behind closed doors, she would throw a tantrum or cry. Sha says that she is still learning to deal with the hurts from the rejection she experienced and her desire to tap into her Filipino roots as a musician in Britain.
“Initially, I did not want to have a seat at a table or to represent. I did not want to be a token Filipino or a token Asian person. But I grew out of that. It was not something that I forced. I have been told to incorporate Filipino traditional instruments and write in Filipino, but there was still a lot of hurts that have not yet been processed,” she said.
She elaborates that the hurt comes from how she previously thought that there was something fundamentally wrong with her, and she had to modify and shape herself to be tolerated in the Philippines.
But here in the UK, Sha says, “I am not merely tolerated. I am able to grow, connect, expand and shed light into our stories.”
An artist’s imperfect journey
While pleased about her successes, Sha is forthcoming in sharing the challenges she faced as a Filipino artist wanting to explore the creative opportunities that abound here in Britain. She shares that at one point she became homeless. But she turned things around and was even interviewed by the BBC about going sober to improve her mental health and her finances.
She is also not afraid to show that her music equipment may not be the newest or the most sophisticated. Afterall, she was able to record a song which landed on the Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip. The song has then been broadcasted on different streaming platforms globally.
“The gift of experimentation for me is priceless. I did not come here thinking that I wanted to be just as big as Adele. You know that some people know that they were born to be a star. I knew I had something in me, I knew I had something to offer, I knew I had something to say. I know I have a lot of talents that I can combine. Where it was going, I did not know.”
“No, I may not be opening for Steve Aoki here but for me, being able to pay my rent, being able to pay for my council tax, to eat out, support businesses, and have coffee — simple pleasures. That for me isn’t just making big — it’s peace, it’s contentment. It’s more than what I hoped for,” she ends.
About the authors
Paula Valera works as a public health physician-researcher currently based in the Philippines, focussing on disability and mental health systems. Paula earned her master’s degree in Global Mental Health, a joint programme from King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Rhine Bernardino is an artist, independent curator and researcher based mainly between London and Edinburgh, whilst working extensively in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, among others. They hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Film and Audio Visual Communication from the University of the Philippines (Diliman) and MA Fine Art (Sculpture) from the Royal College of Art, for which they were awarded the highly-regarded Abraaj-RCA Innovation Scholarship.
