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  • Felix Widmer
    Felix Widmer    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    Empathizing Through Art in Yogya
    A day before the opening of his solo exhibition “Seeing Java” at Sangkring Art Space in Yogyakarta, Dadang Christanto walked through the gallery, attending to the final touches. His installation piece, simply titled “Java,” consists of around 2,000 small terra cotta heads stacked upon one another and rising like a mountain from the gallery’s floor.

    The word “JAVA” is set high on the wall and spelled out with makeshift boxes made from flattened oil drums with open fronts welded together, reminiscent of the cracker boxes seen in warungs. Inside these boxes, Dadang has placed shiny, polished aluminum versions of the same terra cotta heads that make up the pyramid.

    “When I fly over Java, the volcanoes always impress me,” the 54-year-old Dadang said. “This is why I have stacked these terra cotta heads to form a mountain. With this work, I want to understand the associations people make when they are confronted with the idea of Java.

    “I have been living in Australia since 1999 and Australia is a very flat country. To me, the volcanoes of Java are very impressive.”

    But Dadang means to arouse more than the lure of natural beauty with his installation titled after his native Java.

    The terra cotta heads, which look similar at first glance, are all different. Even in their stasis, they evoke the feeling of ferocity and violence.

    The terra cotta faces have gaping holes for eyes and mouths which, at once, seem to be screaming, shouting and even laughing. The emotions that the heads are meant to foment include the empathy and solidarity that Dadang has for victims of violence in this country.

    Political violence is an underlying feature in all Dadang’s work, as he was himself a victim of discrimination. Political segregation set the course of his life from a very early age.

    “I was born to Chinese parents from a long lineage of Javanese-Chinese ancestry,” he said. “And although I was given a Chinese name at birth, my family spoke Javanese at home.

    “When I was 8 years old, my father, who was apparently an activist for the Indonesian Communist Party, was arrested and executed by the New Order military. I remember people teasing and bullying me, saying, ‘Hey, you! Communist child! Your father is being beaten up at the police station!’ ”

    “My family was not at all wealthy and the political situation at the time forced my mother to split her five children up between relatives,” Dadang continued. “I was sent to live with an aunt in Bandung, so when the government forced the Chinese to abandon their names and take an Indonesian one, the Sundanese-sounding name Dadang was chosen for me. My real name is Tan Gak Tjwan.

    “ ‘Tjawn’ means lucky.”

    Growing up a Sino-Indonesian boy raised by a single parent was not easy.

    “I was always feeling inferior. Luckily, I had known I wanted to be an artist since I was quite young. I had missed [some] school because of what happened to my family,” he said. “I remember I used to cry a lot in primary school because people would mock me for being a communist child.”

    When Dadang finished his education at a secondary art school in Yogyakarta, he wanted to keep studying at the Yogyakarta Arts Academy. But institutionalized discrimination mandated that only two students of Chinese heritage could study there per year, and Dadung was left out.

    Instead, he joined the protest poet W.S. Rendra’s theater community and participated in workshops and rehearsals. He won a part playing a woman in Rendra’s production of the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes.

    “I really enjoyed the critical discussions in Rendra’s theater group,” Dadang said. “But the next year I was accepted at to art school and I became less active. At the same time, the New Order government also banned Rendra from performing.”

    The anti-Chinese programs that saw many Sino-Indonesians murdered and raped in Jakarta during final few days of Suharto’s regime in May 1998 brought the full weight and evil of discrimination to Dadang’s heart.

    “I remember at that time I was glued to my radio, listening to phone-in programs from Jakarta. People were desperate, asking the radio where the police or the military were. They were nowhere and the violence spread like wildfire through the Chinatown of Jakarta. People were raped and murdered, and property was burned to the ground,” Dadang recalled.

    “A friend, who is also of Chinese descent but looks less Chinese than me, knocked at my door and said he wanted to take me and my family out for a meal. Jokingly, he said that he was embarrassed to be with me because I looked too Chinese.”

    After a lifetime of discrimination and bullying, the events of 1998 were the last straw for Dadang, who decided to leave the country for a while.

    “I was thinking, ‘This is the collapse of civilization. There are no more morals, no more values,’ ” the artist said. “I rang a friend in Canberra and asked to be given a residence program there, and in July I went to Australia and made an installation work titled ‘Memoir Jakarta-Solo, 13,14,15 May 1998.’ ”

    The ceramic artwork he created set the tone for the strife Dadang had witnessed in Indonesia. The installation depicted sate sticks on a barbecue that featured skewered human body parts instead of pieces of lamb.

    In February 1999, Dadang left Indonesia for good with his family and took a position in the Northern Territory University, teaching Southeast Asian contemporary art.

    “It was only in Australia that I began to feel that it was OK to be Chinese,” he said. “I went to a Balkan culture festival and realized that everyone has an ethnicity and it is OK. Being Chinese is not wrong. It is nothing to be ashamed of.”

    The opening of the “Seeing Java” also featured a performance titled “Survivors,” a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. Around 50 participants covered their bodies in mud and carried photographs of victims of violence.

    On its opening day on New Year’s Eve, Dadang’s installation got a surprise visit from Yogyakarta’s Sultan Hamengku Buwana X, who said in a short speech that culture was the basis of the social, economic and political development that was key to real progress in Indonesia.

    Watching Dadang, as one who suffered political discrimination, brief the participants the day before his exhibition opens, one sees a spiritually mature man who has forgiven and can communicate and share his reflections and experiences to an audience to create a better, more peaceful world.

    “I am lucky in that I can express myself. In a way, my work is therapy for me,” Dadang said.

    Source: Jakarta Globe. http://bit.ly/xIbfd9
    • 06 Jan 2012, 5:11 pm