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CHOUINARD GALLERY HOSTS INDONESIA’S PUTU SUTAWIJAYA
BEGINNING OCTOBER 4 THROUGH NOVEMBER 30
Collection Reflects Peace and Equality Despite Trouble in Homeland and Abroad
Chicago, IL – October 4, 2003 – Chouinard Gallery welcomes the exhibition of one of Indonesian’s foremost contemporary painters, Putu Sutawijaya. The exhibition is titled, Who Am I, and will open on Saturday, October 4th, 2003 at 3025 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago and will continue through November 30, 2003. A cocktail reception will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 4, 2003. The reception is free and open to the public.
About the Artist:
Putu Sutawijaya shares many of the desires of his generation in Indonesia and beyond, which includes the right to a peaceful life, one without fear. His work is a demand for freedom in an atmosphere gripped by chaos and confusion. Years of social and political turmoil have scarred Indonesian society profoundly. Political oppression by the minority of the majority silenced rightful protest, turning dissent inward, fueling anger and frustration. Yet within the social and political turmoil of recent years, Indonesia’s artists have been turning their energies and talents to making some of the most powerful art in Asia, art that spans expressions of the most public kind, as well as the most personal.
His current collection is contemplative and reflects his interest in mediation, music, dance, movement where his figures are painted with rhythmic motion and minimal color, and are characterized by his strong lines and brush strokes. Androgynous human figures are represented in motion – dancing, flying, floating – or otherwise completely still in a pose of serene contemplation. It is with such a view that one sees clearly Putu’s influences as an artist.
These influences lie, not within the narrow scope of political or activist art, but the much larger framework of Indonesia’s rich cultural life and heritage. Dance and music, as well as the practice of meditation, suggest to the viewer that Putu wishes to convey through his figures that even in the chaotic and confused world in which he lives there is still happiness, even though it may be brief and personal. Yet, at the same time, throughout his work, Putu’s the crucifix-like postures of some figures represent the sadness and pain of the world. It is testament to his skill and perception as an artist that Putu is able to convey so much about the emotions of joy, happiness, sadness, peace, and contemplation through his simple figures and their tight physical reality.
Putu Sutawijaya was born in Angseri, Tabanan, Indonesia in 1971, but today lives in a rural village on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. A graduate of the Institute of Indonesian Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta, Putu remains active in the Institutes activities. As a winner of many awards, Putu has been set apart from many of his contemporaries. While there is much that may be interpreted as political in his work, Putu says he attempts to remove notions of racism from his work. His art is, above all, about the individual human condition in a struggle to free itself from the constraints of an overly complex world.
Chouinard Gallery’s aim is to promote Asia’s best emerging and established contemporary and modern artists. Countries of origin include Indonesia, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Philippines and Malaysia. Chouinard Gallery operates in Chicago and Hong Kong. The Chicago gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday from 12:00 p.m. until 5:00. Or by appointment. The gallery is located at 3025 North Lincoln Avenue, in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. For more information, please visit www.chouinardgallery.com.
In Search Of A Simple Life - Essay by Ian Findlay-Brown, Editor/Publisher Asian Art News
Years of social and political turmoil have scarred Indonesian society profoundly. Political oppression by the minority of the majority silenced rightful protest, turning dissent inward, fueling anger and frustration. The long wait for a time for this anger and frustration to be expressed through action came to a head again in the late 1990s. Riots and demonstrations, ethnic and religious fighting, and demands for a greater say in running one’s life which have swept through all levels of contemporary Indonesian society have destroyed old alliances and created new ones. As the world looks on it would appear at times, that all of Indonesia’s myriad ethnic and religious groups are blindly tearing themselves apart, heading for utter ruin. Yet within the social and political turmoil of recent years, Indonesia’s artists have been turning their energies and talents to making some of the most powerful art in Asia, art that spans expressions of the most public kind, as well as the most personal.
The contemporary history of Indonesian art includes a wide variety of movements and struggles, from expressions against the Dutch colonial period, modernism in conflict with traditional ideas from the West, People’s art, to the struggle for a new Indonesian identity which rejects Western notions of what art ought to be. In the main centres of contemporary Indonesian art circles -- Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung and Bali – established and emerging artists, both men and women, have sought over the years to move through numerous styles and media, from painting to installation and performance art, to make art that not only attends to national sensibilities, but also reaches a wider international audience. But the Indonesian art that is seen overseas touches only briefly on the astonishingly wide range of artistic output within the country as a whole. When it comes to deciding what is seen overseas, the expectations and desires of international curators are often in conflict with those of local curators and artists. Artists such as Affandi. Mochtar Apin, Srihadi, Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto, Eddie Hara, Entang Wiharso, Tisna Sanjaya, Arahmaiani, Bunga Jeruk, Agus Suwage, I Made Palguna, and Putu Sutawijaya, among others, represent but a few of the many disparate voices of modern and contemporary Indonesian art. Most of these artists are well-known beyond Indonesia’s borders and have, to some extent, added to a broader awareness of a fuller picture of what is happening throughout Indonesian art.
Although a great deal of the most recent output of contemporary Indonesian artists may appear to fall into a category sometimes referred to as “activist art” or “political art”, the range of influences among artists is much broader than these terms suggest. Yet it is difficult to escape the fact that for so many artists the socio-political situation of the nation is at the heart of their work, struggling as many do to buy even the most common of materials with which to make their art. In writing in 1999 about art of the 6th Indonesian Art Awards Competition, established in collaboration with the Philip Morris Group of Companies, jurors noted the “majority of the works presented... are expressions of social concerns... Several works bluntly express the people’s anger and distress... The overall atmosphere is dark and painful to contemplate.” They also noted that in looking at their world the artists employed a wide variety of styles, “naive popular, hyperrealist, conceptual, informal, and caricatured.”
A young, emerging artist like Putu Sutawijaya, 30, represents many of the desires of his generation, which includes the right to a peaceful life, one without fear. A recent work entitled Stop (2000), shown at Sanggar Dewata Indonesia (founded in 1970) at the Hotel Padma in Bali (30 July – 10 August) this year, emphasises much of his outlook. As Wayan Sika, chairman of Sanggar Dewata Indonesia, noted in the catalogue, this work by Putu “features hands and bullets formed from resin, strong brush strokes, freedom of expression. His work is a demand for freedom in an atmosphere gripped by chaos and confusion.” An earlier large mixed-media work, Kontemplation (1999), shown at the Indonesian Art Awards, exemplifies one of the most significant elements of Putu’s art, that of the anonymous, faceless figure. It is a work in which the figures, in varying degrees of open and closed postures, seem to float within very confined spaces, seeking some kind of balance or groundedness. This is a somewhat gentler work than Stop with its underlying sense of greater dislocation and alienation.
Although the feelings of dislocation and alienation remain in Putu’s work, his recent paintings, as a critic has noted, are “contemplative and reflect his interest in mediation, music, dance, movement [where] his figures are painted with rhythmic motion and minimal colour, and are characterised by his strong lines and brush strokes. Androgynous human figures are represented in motion – dancing, flying, floating – or otherwise completely still in a pose of serene contemplation.” It is with such a view that one sees clearly Putu’s influences as an artist. These influences lie, not within the narrow scope of political or activist art, but the much larger framework of Indonesia’s rich cultural life and heritage. Dance and music, as well as the practice of meditation, suggest to the viewer that Putu wishes to convey through his figures that even in the chaotic and confused world in which he lives there is still happiness, even though it may be brief and personal. Yet, at the same time, throughout his work Putu’s the crucifix-like postures of some figures represent the sadness and pain of the world. It is testament to his skill and perception as an artist that Putu is able to convey so much about the emotions of joy, happiness, sadness, peace, and contemplation through his simple figures and their tight physical reality.
While it may be easy to read a strong religious element into Putu’s works, he himself discards such interpretation. There are many elements indeed which may suggest the broad range of religions in Indonesian culture and their attendant influences, but he doesn’t “consider himself a religious person, at least not by Hindu defintion.” He is as he notes, “unable to achieve the spiritual depth of his family, friends and peers through Hinduism,” but rather “attempts to achieve the same through my art.” By eschewing the religious definition, Putu invests in his figurative narrative a certain anonymity. The figures are androgynous and, for the most part, faceless which is strikingly different from that of much of recent Indonesian art which personalises the messages of art by giving faces to the characters, whether they be corrupt officials or anonymous street people. For Putu, the facelessness of his figures removes the “racist element of Indonesian tradition where facial features and skin colour segment Indonesian cultural and religious groups, the Balinese, Javanese, and Chinese, for example.” It is not what someone looks like that is important for Putu, but rather “human expressions, conveyed through my work, that are meant to apply cross-culturally.”
There is, too, a rawness in the manner in which Putu represents human expression and experience. This is particularly effective in the way in which his androgynous people are revealed in their natural, naked forms since, as he notes, “clothing conceals human expression and emotion.” Slowly, however, Putu’s androgynous, faceless figures are giving way to a more personalised form -- perhaps influenced by his own recent marriage -- in that their gender is now being exposed. Now there is a sense of humanity present that was absent earlier and through this Putu adds depth to his vision of the world. The anonymity of the human figure can only do so much in terms of explaining the human condition and its varied range of emotional and psychological experiences in our complex world. By adding gender to his figures Putu is “attempting to capture the magical element in certain male and female relationships.”
With this identity of the figure Putu’s work has achieved a new balance, a fresh visual impact. The impact, too, is enhanced in the way through which he wishes us to view the human condition. Within many of his paintings there are groups of people, generally three, six, or nine. The single figure now seems truly isolated. His regular use of the numbers three and nine, is, as he notes, “to create my own form of balance [rather] than for religious or ‘numerological’ reasons”. But numbers for balance do not control him, nor do other elements, such as colour or symbols, nor does he wish for them to do so. Such control would inhibit the free-spiritedness he wishes to maintain within the making of his art.
Putu Sutawijaya was born in Angseri, Tabanan in 1971, but today lives in a rural village on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. A graduate of the Institute of Indonesian Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta, Putu has chosen to be associated with the artistic community with links to ISI. As a winner of many awards over the past five years Putu has been set apart from many of his contemporaries. While there is much that may be interpreted as political in his work, Putu says his work is non-political “other than to remove notions of racism from his work.” His art is, above all, about the individual human condition in a struggle to free itself from the constraints of an overly complex world.
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