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拍品专文
THE GENERATIONAL STORY:
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION OF INDONESIAN CONTEMPORARY ART
A capsule history of contemporary Asian art can be told through the experiences and aesthetic orientations of different generations of artists. Artistic production is influenced greatly by a number of factors, not least academic discourse, the availability and knowledge of use of particular mediums and the key social, cultural, and political events and issues of the times. Looking across the span of art history, one begins to pick out generational cohorts of artists who may self-identify as a particular fraternity of artists, or who might not but still exhibit broadly similar aesthetics. Generational cohorts are key to capturing the zeitgeist of their times, and their works become the basis upon which the building blocks of art history are constituted.
The Generational Story is a cross-generational selection of works by key Indonesian contemporary artists from an important pioneering private collection. This collection has been put together since the 1990s with a vision to capture the zeitgeist of their times the artists were expressing, and to represent the breadth and diversity of Indonesian artists who have emerged on the scene.
The core group of artists in the collection are those born in the early 1970s, amongst them represented here are Christine Ay Tjoe, Nyoman Masriadi and Jumaldi Alfi. Born in the early 1970s, they experienced the turbulent political period of transition from the New Order of Suharto to an era of democracy only partially as they were mainly all students at art college in the late 1990s. Their coming of age, as they left art college at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, coinciding with the passing over to a more politically stable environment, and where the art world began to take form around the art market, and an art world infrastructure begun to form.
These early-70s born artists differed from their predecessors, those who lived through the end-Suharto years as mature practising artists. Amongst them are artists such as Agus Suwage, Heri Dono and Ronald Manullang represented here in this collection. Whereas the early-70s born artists were not compelled by the prevailing sentiment of people around them to express themselves politically during their formative years of easing into their identities as artists, their predecessors such as Suwage and Dono were creating art in an environment which saw it as normative for artists to express statements about the state of society and politics through their art.
Suwage's Balada John and Yoko expresses faith in the ideals of universal love and brotherhood, largely differing from the figural treatment of Nyoman Masriadi's Lagi Enggan which takes a more personal and even cynical attitude towards human relations. Heri Dono is highly representative of artists from the preceding generation, with so many of his installations and paintings being thinly veiled commentaries on power, nepotism, and the position of the state in relation to its people.
With the later generation of artists - those born post-1975, we observe a very keen sense of openness on the part of artists to distilling the influence of distinct visual cultures such as cartoon and to also make direct commentary on art history. There is a markedly distinct receptiveness to appropriation and this is seen in the works of Samsul Arifin and J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra.
The distinction between the two generations is a markedly stark one and is beginning to intrigue historians in the field of Indonesian art. Through private collections that have had the vision to collect key pieces of these generations of artists, we are able to observe these key shifts in the attitudes and aesthetic orientations of generations of artists.
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION OF INDONESIAN CONTEMPORARY ART
A capsule history of contemporary Asian art can be told through the experiences and aesthetic orientations of different generations of artists. Artistic production is influenced greatly by a number of factors, not least academic discourse, the availability and knowledge of use of particular mediums and the key social, cultural, and political events and issues of the times. Looking across the span of art history, one begins to pick out generational cohorts of artists who may self-identify as a particular fraternity of artists, or who might not but still exhibit broadly similar aesthetics. Generational cohorts are key to capturing the zeitgeist of their times, and their works become the basis upon which the building blocks of art history are constituted.
The Generational Story is a cross-generational selection of works by key Indonesian contemporary artists from an important pioneering private collection. This collection has been put together since the 1990s with a vision to capture the zeitgeist of their times the artists were expressing, and to represent the breadth and diversity of Indonesian artists who have emerged on the scene.
The core group of artists in the collection are those born in the early 1970s, amongst them represented here are Christine Ay Tjoe, Nyoman Masriadi and Jumaldi Alfi. Born in the early 1970s, they experienced the turbulent political period of transition from the New Order of Suharto to an era of democracy only partially as they were mainly all students at art college in the late 1990s. Their coming of age, as they left art college at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, coinciding with the passing over to a more politically stable environment, and where the art world began to take form around the art market, and an art world infrastructure begun to form.
These early-70s born artists differed from their predecessors, those who lived through the end-Suharto years as mature practising artists. Amongst them are artists such as Agus Suwage, Heri Dono and Ronald Manullang represented here in this collection. Whereas the early-70s born artists were not compelled by the prevailing sentiment of people around them to express themselves politically during their formative years of easing into their identities as artists, their predecessors such as Suwage and Dono were creating art in an environment which saw it as normative for artists to express statements about the state of society and politics through their art.
Suwage's Balada John and Yoko expresses faith in the ideals of universal love and brotherhood, largely differing from the figural treatment of Nyoman Masriadi's Lagi Enggan which takes a more personal and even cynical attitude towards human relations. Heri Dono is highly representative of artists from the preceding generation, with so many of his installations and paintings being thinly veiled commentaries on power, nepotism, and the position of the state in relation to its people.
With the later generation of artists - those born post-1975, we observe a very keen sense of openness on the part of artists to distilling the influence of distinct visual cultures such as cartoon and to also make direct commentary on art history. There is a markedly distinct receptiveness to appropriation and this is seen in the works of Samsul Arifin and J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra.
The distinction between the two generations is a markedly stark one and is beginning to intrigue historians in the field of Indonesian art. Through private collections that have had the vision to collect key pieces of these generations of artists, we are able to observe these key shifts in the attitudes and aesthetic orientations of generations of artists.