Retrospective of legendary Indonesian contemporary artist explores the themes of violence, control and the search for self

Few artists are as central to the development of contemporary art in Indonesia as FX Harsono. He was a founding member of the ground- breaking Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, or New Art Movement, in 1975, and his works commenting on some of the most tumultuous decades of Indonesian history have been an influence on almost every socially conscious artist who came later.

“He is one of the senior artists who is respected by the younger generation because of his commitment to such art practices,” said Arahmaiani, a well-known contemporary artist who counts Harsono as an early inspiration on her own career.

Now a retrospective exhibition of 18 works at the Singapore Art Museum takes a look at Harsono’s development since he first emerged on the Indonesian art scene.

“This exhibition presents FX Harsono’s artistic journey, and his most important works over three decades are exhibited here,” said Hendro Wiyanto, curator of the show.

The earliest two pieces are “Paling Top 75” (“The Most Top 75”) — a toy M-16 rifle in a box — and “Rantai yang Santai” (“The Relaxed Chains”) — chains laid out on what looks like a prison bed. These are raw, blunt statements about the twin threats of authoritarian power — the gun ready to be wielded and the chains ready to confine.

The rawness here reflects the birth of an art movement that was still struggling with what it wanted to say and how it wanted to say it. Harsono and his GSRB colleagues from Yogyakarta and Bandung were still new to making art that was politically and socially relevant.

The problem with the other art being done at the time in Indonesia was that it was “based on Western theories and references that didn’t show any Indonesian identity,” Harsono said in an e-mail reply to questions.

By opening up the definition of art to found objects, installation pieces and other imagery, Harsono and GSRB felt they could “liberate art from elitist attitudes” and speak more directly to “the problems of society [which] are more important than individual feeling,” as declared in their manifesto of 1975.

We see a more confident portrayal of central themes when we jump to 1994. First, in “Voice Without Voice,” nine panels of a signing hand spell out in sign language the word “D-E-M-O-K-R-A-S-I.” In the last panel, ropes bind the voiceless hand and emphasize its powerlessness.

In more brutal imagery from 1994, “The Voices Controlled by the Powers” is made of unpainted traditional masks cut in half, with the upper halves of the faces arranged in a square to look inward at the mouths and jaws piled in the center. Both horror and violence are conveyed as these mute, silent witnesses stare at their own mutilation, unable to scream.

Then there is an end to these righteous blasts against an authoritarian regime. The “enemy,” Suharto, falls, and while this ushers in new freedoms, it also brings bitterness for Indonesians of Chinese descent such as Harsono because of the violence directed at the Chinese community in the riots of May 1998.

The strongest statement against this mob violence is the piece “Burned Victims,” presented as blackened wooden torsos suspended in rectangular frames. In front of each charred body, a pair of shoes gives a personality and character it wouldn’t possess on its own.

A work from 2002 shows a more general disillusionment with the freedoms of the post-Suharto era. In “Open Your Mouth,” a man’s face is depicted with someone’s hands trying to make the already open mouth larger. The eyes, nostrils and mouth are a blank white, as if nothing is inside.

“Anyone … is now forced to speak and say just about anything,” Hendro said. “It is as if people are simply saying something, although what they say is useless and cannot be used to solve any problem.”

Ambiguity creeps in when we turn to pieces from 2003 to 2008. The motif of a butterfly transfixed by a needle is often used, implying pain, but from what and because of what is less clear.

The butterfly could represent freedom, or as Hendro suggests, a “weak person” unable to stand up to the turmoil of the period. The installation “Bon Appetit,” with its meal of butterflies skewered on needles, suggests that even with Suharto gone, the strong still dine on the weak.

Then a series of works from 2009 rounds off the exhibition, even if still leaving things on a slightly ambiguous note. Harsono’s disorientation in the post-Suharto period has finally brought him to delve more directly into the question of who he is.

Ironically, his search leads him to another episode of violence. In the years following World War II, when Indonesia was fighting for independence from the Netherlands, there were rumors that the Dutch were using the Chinese as spies, and this resulted in several incidents where Chinese-Indonesians were targeted.

One of these incident took place in 1947-48 in Blitar, East Java, where Harsono himself was born in 1948. Though his family escaped the violence, his father was made official photographer of a 1951 expedition to find the secret graves of 191 of the victims, and his father’s collection of photographs of the reinternment project was something Harsono had often seen as a child growing up in the city.

In his search for his roots, Harsono decided to go to Blitar last year and interview eyewitnesses, families of the victims and survivors of the massacre. The resulting video-documentary is shown here along with two paintings that focus on pictures from his father’s photo album. The paintings, “Preserving Life, Terminating Life,” numbers 1 and 2, juxtapose images of disinterred skulls with photos of ordinary family life. These represent the two possibilities of life and death, it seems, not only for Harsono and other Chinese-Indonesians, but for everyone else as well.

The final piece, “Rewriting the Erased,” is perhaps the most eloquent of all. A chair and table sit in a room with black floors, walls and ceiling. Three video screens show Harsono sitting at the same table and writing the characters for his Chinese name, Oh Hong Boen, over and over again on the pieces of paper that now neatly cover the floor.

Harsono is searching for the very essence of himself in the pictograms. It is a search, he seems to be saying, that all of us must make, no matter what violence might have accompanied our birth.

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