If you are unfamiliar with contemporary Indonesian history, you might be slightly confused upon entering FX Harsono’s exhibit at SAM. A gun is displayed in a wooden crate, and multitudes of bottle flies are pinned onto a white canvas dinner-table set-ting with preserved butterflies secured on ceramic plates. You’re not walking into a taxidermist’s workplace; rather this exhibition serves as a retrospective of the artist’s work starting from 1975, the year that Harsono and other Indo-nesian art rebels took on the task of redefining an indigenous art that broke away from accepted Western traditions of painting and sculpture, creating ‘democratised’ conceptual works that became vehicles for protest.

Harsono was at the forefront of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) of the ’70s, in which artists struggled to work within the bounds of a repressive political climate that ensured Indonesian art remained depoliticised. ‘Testimonies’ traces the evolution of the artist’s work from that era — its pieces illus-trating the face of a nation oppressed under the Suharto regime — via works created post-May 1998, the beginning of the Asian economic crisis, which saw brutal riots targeting the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, right through to those following Suharto’s step down from power. Departing from earlier themes of political protest, Harsono makes himself and his personal identity — more accurately as an Indonesian of Chinese descent — as the subject matter.

His journey to uncover his personal identity reveals that the self is intrinsically linked to the political environment in which its depicted. ‘Rewriting the Erased’, an installation and performance video, projects Harsono sitting at a table in a darkened room. He repeatedly writes his name in Chinese characters with an ink brush, after which the artist neatly arranges the pieces of paper on the floor until there is no space left What Harsono tries to recover is the ‘Erased’ — under Suharto’s regime, various government policies aimed to fully integrate Chinese immigrants into Indonesian society by insisting that Chinese names be changed to Indonesian-sounding ones.

The artist’s work reveals a technical ability — many of his works adopt a grid-like system that lays out objects in a meticulously ordered fashion, and his sculptures are arranged with painstaking attention to detail. Evading stylistic characterisation, Harsono’s works range from perform-ance art to documentary filmmaking. As much a history lesson as it is an exhibition, this retrospective offers a valuable opportunity to view the changing landscape of Indonesia’s political, social and cultural history from the point of view of a seminal artist who has left an indelible mark on Indonesian society.

Burned Victim

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