1

10. 2011, “Expo Art: Indonesian Art and International Exhibition” in Serenella
Ciclitira, ed., Indonesian Eye, Contemporary Indonesian Art, SKIRA.

EXPO ART: INDONESIAN ART and INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

Susan Ingham,
March 2011.

Indonesian modern and contemporary art was barely known outside Indonesia before the
1990s while their traditional arts, historic crafts and sculpture, gamelan music, the wayang
shadow plays and batik received enthusiastic support when exhibited abroad. In the 1950s
and 60s a few modern artists received grants and travelled outside Indonesia to exhibit in
Europe and America, but their work was rarely seen in major art venues. One unusual
example of this was Affandi, perhaps the most famous Indonesian artist at the time, who,
with other artists, presented Indonesian painting at the Bienal of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1953
and went on to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1954 where he received a prize.1 His
experience remained unique for some 40 years until Heri Dono was invited to exhibit in the
Venice Biennale in 2003. Two elements combined to encourage the exposure of Indonesian
modern and contemporary art outside Indonesia. The first was a major theoretical shift in
Western perceptions of non European art and the second was an environment inside
Indonesia which was not conducive to the exhibition of critically edged, experimental art.

Until the late 20th century Asian modern art was generally treated as a peripheral copy of the
Modernist original that, it was presumed, was a European invention. It was considered a
pastiche rather than a valid interpretation, a perspective that was reinforced by residual
colonial attitudes. The first major exhibition of Indonesian modern art, a travelling exhibition
organized by the Festival of Indonesia in 1990, had difficulty finding galleries and museums
in the United States that were willing to be venues for the exhibition and in two cities the
works were shown in anthropological museums. According to Joseph Fischer who co curated
the exhibition, Modern Indonesian art: three generations of tradition and change, 1945-
1990, this was in part “.... a reflection in such institutions of the lack of any real experience
with anything modern from Indonesia or from other Asian countries except Japan”.2 The
Indonesian curator and art historian, Dwi Marianto, had a similar experience when the
exhibition was mounted in Amsterdam in 1993 by the Gate Foundation. The Dutch curators
 2

rejected some of the paintings as ‘mere copies’ of European Surrealism when the Indonesian
artists had reinterpreted a surreal style to express a sense of psychological tension and
alienation in their own society.3

But the tide was changing. From the 1980s onwards a number of European and American
cultural institutions interested in exhibiting non-Western art began to reposition their
curatorial strategies, influenced by the postcolonial theories of such writers as Edward Said
and Homi Bhabha. Said used the term, ‘Orientalism’, to describe the way in which non-
Western cultures were interpreted, stating that it was “….a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” He used Michel Foucault’s concept of a
discourse, a system of power relations linked to language and knowledge, to define the
amalgamation of ideas that constitute orientalizing.4. More importantly, Said questioned the
Eurocentric view of the Orient that perceived Euro-America as the centre and Asia,
(including Indonesia) the periphery. Homi Bhabha, in his work, The Location of Culture,
carried Said’s project further by indicating that Occidental and Oriental, colonizer and
colonized, were not fixed positions and that a process of hybridization destabilizes the
concept of a ‘homogenizing force’. The process he called ‘mimicry’ opened the possibility
that a colonized culture could translate the dominant culture into innovative forms that
constituted a ‘third space’ of cultural resistance. 5

Between the Primitivism exhibition curated by William Rubin in 1984 at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, and the exhibition, Magiciens de la Terre, organized by Jean-Hubert
Matin at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris in 1989, there was a major shift in perspectives.
In the 1984 exhibition non European objects were treated as primitive artefacts for Western
modern art to plunder as a source of inspiration, but by 1989, Martin was seeking to exhibit
Western and non Western art on equal terms. Both exhibitions provoked considerable debate
and new ideas about non European art were aired. The criterion for Martin’s selection was
that the art be connected to some perceived authentic culture and, although a problematic
concept, the international survey exhibitions of non European art that followed in the 1990s
continued this preference. There were contradictory forces in operation. On the one hand
selecting art that was connected to its origins recognized cultural diversity, although it
reiterated the Western fascination with the exotic, while on the other hand, the demands of
global display tended to homogenize the art and obscure local character. Local references
may require explanation or be ‘lost in translation’, as Asmudjo Irianto indicated when writing
in connection with the Pancaroba Indonesia exhibition held in Oakland, California in 1999.
 3

He wrote, “Most works represent a narrative of social tragedy and have many layers of other
hidden meanings; they represent specific problems and particular iconographies that are
unfamiliar to American audiences, and which can only be understood through a knowledge of
local conditions in Indonesia - and not only of Indonesia’s social, cultural and political
milieu, but also its art world.6

International survey exhibitions, or biennales as they came to be known, whether they were
held every two years or more, were the most visible form globalization in the arts. More than
just art, they served political and economic agendas and they were expected to grease the
diplomatic channels between nations. The Venice Biennale, the first and oldest, was founded
as part of the ceremonies marking the unification of Italy and to attract tourists to finance
restoration projects for the city. More recently, Brisbane in Australia and Fukuoka in Japan
sought to raise their profile and participate in the Asian economic boom of the 1990s by
holding major art shows. The Asia-Pacific-Triennial mounted in the Queensland Art Gallery,
Brisbane, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Show (later a triennial), were among the first survey
exhibitions to show contemporary Indonesian artists. By the end of the 1990s a remarkable
number of biennales were flourishing outside Europe and America. A common aim was to
blur ‘distinctions between center and margin’ and ‘break from the past of discrimination and
exclusivity’ in relation to the West, as a statement from the Gwangju Biennale held in South
Korea declared.7

Where content was concerned, there was a marked preference for art addressing
socio/political issues in the work selected. Caroline Turner, co-founder of the Asia-Pacific
Triennial project and a selector of Indonesian art, said, “I would argue that much of the most
interesting art that is coming out of these countries deals with issues that are very much
connected to changes taking place in these societies”.8 Biennales favoured art that made a
statement and provided a spectacle with a strong element of entertainment to attract the
general public. Installations outweighed traditional art forms or two dimensional works on a
wall, although paintings were not excluded. Melissa Chiu, Museum Director at the New
York Asia Society, wrote that artists working in local artistic traditions were “….frequently
overlooked by international curators interested almost exclusively in artists working in
experimental media, which matched their own ideas of more progressive contemporary art”.9
As well as having socio/political content and working with experimental media, artists
needed certain skills in navigating international artistic protocols such as making submissions
 4

or addressing a curatorial brief. They needed to be free to travel to take up residencies or to

A small number of Indonesian artists met these criteria, best known amongst whom were
Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto, Arahmaiani, Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo.
Others included FX Harsono, Moelyono, Agus Suwage, Tisna Sanjaya, Krisna Murti and
Marintan Sirait, although Marintan initially was identified as German.10. Many were also
painters, but it was their installations and performance art addressing Indonesian issues that
was particularly sought. Heri made a series of installations and paintings that expressed
criticism of the Suharto regime and the repressive society it had produced. He regularly used
a variety of media and technological scrap, creating grotesque figures based on the wayang in
a playful manner that disguised his criticism of the regime which, if it had been overt, would
be have been dangerous. Dadang referred to victims of repression under the regime, both
recently and in the past, and particularly ethnically Chinese Indonesians like himself, who
have been targeted and persecuted. His installations have varied from piles of heads to full
sized figures in terracotta which he often accompanies with a performance. Arahmaiani,
primarily a performance artist, addressed feminist arguments familiar to biennale selectors,
she alone raising issues in her work concerning the patriarchal nature of the predominantly
Muslim/Javanese society. Nindityo and his wife, Mella, focused on issues of culture. For
more than ten years Nindityo explored the significance of the konde, the elaborate Javanese
hairpiece that is an indication of status, while Mella developed the jilbab, or headscarf, into a
series of floor length body coverings in media from frog skins to canvas tents that raised
issues of gender and ethnicity.

All five artists became part of the international art circuit in the 1990s to such a degree they
were considered expatriates at home. The introduction to the catalogue for Dadang’s first
exhibition in Indonesia since 1995 said: “The works of these three visual artists (Heri Dono,
Eddie Hara and Dadang Christanto) are more recognised within the global art circle than in
their own country. This is because they exhibit their works more frequently in foreign
countries, or also because they happen to reside abroad more often.”11 Contacts led to
referrals, as when the curator, Jim Supangkat, selected Dadang for the Havana Bienal in
Cuba in 1994. Dadang met Apinan Poshyananda there who then selected him for exhibition
in the New York Asia Society’s Tradition and Tensions exhibition in 1996. Such exposure
validated their work and these few artists were repeatedly selected and referred through the
power lines of the art world until they became globe-trotting art stars.
 5

While their work coincided with the curatorial preferences of the international selectors and
was understood in the context of biennales, at home the environment was not conducive to
critically edged, experimental art and they received little support until Reformasi and the
downfall of President Suharto in 1998. The Suharto regime, which had been in power since
1965, had become increasingly authoritarian and had a history of repressing dissent,
sometimes forcibly, as with the imprisonment of writers such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer and
artists such as Hendra Gunawan. Student activism was quashed in the 1970s and politics
banned from campus life under the NKK program, or ‘the normalization of campus life’,12
yet against this repression there was an increasing access to global information through
television and the media and, by the 1990s, the Internet.13 Teaching in the tertiary art
institutions in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Jakarta remained conservative but there were
protests from art students against the general predominance of conventional painting. In
1974 FX Harsono was expelled from his art institution, ASRI,14 in Yogyakata, for being part
of Desember Hitam or Black December protest against prizes in the Jakarta National Biennial
of Painting being awarded to conservative work. Nearly twenty years later Dadang
Christanto and Heri Dono were amongst those protesting restrictions on entry to the
Yogyakarta Biennale that similarly favoured established painters. They held art events on the
streets and in the railway yards in 1992, Heri performing with grave diggers from the
cemetery in a work titled Kuda Binal, or Wild Horse, wild, or binal being a word play on
biennale.

The regime upheld the traditional arts and provided little if any support for modern art. Even
today Indonesia does not have a public museum and exhibition space for modern and
contemporary art in the manner, for example, of its closest neighbours, Singapore and
Malaysia.15 The outlet for modern art was through the increasing number of commercial art
galleries but the market favoured non contentious, decorative and abstract painting rather
than installations or experimental work. It was in response to the lack of public infrastructure
or support from the commercial gallery system that Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo
founded the Cemeti art gallery in Yogyakarta in 1988 for the exhibition and sale of
contemporary experimental art. Heri Dono was the first artist to hold a solo exhibition there.
Cemeti was seen as an alternative to the mainstream art galleries and was the first port of call
for visiting curators selecting artists for international survey exhibitions. By the late 1990s it
had become a gatekeeper for contemporary Indonesian art and a launching pad for artists’
careers, including their own.
 6

Another facilitator in the process of introducing Indonesian art to global exhibition was the
artist turned curator, Jim Supangkat. His curatorial career began in 1992 as a consultant to
the Japan Foundation for their exhibition, New Art from Southeast Asia and he effectively
became the writer, curator and historian for the Indonesian participants in biennales and
survey exhibitions around the world. According to Supangkat, Japanese and Australian
exhibitions “….started us thinking, here in Indonesia, who are we? It’s the first time we
encountered the so-called art world and started to understand art discourse. It is from that I
developed the tools to debate Indonesian art.”16 The lack of public infrastructure for modern
art or curatorial training in Indonesia contributed to Supangkat’s lone status in the 1990s and
he became the public face of Indonesian contemporary art in international conferences,
seminars and symposiums.

This local/global exchange has increased the understanding of Indonesia art and culture
outside, and raised the profile of contemporary art inside, Indonesia. There are though,
attendant problems, not least among them being the repeated selection of these same artists
while other Indonesian art rarely sees the light of day in global exhibitions. The modernist
painters, so successful in the local art market, and traditional arts and crafts tend not to be
selected. It seemed biennales incorporated traditional art only when it was transformed by
contemporary practice, as, for example, with Heri Dono’s use of the wayang. Tradition tends
to be associated with repetition while contemporary art was associated with invention and
experimentation.17 The art of activist youth and collective groups, so prevalent in Indonesia,
is also rarely seen in international survey exhibitions. Multimedia community events are
difficult to stage within the format of a static, large scale exhibition and, when shown, can
appear dry documentation drained of energy.18

Biennales have been criticized for these exclusions and the tendency towards a homogenous
contemporary art form with the same artists and curators forming an international club.
These criticisms must be balanced against the opportunity to give global exposure to local
issues and increased international appreciation and understanding of diverse cultures.

1
As reported by Claire Holt, in, Art in Indonesia: continuities and change, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press,
1967, pp.321-322. Claire Holt and the Indonesian Studies group at Cornell University were active in gaining
some grants for Indonesian modern artists in the 1960s. These seemed to gain support on the basis they
encouraged anti Communist sentiments during the Cold War.
 7

2
Joseph Fischer, ed., 1990, Modern Indonesian art: three generations of tradition and change, 1945-1990,
Jakarta, New York, Introduction, p.12.
3
Marianto, Martinus Dwi, 1995, Surrealist painting in Yogyakarta, University of Wollongong PhD thesis,
unpublished version, pp. 11 - 13.
4
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Penguin, 1995.
5
Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1994.
6
The Pancaroba Indonesia exhibition was held in 1999 at the Pacific Bridge Contemporary Southeast Asian
Art gallery in Oakland, California. The quotation is from an article by Asmudjo Jono Irianto titled, “An
Unsettled Season, political art of Indonesia”, Art AsiaPacific, no. 28, 2000, p.83.
7
See http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/gwangju/english.htm accessed 26/02/07, and also the websites of
the Fukuoka Triennial and Shanghai Biennale, accessed 08/07/05.
8
Caroline Turner, then Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, co-founder of the Asia-Pacific Triennial
Project and a selector of Indonesian art for the Asia-Pacific Triennial, interviewed by Jennifer Moran for
Pandanus Books, Newsletter, Spring 2005, issue 6, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The
Australian National University, for the publication of the book, Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in
Asia and the Pacific, edited by Caroline Turner.
9
Melissa Chiu, Museum Director and Curator for Contemporary Asian and Asian-American art, Asia Society,
New York, “Asian Contemporary Art: An Introduction”, c. Oxford University Press, 2005, Grove Art Online,
http://www.groveart.com/grove-owned/art/asiancontintro.html accessed 30/04/07.
10
Eventually the effects of globalization were recognized in identifying artist’s country of origin. Both Mella
Jaarsma, Dutch – born and educated, and Marintan Serait of German-Indonesian parentage, live permanently in
Indonesia and make work that is identified as Indonesian.
This is not intended to be a comprehensive list and, for example, certain Balinese artists were also selected for
different exhibitions.
11
Bentara Budaya administration introduction for the catalogue of the exhibition by Dadang Christanto, titled
Kengerian tak Terucapkan, The Unspeakable Horror, curated by Hendro Wiyanto in 2002 at the Bentara
Budaya exhibition space, Jakarta, July 4 – 14, p 23.
12
NKK, Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus, or the normalization of campus life, required students to concentrate
on reading, writing and conducting research, according to the Minister of Education and Culture, Daoed Joesoef.
Badan Koordinasi Kemahasiswaan or bodies for the co-ordination of student affairs, known as BKK, enforced
the policy with censorship, harassment and informers on campus.
13
Public access through Warnet or Internet cafes was provided in Yogyakarta, for example, by September 1996,
see Hill David T and Sen Krishna, 1997 "Wiring the Warung to Global Gateways", Indonesia 63 1997, p. 68.
14
ASRI, Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, the Indonesian Art Academy in Yogyakarta was later renamed Institut
Seni Indonesia or ISI, the Indonesian Art Institute. The other two major art academies are the Fine Arts
department of Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung Technological Institute, or ITB, and the Institut Kesenian
Jakarta, Jakarta Art Institute or IKJ, part of the complex that includes the TIM culture center in Jakarta.
15
The Galeri Nasional Indonesia is a space for hire. It holds exhibitions financed by private interests and sells
the work from the floor. The Singapore Art Museum, in contrast, aims to be a repository for Southeast Asian art
and part of the international art circuit. It has held significant exhibitions of Indonesian art history as well as
solo shows of Indonesian artists.
16
Supangkat, interview, Bandung, 24/04/2005.
17
The innovative batik art of Brahma Tirta Sari, for example, was seen in the Asia-Pacific Triennial, APT/3 in
1999 but on the whole their work is shown in media specific exhibitions for textiles. See:
http://www.brahmatirtasari.org/cv2.html
18
The diversity of these groups makes it hard to generalize. Some groups don’t consider themselves artists and
art is only part of a range of activities supporting their activism, as in the case of Tanam Untuk Kehidupan
 8

(TUK), whereas ruangrupa and Taring Padi prioritize art making. Ruangrupa were exhibited in the Gwangju
Biennale in 2002.