| Since 1975—beginning with the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) movement (Indonesian New Art Movement)—I developed a particular concern for the social, political, and cultural issues of the people around me. |  |
FX Harsono
Since 1975—beginning with the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) movement (Indonesian New Art Movement)—I developed a particular concern for the social, political, and cultural issues of the people around me. Such concern also provided the basis for my works since the launching of the movement. I tried to really understand social, political, and cultural problems by getting myself involved so that I could learn from experience, and by joining and communicating with critical activities in the surroundings. I maintained the aspiration to make art a language through which to express resistance to injustice, as I believe that cultural change does not depend on a handful of political elites. However, following the collapse of the New Order rule the hope for change brought by reformasi movement turned to be void.
By the end of the New Order era my works tended to be increasingly verbal and destructive. The intention was not to destroy, but to react against increasingly repressive acts and the demolishment of religious buildings and institutions regarded as the enemies of those in power. The political situation gave me the inspiration to create works that express resistance by featuring the same proclivity, namely destruction. I gave a clear indication that the destruction in my works is the embodiment of protests. I showed the process of destruction and I recorded it, without any attempt of manipulation. I exposed the process of destruction in my works to show the contradiction between the destruction I made in creating and the actions of the ruling regime, marked by censoring and manipulating information through the mass media.
For me, the process of creating works is as important as the end products. Verbal expressions don’t reduce the aesthetic value of a work; instead, it just highlights my skepticism of the subtle deepness as a form of art mystification.
The issue of identity brought me to the notion of a hybrid culture of people that belong to a race in diaspora. From here sprang my works for a solo exhibition in 2003. Aside from that, I realized that my experience in graphic designing had brought me into the very interesting digital culture that has in turn influenced my modes of creation.
The point is that identity doesn’t represent the attempt to return to ancestral culture, but rather to locate one’s own position in a cultural constellation that has become very complex. After more than 30 years the Indonesian-Chinese have been uprooted from their culture, is it now still appropriate to discriminatively call them “Indonesian-Chinese” at all? Yet if I am to be just called “Indonesian,” do I really know and have the Indonesian cultural roots? Those who are called “native”—especially in the big cities where cross-cultural interactions are very intense and open—do they still maintain good knowledge of their cultural roots? Then, who are we, culturally?
Quoted from A Conversation with FX Harsono: from Opposition to Pain, published in the catalog of FX Harsono’s solo show, Point of Pain, at Langgeng Icon Gallery, Jakarta, 2007; an interview conducted by Hendro Wiyanto.
