Biasa Artspace has been missing its mojo for months, during the extended absence of its founder, Susanna Perini. For most of 2010, a bevy of guest curators stepped in to keep the Biasa heart beating (“paddles, clear!”), with a round of satisfactory exhibitions – - most recently On Camera, a show by Indonesian photography collective MES 56.

While the show as a whole was out of focus, we found a few of the images oddly haunting. Foremost among them was Agung Nugroho Widhi’s Capturing a Moment in a Windy Garden Party, an archival print mounted on aluminium (detail above). Here tiny toys poignantly evoke the disaster of the Suburban Dream in poison plastic colours. The most cherished ideals of Indonesia’s aspirational middle class are exposed as nothing more than toxic trash, a sham, a cheap trick foisted on them by toy sellers. And the absence of people (or dolls) amid the tipped chairs and glasses smells like a neutron bomb.

Yet there remains some solace here. Arcadia, although abandoned, is seen to persist in a natural landscape reflected upside-down in a pond, which fills the far background. The scale of Widhi’s print, at 131cm, gives the piece extra punch. Go see it for yourself; the show is up until mid-February, so you can find the time. I’m sure of it.

The vernissage of On Camera was sparsely attended, at least in comparison to other Biasa openings in the past. Perhaps it was the season. Perhaps it was the plethora of other openings and events the same evening. Perhaps it was the absence of Susanna Perini, whose imminent return to Bali is awaited with bated breath.

For the first time at any Biasa opening, there was space to see the art and we weren’t sweltering in a crush of people. That’s me (above), talking with Lombok artist, Karyana (an extraordinary autodidact). At right in white is Belgian metteur en fête Eric Van Bruggen with fellow Belgian visiting Bali, Eleonore De Liedekerke. Shortly after the picture was taken we were off to Deus Ex Machina in Canggu for the opening of their Christmas art show . . . . more on that in a minute.

Sandow Birk is one of the most interesting artists working (hard) in America. I began following his work at first because our friendship is a Bali bond. Then I  continued following because it’s impossible not to once you start. There’s a plethora of plots to follow in Sandow’s work, all of them with twists. He’s prolific, proficient, precocious, provocative, and still really young (meaning under 50). By way of introduction he’s done a critically acclaimed series of epic history paintings in the grand tradition entitled “The Great War of the Californias,” and a painted restaging of Dante’s Inferno set in LA today and worthy of a spectacularly staged full-on opera to the music of Lou Reed from his Metal Machine Music period. Sandow’s speciality is making deep irony look “fun”. Devilishly smart, in other words.

Years ago, Sandow and I met while working together creating a monumental collection of carved panels for the Hawaii home of Silicon Valley success-surfer and disk-spinner extraordinaire, Steve Luczo (who btw happens to be happily married-with-kids to the sincerely beautiful woman-who-models, Agatha Relota). Obviously, there’s beauty in this story from every angle, so read on.

Sandow has surfed Indonesia a number of times, and was commissioned by Steve to come to Bali to absorb the artistic what-the-what that is here, or was here, in order to create a set of drawings for this epic group of Balinese panels for Steve’s Hawaii beach house. Sandow got it. He got Bali on a gut level, and I don’t mean he got “Bali Belly” He absorbed the Bali Thing into his pores without even trying. He hung with our Bali carvers, he rummaged around temples, palaces, galleries, jungles and pointed point breaks down Uluwatu way, then came up with a splendid set of very Bali drawings which the Balinese carvers received with great glee. They carved with chisels, they carved with grins, they carved with demons, nymphs and kings. The panels were pretty good, in other words. We are all very happy.

And right now I am specifically happy because in a few weeks’ time, PPOW gallery in New York opens a show of works from Sandow’s epic long-term opus, American Qur’an. He has undertaken to paint every surat from the Qur’an, illuminated in the margins with scenes from life, meaning life in America from catastrophe to catastrophe, as it is being lived. In classic Sandow fashion, this project is an itch-inducing thorny tightrope of  works, but it works, because he’s not in fact cashing in on cross-cultural hypersensitivities here. Instead he exposes the absurdity of this neurotic hypersensitivity itself, along with the bend-over-backwards politesse of American mass culture toward The (hated and feared) Other, in this case Islam. American Qur’an goes further still, by inviting us through its deep irony to see how the velvet glove of American political correctness fails miserably to conceal the iron knuckles of ignorance and fear.

The pointed paintings of American Qur’an save Sandow from a fatwa by being packaged as pop, as Zippy the Pinhead comics of life. And there‘s the real statement. These days, it seems a serious man can only get critical whimsy in under the radar if he cloaks it in the stealth bombing costume of a harmless kook. (We don’t want another Danish debacle, now do we? So coat it in candy. Pop rocks come to mind. They were dangerous candy that wasn’t actually dangerous. We really liked them and will never forget them, those of us who lived through the Pop Rocks epoch of American history without exploding or imploding. Are we having fun yet?)

Stereo.type, the subject of the current exhibition at Kendra Gallery, is one of the myriad projects of artist-designer-activist Ebon Heath. It consists of metamorphosed typography which transmits subtle messages about printed words themselves and their broadest meanings. The title Ebon selected for his website, “listeningwithmyeyes” voices eloquently the peculiar effect of freeing typography from its familiar context. Text moves from the page into the atmosphere, where it is more seen than heard-in-the-head, as one hears words while one reads them on a page. Released from the page, text can be sensed in new ways. Ebon is experimenting with a form of synaesthesia, which I suspect  he feels himself and always has, in relation to text and typography.

No surprise then, that Ebon has for over a decade been a pioneer in graphic design, exploring divergent paths in typography, and in other graphic means to transmit urgent and potent messages. His graphic work evidences an innate understanding of the prevailing conditions of his clients’ publics. He fathoms just how deeply we wallow in a surfeit of text, messages, text messages and constant clever clamoring after our attention.

Ebon seems to propose his mobiles as a means to float above the imperatives of prolific message making. They are not the products of an assignment to Ebon the graphic designer, requiring him to hit a target with a specific message shot from a grassy knoll into a cluttered world. Rather, they seem to be his own response to the nebulous nature of the printed word itself as a phenomenon. And equally, as an expression of Ebon’s own understanding of that phenomenon, or cluster of phenomena, after years of deployment on missions as a sniper on the battleground of printed messages. Me, I can’t help but like this stuff, as a veteran of the sharp-shooting message squad myself (JWT, O&M, etc).

I’m not sure that Ebon has achieved the full effect  he hopes to achieve with Stereo.type, yet. Nevertheless, his trail-breaking at this juncture still affords us access to paths that were not previously available. In other words, there is value in the Stereo.type project, and one would do well to follow its course and expect even greater work as Ebon conjures forth his word-clouds (as above, at Kendra).

The art products comprising Stereo.type are primarily undulating and exploding mobiles of typography which release printed words from the constraints of the two dimensional page. Words hang in the air. Words fly. Poetry floats. We are invited to feel in a spatial and physical way how real words really are. As embodied beings ourselves, we witness an analogous embodiment of the texts that fill our world. In this way we can begin to comprehend what the printed word is actually doing in our world, from religious texts to text messages to political campaign slogans. Everything written, printed, and distributed is hovering in the atmosphere around us, twisting and drifting like Ebon’s mobiles (above).

As text is decontextualised in Ebon’s artworks, so is the artist himself deliberately decontextualised. He drifts wantonly away from the orthodoxies of the contemporary art market, disregarding agreed-upon categories of fine art as we know it. He is colouring outside the lines that separate fine art from, say, interior decoration, graphic design, body ornament and indeed, activism. Ebon’s mobiles are “going retail” later this year as constituent elements for high-design interiors. As are other Stereo.type art products, including laser-cut typographic earrings, cuffs and belts (above).

Photographic prints are another form of art objects within the Stereo.type project (above, visible to the right of a word-cloud). A dozen or so of these these limited edition prints are avaible through Kendra, and several are hung in the gallery now. They twist the text-to-art story into yet another permutation, by first taking the printed page into three dimensions (mobiles), then intentionally flattening it out again (photographs of mobiles), but with its earlier 3-D state having transformed the text in disorienting yet salient ways. It’s all as twisted as the morphed, warping words whirling slowly in the air-con at Kendra, now through 16 May. Go. Spend an hour or two in the gallery if you are in Bali, and consider how words and text exist among us, take form, move, morph, move, and insinuate themselves into our very atmosphere.

Kim Randall, la femme chef d’affaires of Kendra Gallery, was radiant on the occasion of Ebon’s vernissage last Saturday, as she always is (above, with Chun Gee of Bule Fusion studio). She’s an object lesson in natural beauty, which has nothing to do with airs and everything to do with graces. That characterises Kim (below, far right), who was on fine form on the night. The artist, on the other hand, initially seemed to be on less than fine form, having not yet appeared until well into the second hour of the vernissage. Kim explained matter-of-factly, “Gosh, Susi, he’s been up for three days working on the installation. Now he’s crashed out asleep in his room!”

Kendra is situated at Uma Sapna, one of the few well-designed boutique villa hotels in Seminyak. It, and Kendra Gallery, were discreetly created by their ineluctable éminence grises, Bruno Wauters and his enchanting partner Sekar Warni (above, third from right, beside interior designer Laure DeGuillaume and architect Cheong Yew Kwan). Given the fact that Ebon was staying at Uma Sapna, he was understandably inclined to recharge – -  after three days discharging the painstaking duty of affixing innumerable strings of typography to walls and ceilings he had never seen before.

But lo and behold! The artist ultimately emerged! At the very moment the crowd reached maximum numbers, which were impressive numbers indeed (see above), Ebon Heath popped out like a rabbit from a hat, and proved to be remarkably personable, approachable, affable, relaxed, and generous in answering questions and discussing his work – - not to mention, beaming smiles for miles. I guess the mattresses and sheets at Uma Sapna are top-drawer, and the rooms are as serene as a Trappist monastery. It seems that a two-hour siesta there is equivalent to eight hours of shut-eye anywhere else.

Ebon talked about some of the texts hovering over our heads. One was a composition by Indonesian poet laureate, Chairil Anwar (I’m a fan), rendered here in muted gold and black (above). Another was an enormous black and white, yin-yang cloud of Koranic verse tangled with excerpts from the Tao Te Ching, with each text in its original language and script. This particular piece gave me pause for thought, particularly as I was wearing a handwoven poleng scarf (below, with Eric Tourres and his family). Ebon was interested in the connection to Bali’s checkered poleng cloth, which represents the concept of rwa binneda, the inseparable interdependence of opposites.

On this occasion, poleng was certainly apropos. I purchased a pair of Ebon’s typographic earrings from the exhibition, which proclaim “push-pull” in Arabic. One earring is black, the other white. I put them on immediately. I also bought a single earring for Welldo Wnophringgo (below), an unforgettable local artist whose life and whose physical presentation are both an ongoing installation and performance work. Welldo accepted the earring gleefully, and you will now have to ask him directly to read his Arabic text earring to you. I am quite certain he will be wearing it. He wears basically everything, and then some, with tremendous commitment and care.

Ebon joined Kim Randall and a crowd of Kendra patrons and friends for dinner after the vernissage at Chandi restaurant on Jalan Oberoi, which is now our kitchen-away-from-home in Bali. Never a bad meal, and we return again and again for their daily specials, and their superstar standards, notably “Agung’s Black and Red Nasi Goreng,” which has become a staple of our diet, particularly as it comes in both seafood and vegetarian versions. What a plate. We hope Chandi doesn’t become a victim of its own popularity as so many good restaurants in Bali have.

Ebon was still woven tightly into the Kendra circle when I went home well after midnight. We hope to see him again in Bali, and with any luck, one of our local design-driven new boutiques like Word of Mouth (playground of Valentina Audrito, above right, with Sekar Warni and Cheong Yew Kwan), or Paola Zancanaro’s  Namu, will pick up his jewelry, belts and mobiles so they can be acquired in Bali without having to come in the luggage, as so many worthwhile things must these days (wine not least among them).

Finally, do go see some of Ebon’s story on his website. It’s a story that includes RISD (helloo . . .), Kenneth Cole (helllllooooo . . .), a successful self-started consultancy doing issue-based media strategies for non-profits, NGOs and brands (no hello or goodbye necessary). And more. And do have a look at who turned out on the night in Bali (above and below), and how well they were turned out.

There is certainly not a burgeoning serious art scene in Bali, there is an active, serious, intelligent, international, and interesting art scene here in full flower. The future is now. Witness Bali. Of course, this particular art scene would be more bubbling if the daft delusional bapaks in Jakarta repealed the ridiculous duties and taxes on alcohol here, which now run around 400%. Even Malaysia doesn’t do that. And it contravenes APEC and ASEAN treaties. What a foolishness, what a fiasco, what a supreme act of self-sabotage. What a sure-fire way to alienate the travellers who can do the most for Bali and bring the most and cleanest dollars.  If it weren’t for such stupidity (and it is simply stupid), we would have had bubbly galore at Kendra, given there was so much to celebrate.

Who was celebrating? Unphotographed friends present included Susanna Perini of Biasa, eboniste extraordinaire Etienne de Souza, jeweler Frederic Bonnet, photographer Alessandro Luppi, 24K Kendra assistant manager Lalita Rachmania, Yakker Sophie Digby, fashionista Simonetta Quarti, Ubudian fine-financier Cryil Battini, plus an all-star cast of thousands. As for photographed friends, see images above, and plenty more below.

Roberto Canale of Biasa Artspace (left), and friends.

Pascal Morabito of Morabito Art Villa (in white at centre), at left are his wife Marie-Ève and his exceedingly tall son, and at right are the artist, and Bruno Wauters of Kendra.

Bruno Wauters of Kendra and Uma Sapna with prominent Bali-based Italian painter, Mondo (left).

Left to right, Maya Klat (scion of veteran Himalayan art dealer and Bali resident, Chino Roncoroni), her husband architect Diego Klat, and Miss Iin, formerly of Biasa Artspace, now “at large”.

Painter-designer Kirsty Ludbrook (Mrs. Richard Ludbrook), photographer Richard Ludbrook, and Robert Rosen who is one of Australia’s foremost social photographers and an astute observer of Sydney Society. Rosen has been in Bali working on poignantly pointed on-the-street portraits of transvestites in Jalan Dhyana Pura. We would love to see an exhibition of this series of images.

BGFs: Kim Randall of Kendra, and Gaby Wehn, photographer and founder of LVDK Productions. Love love love. Gaby wears Monica Benet necklace.

The poleng scarf of yours truly figures at centre, amid the growing crowd.

Maya and Diego Klat arriving in style. She’s wearing a one-of-a-kind dress from Simple Konsep Store, which look likes it was made just for her. Gorgeous.

The galleries where the Indonesian artists go are the galleries to go to. Bintang sur l’herbe at left in foreground. It hadn’t rained just yet . . . but it did.

Clouds. Crowds. From left, that’s Ebon in the green dread-cover, Yew Kwan vanishing at lower left-centre, yours truly in black and white, clutching a catalog (where did that catalog go?) at right under the cloud.

Stephanie Robert of Maison Bulle (subscribe to their newsletter read their website news page Pulse), with Marco Lastrucci of Quarzia, a high fashion batik atelier with retail on Jalan Oberoi, not far from Elite Havens.

Kiwi film director/producer Jason Moon (right) and friend.

Gorgeous Gaby of LVDK Production with our new pal, designer Monica Benet. Both wear Monica Benet necklaces and accessories.

Filippo Sciascia (Bali-based Italian multimedia artist and painter, recent solos at Gaya and Kendra, two-mans at Biasa and elsewhere), arriving with friends. We rarely see such ebullience at a vernissage. This one was effervescent, start to finish.

Bruno Wauters of Kendra, with artist Filippo Sciascia, reading the clouds.

P.S. If the lighting in Kendra were not amped up as if to illuminate a Jakarta Ferrari showroom, the subtlety of these and previously-exhibited artworks could perhaps be better appreciated. If they lit beautiful women like that, even Kim Randall might look like a frozen mannequin. Hint, hint. Or maybe we’re supposed to wear our black Persols. But then it would be difficult to listen with our eyes.

Images © Kendra Gallery of Contemporary Art, by IGA Eka Suwintari of Windia Studio, Bali.

Be at KuDeTa on Friday 26 February for a no-jive, all-live, art attack. Two UK artists painting live before your eyes to the tune of globally-regrooved hip hop, morphed tropical urban house and deep subterranean sounds spun by six (count ‘em, six) DJs. This art extravaganza isn’t happening just for YOUR benefit. It’s a benefit for the I’m An Angel charity, which does good in great measure for local people, places and problems.

Art. Action. Aural enzymes. Angelic altruism. All together. In an eight hour marathon from noon to eight. Just remember, it’s been HOT in Bali lately (in more ways than one), so put on something skimpy and chilly, then plan to spend the whole day until after sunset at KuDeTa this Friday.

The artists? Jo Peel and David Walker, a pair of gloriously gritty Brits visiting Bali (that’s David below, live-painting with fellow street art superstar, Hush). We’re really keen on Jo at the moment, who renders the tangle of urban NOW (wires and all, see above) into lyrical rhythms of line, colour and texture. She’s been painting in Bali for a few weeks, and (no surprise) is finding the island’s interleaved layers of intensity inspirational.

Really, you don’t want to miss this. It’s not your ordinary day sweating in the sun, it’s a full-on art-attack, and that doesn’t happen often on Bali, the island of a thousand lukewarm welcome drinks with free legong. I’ll be there. My office and gallery are 50 meters away, so how could I not?!? On top of that, Jo shares a studio in the UK with my bestest university friend and housemate Tom Hallifax (we read Art History together at St Andrews in the 80s), so what’s not to love about this six-degrees-of-unseparation, unprecedented, charity art attack?

Nice party. Beautiful people. Harrowing canvasses. Clearly, this ain’t no fooling around, even if it did take place in Bali, the ultimate island for fooling around, art-wise and otherwise. But a wonderland, Bali is not. A rabbit hole to wonderland, this exhibition is not. We are at Biasa Artspace, Bali’s pre-eminent, credibly independent, contemporary art gallery. November 21. It’s a vernissage for the disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing recent oeuvre of Bali-based painter Edmondo Zanolini (AKA Mondo), entitled “Follow the Rabbit”.

Shades of Lewis Carrolls’s rabbit? Perhaps. But this is no recreational trip into a whimsically altered state, it is a harrowing one into a raw state of naked awareness, and certainly not a wonderland by any stretch of any addled imagination. It is more Helter-Skelter than Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Stop dreaming, says Mondo. Wonderland and the House of Horrors are one and the same. Drop the dreams and wake up. The antidote to dreams is down this rabbit hole, so follow the rabbit, if you dare. Reality is weirder than dreams ever could be.

The palette is strictly propagandist red-black-white, conveying a sense of urgency and non-negotiability. The canvasses are mostly large, the narratives literal, graphic, and although the figures are merely silhouettes, they are starkly legible in the same way Balinese shadow puppet gods and demons writhing on a screen at a temple ceremony are starkly legible. In the same way a snapshoot of a hooded Iraqi torture victim is starkly legible. That is to say, these images are iconic, relentlessly in your face, and they burn themselves indelibly into memory as shadow puppet gods and demons brand themselves onto the retina in the crepuscular yet dazzling light of oil lamps blazing against a stretched canvas screen, late at night in Bali’s wayang kulit shadow plays.

The curator of this show, Valentine Willie, is a local hero of sorts, (that’s him, above right, next to Mondo holding satay stick). Wille has a certain clout around these parts, and can surely coax and cajole artists as effectively as he can collectors and institutions. The question that begs asking then, is does size matter? And is canvas size in this exhibition down to Willie, or to Mondo? Bear in mind that Mondo’s late spouse was one of the most bankable painters to come out of Bali in decades, and this bankability cannot escape the attention of any gallery owner, art investor or curator, nor should it. In Willie’s position it would be impossible not to ask, “Can the shadow cast by an artist on her surviving spouse have value in artistic and market terms?” No one looking at this shadow play could possibly avoid such a question. Is the answer to be found in large works, marketable works, engineered exhibitions? Or in leaving the artist entirely alone and accepting what comes, or not?

In this show, Mondo’s large works evidence a certain conflict, a reticence to go that big, and are therefore imbued with a palpable tension, perhaps a resistance to exposing matters so minutely intimate on such a large scale. Mondo bears a message of visceral integrity and has his own ways and means, but do we really need it so big? One cannot help but think that someone was involved here, someone adept at calculating the scale of the home and office spaces occupied by art aquisitors in this region, and the local price per square meter for finished paintings. Still, authentic disclosure does not require a billboard in order to be transmitted with fidelity. Mondo’s “Rabbit” works can be scaled up or down and the fidelity remains. One yearns for miniatures, for pocket sized “Rabbit” works to contemplate. Marketable? Maybe. Smart Cars are marketable.

Upstairs at Biasa Artspace, relegated to the back of beyond, are Mondo’s assemblages of small canvasses in filmic groupings that hit harder and appeal more than the big, perhaps coached-into-being canvasses below, under the big top. Upstairs, Mondo is writing small, as one writes small when writing surreptitiously with cramped script on the tiny pages of a private notebook by the glow of a flashlight under the sheets. The human and lagomorphic figures rendered on this scale look like ciphers, a hermetic script of unspeakable truths and pleasures and terrors. By presenting themselves to us as script, as language,they speak to us personally, where billboards do not, being public by nature.

The grand, theatrical, gallery-engrossing images arranged downstairs feel a bit Barnum and Bailey in comparison, (particularly the largely-ignored mirror-anti-mirror set of mega-paintings self-consciously arranged at the gallery’s entry passage, which suggest a miscalculated attempt at a grand gesture), not to mention the wallpaper-patterned, super-sized, cut-out stickers plastered randomly on the walls and and window recesses of the gallery mimicking the figures in the Mondo alphabet of tortured shadow-entities (above, with Mondo, his child and others), which seem as superfluous as pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey posters at a papal convocation.

The upshot of all this is that Mondo’s paintings are talismanic script, just as magic as inscriptions and mudras are in the context of cathartic trance rituals in Bali. Mondo has been in Bali a long time. His late spouse, the most significant woman painter of the 20th century in Bali, was Balinese. He knows what I’m talking about. And I perhaps know a bit about deciphering Mondo’s alphabetic code of figures, being a diehard fan of the ritual transmissions of obscure Balinese dalangs (shadow puppet masters).

Mondo’s are magic paintings.  Magic in the tough love sense of the word. And mark my words, they are not as shocking as they are shockingly affordable. But there ain’t no wonderland down this rabbit hole. Go look long and well at the works on the wall, or simply scan through the images of them on the BiasaArtspace website and see for yourself. But don’t forget, there is really no difference between bunny ears and devil horns. Ever.

An exhibition “Indonesian Textiles as Art” opened on 19 July at the Museum Pasifika in Nusa Dua, Bali. We were there. We saw. And we agreed wholeheartedly with the stance of Georges Breguet who mounted the exhibition, that the best textile arts of the archipelago are indeed art, and should be viewed as such.

A dozen or so well-mounted pieces were exhibited in the well-lit and spacious gallery space, in the same manner one would exhibit paintings. And it worked. The eyes have it. Just look. It’s art. Exhibition continues through October.

The highest highlights were two outstanding Torajan ikats, one of them spanning the entire length of the gallery’s north wall. Also a graphically dazzling hinggi woven by a member of the family of the Raja of Pahu (Sumba Island).

We enjoyed chatting with fellow textilians during the opening, including Bruce Carpenter, Robert van der Stukken, Heribert Aman of Köln, Meriem Kheira Peillet and Maurizio Rosenberg Colorni of Biji Arts, and of course, Georges himself (above left).

Start Here: Too Much Text

If art works demand a seven page “curatorial essay” then perhaps there is something amiss, some loose threads in the fabric. Shall we examine some random loose threads trailing out with frayed ends from this unravelled exhibition? Bearing in mind that loose threads can be fibers broken from the fabric they should have been warped or wefted into, and they can also be long, trailing anomalous strands never intended to mesh into the main fabric in the first place, but snaked outward from it to become incidentally entangled in other stories. Such wayward strands could easily snag on dinner forks, dissertations, discourses, or discarded hairbrushes, and stay fast there forever, much to our amusement or annoyance. So here we go with loose threads splayed outwards from Tisna Sanjaya’s Cogondewah show at Kendra Gallery in Bali, which opened last Saturday, 11 July, to moderate applause.

Loose Thread No. 1: Failure to Communicate

The works in Tisna’s Cigondewah group are socio-political. The socio-politial message is important, emotional, material, personal, and merits attention. The works do not altogether suceed in gaining it. What we have here is a failure to communicate. I quote from Cool Hand Luke of course, a reference which the artist will not fail to appreciate, being an ITB senirupa alumnus and faculty member. It’s not that we don’t support or empathise with the struggle of this artist, but the art above all, must embody and transmit the statement, text or no text.

During the exhibition opening I solicited comment from a range of people, and eavesdropped shamelessly. I heard, “the black and white works don’t work,” “I’m not convinced,” “only the self portrait seems really honest,” “Those collages were contemporary thirty years ago.”

Not only was there a failure to communicate, but also to engage. It felt as if the artist did not want to tell us something, he wanted to be asked. Digging deeper into Sanjaya’s story and the non-exhibited works one begins to understand that we may have been subjected to a yard sale in this exhibition. Interpret that as you will.

Loose Thread No. 2: Not Lost in Translation

The aforementioned seven-page curatorial essay was deftly translated into English from Indonesian by Sherry Entus. The thread incidentally snagged here is this. She was my classmate in Advanced Indonesian Language at IALF Denpasar in 2001, along with Rucina Ballinger, who like Sherry, is a force to be reckoned with (willingly or not), on the Island of Bali. I was fixated on taking this course in 2001, but IALF had no other advanced students at all to make up a class. I needed worthy classmates. I contacted Sherry and Rucina. The course is expensive. Sherry and Rucina devote their energies to loftier goals than making loads of dosh. So I offered to support them with subsidised tuition and free transportation from Ubud to Denpasar daily, just to get some classmates to make the course sizzle as it should do. I got more than my money’s worth from two such able and tenacious classmates.

The course would have been worthless without them, and without our extraordinary teacher, Bundhowi, an artist and poet and translator (notably of the poetry of Frans Nadjira). If Bundhowi and Tisna Sanjaya found themselves lost in the fog for a week on a Java mountaintop, I suspect it would be a grand thing.

Loose Thread No. 3: Goya

I am disturbed by Tisna’s seemingly gratuitous reference to Goya’s iconic painting, The Third of May in his work, Sandiwara Kita (detail above), where it is as central as the altarpiece in a Spanish chapel. Until Indonesian artists and art academics can refrain from worshipping at altars of gods alien to their own stories and histories, they will stand at the peripheries of the circle of discussion.

What is happening here? Are we speaking to Sundanese people about a deeply entrenched Sundanese problem in Spanish? Or are we speaking to art postcard collectors who line the coffers of museum gift shops in America about something they can’t begin to fathom or give a toss about? Or are we talking to fellow Indonesian art students, sharing an inside story about slide-lectures that separate the educated and internationally aware intelligentsia from the autodidactic hoi polloi? Or what? Threads snag and snap. To reference so blatantly an Art History 101 image here feels uncomfortable.

Other fibers snag in utterly incidental places. Goya grew up at home in Zaragoza. Today on the drive to work, we noticed yet one more among hundreds of acutely unremarkable cafes in Seminyak. This one just opened on Jalan Oberoi-Petitenget – - named for unfathomably irrelevant or irreverant reasons “Zaragoza”. It has one of those excruciatingly over-loved black weeping wall fountains out front, eagerly streaming the owners’ dreams down the surface of its fractured andesite mini monolith. While passing, we placed bets on how long Zaragoza would remain in business. We do this often in regard to new cafes and warungs and dress shops that are part of the retail pandemic striking this, the latest Bali Street of Dreams. We have found that we are usually overly optimistic, and the enterprises we wonder about shutter their windows far before the predicted doom-dates. Hope springs eternal, though, at least until the peeing monolith goes dry.

Back to Goya. While on his obligatory artist’s Grand Tour in Italy, he won second prize in a painting competition organized by the City of Parma. Just recently I became acutely aware of Parma after inviting a random sampling of my most wicked girlfriends for an evening of general dissipation at my house, while my partner was away in Italy. Two of them were Italian women whose respective connections to me are radically tangential, as are their generational stories. They were introduced and became fast friends instantly upon discovering their common roots in Parma. The one, a dealer in ethnic ornament, is back in Parma. The other, Ambra Calo, an archaeologist by profession, is working with street kids in Bali in an anti-paedophilia effort until she starts a stint at the Metropolitan Museum poring over the particulars of  bronze drums and related artefacts from Southeast Asia in September.

Her SOAS PhD. dissertation, The Distribution of Bronze Drums in Early Southeast Asia, is my bedside table tome, constantly being read and re-read with great relish. It recently garnered the undivided attention of a visitor to our house, Thomas Murray, an established tribal art dealer based in the San Francisco area, who spent the better part of this particularly festive evening at our house locked in seclusion perusing Ambra’s dissertation, which I could not think of lending to him, as Ambra herself gave it to me, and so kindly inscribed it, “To Susi, always a special source of inspiration”.

Ambra’s work sheds rays of light that pierce the murky gloom of Southeast Asian ancient history at all kinds of odd angles, illuminating in CT scan slices the whole enormous and important story of the region, from the bronze age to the information age. Artists here would do well to go there, into the rich but murky waters of their own past, before going to Goya and Zaragoza, I expect.

Loose Thread No. 4: Broken Transmission

The fact that so many important current works by Tisna (including some illustrated in the catalog) were  not shown in Kendra Gallery’s exhibition certainly ensured that the artist’s channels of transmission were disturbed by dropped signals. I refer in particular to his Amnesia Cultura series of 2008 (above, and below), which appeared in the catalog (four works), but not in the exhibition. An example is shown, at top above. These mixed-media works on military camouflage cloth are arguably, and visually, the most powerful and most beautiful of Tisna’s entire oeuvre. And yet they were conspicuously absent in this exhibition. What threads were broken here? Why were these works in the catalog, but not present?

That begs the further question regarding the opening party, “What happened to the artist?”  At the event, on “hari H” as the Indonesians say, he made no statement, nor did he seem to be present at all. The story was, “He’s late,” or, “He’s on his way here,” or some such vaguary. No presence. Was it shame? Non-support of the supporting gallery? Ambivalence? What factors were at play under the surface here? What transmissions were broken, between artist and audience, and by whom? Enquiring minds want to know.

Perhaps the one to ask is Kim Randall, the exquisitely charming manager of Kendra Gallery, who incidentally is up for the coveted Yak Awards “Woman of the Year” trophy (don’t miss the awards party on the 18th of July at Sentosa Bali). She’s got stiff competition, so don’t fault her if she doesn’t take home the Yak horns this year. With contenders like Susanna Perini, sole creatress of the Biasa fashion line and Biasa Artspace, it’s going to be a close race. (Aside: Sophie Digby, founder of The Yak has confessed to me under compromising circumstances that votes tallied mathematically for the Yak awards do not necessarily match the actual outcomes. Arbitrary arbitrage is a form of artistry here, and so say all of us. Seems that Yaks are animals, and as we know, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others (according to George, at least.)

Loose Thread No. 5: Intellectual Collateral Damage

Tisna is an illustrious ITB alumnus. ITB is Indonesia’s most sophisticated, international and intellectual university, located in Bandung, deep in the core of Sundaland, a realm of powerful yet peaceful ancient kingdoms illuminated by a syncretic form of Hinduism blended with local animism (c.f. Badui, Sunda Wiwitan). They still believe that their last king resisted the incursions of Islam in other dynasties in Java, and in his own family, by retreating into the mountain forests of West Java, where he transformed himself into a great tiger, the king of all tigers. They believe he still rules the land through supernatural powers, from his palace of trees in the deep forest.

So in Sundaland absolutely everything is an interesting mix – - secretive, intellectual, international, mystical, mythical, multifaceted, and modern (the Sundanese almost singlehandedly created modernism in design in Indonesia) . Where does this errant thread lead? Today I had a visit from two recently graduated students from Tisna’s alma mater, the College of Fine Arts at ITB. It was largely incidental. They are both artists trawling for paying jobs. As it turns out, one of them is keen on design, and the other is an aspiring fine art photographer, and son of the celebrated designer and ITB faculty member, Ratna Panggabean (of whom I have written previously and who I admire without reservation). This was a fortuitous meeting indeed, and a very enjoyable one. We’ll meet again, as I have invited these two fresh pucuk rebung (bamboo shoots) to the exhibition opening at Biasa Artspace (see above), this Thursday.

Also snagged here is the thread of my great good friend Didi Sugandi, who was part of the famous Students’ Struggle of 1978 at ITB, during which a patently smart and well-informed student body united in a mission to expose the corruption, manipulation and inequities of the Soeharto regime. Two decades passed before the truths they had waved bravely on their protest banners finally came home to the masses,  and Soeharto was ousted in May 1998. One cannot help but think that the audacity of those ITB students a generation before were instrumental in cracking the fused-glass cocoon in which the Soeharto regime had entombed the country.

Ok, now coming back to my two young visitors, who arrived so auspiciously and unexpected this morning. They revealed to me that current opinions bandied about on the finest fine arts campuses of this country hold that young ITB artists are “too intellectual,” and that their rivals at ISI (Institute of Fine Arts) in Yogyakarta are “too emotional”.  It was a great pleasure to hear their tirades against the Yogya pseudo-suffering-artists who, in their opinion, do little but sulk in dark corners, dressed in dirty black punk-redux getups with carefully matted hair, smoking constantly and complaining, while trying to look “radical” and “tormented”.  They said, “Those guys are so ridiculous! How can you be taken seriously in this world if you look like that, if you act like that? Artists aren’t like that anymore. We don’t need to make a rebellious statement in how we dress or behave. Whatever we have to express, we will express in our art, and that is as it should be. What’s with the clothes and piercings and dreads and tatts?? It’s all about the art, not about the attitude.”  I tend to agree with them, confidentially. They confessed as well, that the Yogya crowd spurns their ITB rivals as intellectual “jet setters”. To get a better perspective, I’ll have to grill some ISI alum on Thursday at Biasa Artspace about this. What fun. A vital dialectic is going on here. This bodes well for the development of art in Indonesia. Just let them have a knock-down, drag-out brawl, I say. Or a “paint-off” with the American Idol panel doing the judging. That would be a fine, fine arts reality TV extravaganza.

As if this isn’t enough already, yet another wayward thread catches hold. During my meeting with these two young aspiring artists with broad global horizons and deep local roots, they recalled that my (non-genetic) “brother” Didi Sugandi is an old friend of their mother (referred to as “Om Didi”). We got to talking about him, and his current career as a pirate-pioneer, sailing the high seas with an organisation known as Garis Depan Nusantara, on a mission to visit and document unblinkingly, the farthest-flung islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Both of the aspiring artists across from me at my desk this morning trilled, “We want Didi’s job!!!”  My heart sang like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, hearing a Batak and a Sundanese so enthusiastically embracing the majesty, dignity, richness and challenge of their own vast “Land of Water”, the archipelago that defines this region and all it was, all it has been, and all it can become. It seemed like a very good sign.

Loose Thread No. 6: Numbers

The catalog for this exhibition (which looked like it was reconstituted from some previous exhibition in a more moneyed capital), has some interesting numbers attached to it. It has 53 pages, showing 19 works of art, of which only 12 were exhibited in the show and 7 not. It has 6 empty pages printed full-bleed red (as in blood, as if we didn’t get that). You do the numbers. Amnesia Cultura, indeed. It’s kind of amnesiac. The only works I really wanted to see, were not there. That’s a bit of a slap in the face.

My final feeling is that something was slightly amiss. It seems almost possible that artists and galleries use Bali as a flea market, as a secondary unsophisticated market for art (and artlike things), with audiences and money, but little understanding. Bali perhaps looks like a good bet, with low overheads and high fringe benefits plus low critical standards. Just “good” is assumed to be good enough, and no one is asking any questions, nor is anyone saying anything much in the press and electronic media, other than congratulatory snippets or  regurgitated press pack baggage. Press packs get good print when they are passed around in Bali, this being an island with an excess of local and global print and an excess of outside attention, with the money sedating any inside attention to anything much other than the crop stats from the lucratvie bule farms.

Tribal talks to modern and the conversation is scintillating.

A truly outstanding exhibition at a truly outstanding institution. The Beyeler Foundation in Basel offers “Visual Encounters — Africa, Oceania and Modern Art,” through 24 May 2009.

The show juxtaposes masterpieces of tribal sculpture with important canvasses of modern masters; van Gogh, Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Rothko. The result is utterly sublime. The way these works talk to each other is like long lost friends who have just met by chance after decades. The conversation is animated, joyous, rich and deep.

Generously spread over thirteen exhibition spaces in the Beyeler’s Renzo Piano designed gallery, this exhibition suggests new avenues for serious art collectors to explore. The juxtapositions make both bodies of work resonate more strongly than either would on its own. This is an an aesthetic nuclear fusion, releasing tremendous energy. Go. See. Be awed and inspired.

© Photo Hughes Dubois, Brüssel – Paris

OK here we go, a bit late. The best gallery opening of the winter holiday high season in Bali was just before Christmas at Biasa Artspace. Indieguerillas were the artists, a husband and wife team out of Central Java, who hail from the worlds of interior and graphic design and from the burgeoning galaxy of Indonesian global geekdom. And what a show it was. These two (Bung Otom, pictured above right, and Santi Ariestyowanti), go boldly where no Indie couple has gone before, orbiting the separate suns of Javanese sacred iconography and global-techno-sound-data-culture. Swinging from the gravitational field of both of these in a twisted Moebius loop, and fueled by the spirit of post-punk alt culture, this binary star system of partnered artists explodes across our visual and perceptual fields with a pow that punches at least as good as Lichtenstein’s did for his own milieu.

What we have here is an irreverant bundling of the software of pop and global culture now, with ancient iconography, into a critical cartoonish package, and the artist-couple takes great pains to present it to us as it should be presented. The impeccable quality of painting is here, matched by meticulous competence in other media and means, as well. Laser-etched plexi meets epic-scale canvasses meets sound+vision on the outdoor terrace of Biasa Artspace into all hours of the night. (That’s Bung and Santi standing up to the scrutiny of renowned Bali-anthropologist-at-large Jean Couteau, above.)

I doubt many of the free-drink scavenging masses of Seminyak society knew why the vibe was so real and so alive that night. It was the art that did it, augmented by the spirit of generosity and inclusiveness that characterises Biasa Artspace.

This multimedia evening was an ecstatic celebration of generous talent and generous patronage on the part of Susanna Perini (above), proprietress of the whole Biasa biosphere. Who wasn’t there? Indo and mondo and molto and pseudo and slinky all gathered in the charged energy of an indoor-outdoor Indiguerillas moment. 

Indie = Independent/Indonesian. Guerillas = operatives on a mission using the means available in a creative and subversive manner. That’s what we got with this exhibition, and it surprised everyone who was paying even the slightest bit of attention.

The title of the show, Fool’s Lore, was apt. There we had the Punch and Judy poignant criticism of iconic Javanese wayang kulit, mixed with ironically deployed imagery from animé, China-pop, gaming and the whole gamut of pop culture icons.  Masterfully mixed it was – iconoclastic icon revival in the disco-ball light of now. (Even international tribal art dealers Michael Palmieri and Antonio Casanovas, pictured above, made the scene.)

To the title, Fool’s Lore, all I can say is “Lord what fools these mortals be,” and count myself willing or no among the foolish band of mortals. Thanks, Indieguerillas (Bung above left, Santi above right), for this moment of self-awareness which startled me like seeing myself in the security cameras of an office-block elevator, looking like the earnest little fool fixed in the Indo-mix that I am. That’s me silhouetted like a shadow puppet in front of the digi-video screen, below right.

I bought one piece from this show, and it wasn’t the free beer that made me do it. I had them slap a red sticker on the first work you could see on entering the gallery, almost the minute I arrived. It’s a laser-etched perspex panel on stainless steel mounts, representing a “gunungan,” the Javanese phalliform shadow puppet which begins and ends every story. The “gunungan” traditionally depicts within it all the contents of the known world, and my Indieguerillas “gunungan” has etched into it PSX-worthy icons of sounds and speakers and DJs and a hi-tech Hanoman (the monkey-god from the Ramayana) all woven into a unified visual groove as if they were parts of a single circuitboard. I could not resist this encapsulated statement of the schizo-Indo zeitgeist, in which the complexity and contradiction and raw humour of the moment is rendered eternally in plastic.

I had a fine evening, to boot, in addition to scoring a fantastic work of art. There’s Susanna of Biasa Artspace again, above. She clearly enjoyed the celebration, and I know it was a pandemonium of effort to get it all together, so bravissima Susanna.

Who hung this show? I forgot to ask during the opening last Saturday at Komaneka Gallery. What was extraordinary to me, and what begged the question about who hung this show, was the spontaneous emergence of a narrative, revealed in the sequence of images considered in turn while circulating clockwise (as one often does) around the gallery space. 

Beginning with a full frontal floating self portrait (detail above) that almost knocks you backwards down the stairs as you enter the space, and returning to it again after a clockwise circuit, a story unfolds. The artist earnestly explains that he did not intend any sequential relationship of the works as they were hung. Yet a story tells itself, as if it had an independent will to make itself evident.

This was Budi Agung Kuswara’s first solo exhibition, at the fresh age of 26, and that’s quite extraordinary in itself. Having been asked to prepare a solo show, he took it upon himself to fly very solo indeed, relying on the self as the sole inspiration and subject for his works. Whereas in the past he had painted literal and outward looking works responding to political and news events, for this show since it would be entirely his own, he felt compelled to turn his critical eye inwards and paint a body of work from that point of view.

On self-examination, as he explains it, he encountered a lexicon of symbols and sufferings that simply found their own way to the canvas, in positions and juxtapositions that the artist himself cannot explain or rationalise. He repeatedly refers to painful memories that he cannot see or give voice to, consciously. The process of Jungian analysis comes to mind.

Walking the circle from self-portrait clockwise, the obvious impression is that this is a story awash in water. Water is everywhere, and the sound system in the gallery was set to emit water sounds, waves, rivers, leaking roofs, fountains. One recalls the Balinese term for their island’s syncretic form of Hinduism, “Agama Tirtha” or the religion of water. The artist is half Balinese.

As the story opens, bleeding wounds mar the pained face of the artist, wounds that recur, but seem to resolve as things progress around the circuit.

At first, there are trees, but they are artificial and weapon-like. The trees become arrows raining down on the artist in a desperate fetal position, and only burst into life if they break the artist’s skin, thus he is the sole medium of growth. He is a sacrifice here, a Fisher King in a rainstorm of tree-darts.

Again and again, there are swooshes of blood in the sky of these paintings, a motif borrowed from traditional Balinese painting, which signify the winds of change, conflict and spiritual energy. The bloody Nike swooshes are increasingly tamed as the story unfolds, and become composed accents rather than uncontrollable energies of the atmosphere.

Everywhere there is water in its many forms. Oceans, rains, swimming pools. Pink swim goggles (rose-coloured glasses) become emblematic during the central part of this voyage in pictures, during the swimming phase, and they are replaced by opaque black glasses at the end-beginning, in the floating, flat, perpendicular self-portrait with lilo, which is the anchor and kayonan of this eternally recurring epic.

In this large-scale and almost rudely simple self-portrait, we are looking down from on high at the subject, as he floats on the vast proto-cosmogenic sea of the Vedas and the Bible, or on the surface of a Hockney swimming pool. What’s the difference really? We are looking down from on high at the inert man, his yellow lilo and the water. Since he wears black glasses, we can never know if he sees us or not.

At this point it must be noted that one of the first images in the cycle, where the artist’s wounds are most raw and fresh, like those of a beaten child on the day after, entering his classroom and responding to stares with stories of bumping into doorframes accidentally and such like – - in this image there is an expanse of sea, embellished by small tongues of flame spontaneously arising from the waters, and painted in the style of the Kamasan court painters of pre-tourism Bali. This mirrors the opening scenes of Hindu cosmogeny when flames first arose on the surface of the endless primordial sea signalling the Beginning. The artist has never studied the Vedas, and the classic Hindu cosmogeny myths do not figure in Balinese Hinduism. The flames here are close cousins of the wounds on the artist’s face.

The wounds seem to resolve of their own accord, as things progress, but remain in the picture, situated elsewhere, off the body, and work themselves out iconographically where red appears. Just as personal wounds might work themselves out in life, taking on more benign and even useful forms over time. Here, they become a shower cap protecting against the shame of a ruined coiffure, there an umbrella with its rib tips formed like drops of blood, (again, this object, the umbrella, is an instrument of protection from water) and yet again as swim goggle rims, protecting the eyes from water, and providing clearer vision into it. Yet in all these paintings the subject himself is in the water, artificually buoyed up, or swimming purposefully, or — in the umbrella image — taking shelter from water while immersed in the water itself (the work is entitled “Taking Cover while Soaking”). 

The blood becomes contained, as the story unfolds, solidified into neutral inanimate objects, and eventually is worn and used in a state of relative ease (the primary and final self-portrait with lilo, in red swim trunks). Yet here again, with the swim trunks there is a role of protection given to the blood-red element in the picture (as the shower cap, goggles, umbrella). It is not protecting the artist from water, it is protecting him and us from embarassment, and protecting or enfolding the means of procreation, as well, a loincloth. Thoughts tend to drift in that direction at this particular moment when Indonesia is suffering the collective neurosis of the Anti Pornography Bill which was just signed into law. The status of bikinis and swim trunks, and of human anatomy now is in question, and in a state of confusion, in this tenuously united country, where one large population attires itself in little more than penis gourds (koteka) for both formal and informal occasions, and the climate calls for less clothing rather than more.

Trees take various forms in this story, and merit attention. They appear not only as arrows, but as balloons (which can fly and float to help keep one’s head above water, as does the yellow lilo in the iconic self-portrait that opens and closes the story and then opens it again). Trees become stiff cartoons against resort walls, then the cartoon trees appear again blown into life by the winds of the actual world that blow comic book pages into a confused funk.

Clearly this circular story is the circle of self-study, which never ends, but begins again at every moment of felt stability, with the sense of stability threatening stasis and so starting the cycle anew. The unexplained wounds heal from one chapter to the next, yet manifest again in other guises, as red umbrellas, swim trunks or varnished lips contorting like speaking stigmata.

This is a show that was well hung, one might say. The artist had no sequential notions in mind. The gallery owner and manager also had none. It seems to have happened of its own accord, as if the symbols communicated to the hanger exactly how to put the story in order. It’s as valid as the stories that occur to us and seem so supernaturally telling when we randomly array a handful of tarot cards on a table. Frankly, I am completely dumbfounded by this fascinating example of how the unacknowledged story is the most telling, and insists on telling itself, in symbols that arise and interact while we are all looking the other way. Art breaks the barrier between the active underworld of busy symbols and our everyday world, showing us the meat of the tale, the tale we are writing in everything we see, say, suspect, manipulate, and decide.

And so we come back to the central self portrait. Floating. In the sense already mentioned, we are beholding the artist as if from above, as if with the eye of God, or as one is said to see oneself as death takes hold, according to innumerable near-death experience reports. On the other hand this is an iconoclastic crucifixion image. In the gallery setting, the viewer is looking up at the body from a point of view somewhere in front of the feet, as one looks up at a crucifix in a cathedral. Yet this Christ is somehow slightly flippant about his predicament, he’s got those arms behind his head, not pinned down by spikes, but perhaps pinned down in some sense by the contents of that head. 

Are we looking down as God does on a man supine, taking a rest break from the struggle of finding the self and validating it? Or are we standing on the floor of a gallery, looking up at an image of a man affixed to a vertical structure, a canvas or a cross, for example? Or a yellow lilo? 

The floating self-portrait looks simple, almost silly, yet it is undeniably important, an icon, and a tortuously ambiguous one. Observe this, and pay attention to the details, or lack thereof. Finally the wounds are gone! The red is neutralised completely, contained within the boundaries of a comfortable pair of swim trunks, which provide practical use value and are largely benign. The subject, the artist himself, is in a state of comparative, perhaps momentary, calm. He is enjoying a moment of balance, floating on unthreatening waters, perhaps tenuously, on an inflatable mattress that could be punctured at any moment (perhaps by those tree-arrows). He is ok. But he is not entirely at peace.

The story is so obviously not finished. There is so much tension and impending crisis in the central self portrait, and the water (in flux and always insisting on change) is invading the lower right edge of the lilo The story is so obviously not finished and how could it be, for an artist of two cultures, with his publically acknowledged Pandora’s box of repressed memories driving the unending process of self-analysis in acrylic on canvas? This floating state is merely a moment of respite, and the subject/artist knows it. The face, half-hidden by the black glasses obscuring the blinding sun, shows a furrowed brow. There are many thoughts still unthought. The image seems to suggest that the battle may be over, but the war will never be. It’s about to erupt again, and there will be blood.

Budi Agung Kuswara, when I spoke with him about the show (above), explained that he himself did not know what any of the images meant. He did not know why certain symbols came to him and demanded to be made visible, and hadn’t expended undue efforts to try to interpret or modify symbols and images as they presented themselves to his imagination. I believe that he is telling the truth. It is self-evident. He has mustered the courage to appear in his blood-red shorts, baring all, but for the eyes behind the glasses (and goggles), and to make himself evident to us, without apology or excuse. 

If this is what Budi Agung Kuswara is doing at 26, while others are tooling around destinationless on motorbikes, or emulating artists whose work sells well, or surrendering to the dictates of cinetron culture, fast money or escapism, then he is courageous to a degree that he evidently has no ability to understand. And that is the blessing and curse of being young and self-evident.