Cartoons serve up food from an Asian perspective

Cartoons serve up food from an Asian perspective

By Ingrid Maack

JAKARTA (JP): For most people Asian food might seem to be an unlikely source of inspiration for a cartoon. However, through the eyes of Asia's best known cartoonists, it becomes a vehicle for poignant commentaries on contemporary social issues and the cultural characteristics of Asian nations. Food in Asia Seen Through Cartoons is the theme of the Third Asian Cartoon Exhibition currently being exhibited at the Japanese Cultural Center in Central Jakarta.

By combining the often absurd with everyday gastronomical humor, cartoonists can use food as a symbol of inequality, poverty, consumerism and cultural imperialism.

The exhibition features 80 cartoons by cartoonists from eight of the world's most populous nations -- Indonesia, Japan, China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines.

This year's theme follows in the wake of the World Food Summit held in Rome last November to address the precarious state of the world's food demand. Similarly, the destruction of forests and farmland to make way for rapid urbanization and industry is exacting a heavy toll on the world's ecosystems and systems of food production. In most Asian nations, food production is lagging behind rapid population growth.

Chinese cartoonist Shen Tian-Cheng, senior editor of Wen Hui daily and one of China's leading cartoonists, points out the dehumanizing effect of mass food production in his work From Harvest to techno food. In Tian-Cheng's cartoon, technology is the food of the future, a situation in which farmers no longer work with nature but with data instead. The cartoon depicts a farmer harvesting a field, the heads of the crop metamorphosing into bar codes.

In Gilo-Gilo (Contemptuous), Indonesian cartoonist and literary editor of Suara Merdeka daily Prie GS voices a cultural complaint about the encroachment of Western fast food on Asian diets and culture. In the work, a street seller pushing his cart cowers at the sight of multinational fast food establishments. In another cartoon, he mocks the scarcity of water and the ready availability of soft drinks, depicting an Indonesian water buffalo drinking from a trough of Coke as the farmer perched on the animal's back drinks from a can of Pepsi. A not unrealistic situation in which brand identification exists within the country's paddy fields.

Perhaps Prie GS' most touching cartoon is The Farmer's Metamorphosis, a triptych depicting the journey of an Indonesian farmer to the city. Once a proud farmer riding a water buffalo, he trades his beast for a car, but does not find fortune in the big city and is instead reduced to the status of a beggar. A pattern of emigration and a fate not uncommon in Indonesia.

Editorial cartoonist of the Manila Bulletin Norman B. Isaac points out the power of fast food advertising in his work The Hamburgerization of the New Generation, a sinister depiction of a child literally torn between the grips of hamburger characters Ronald McDonald and the Filipino Jolli Bee. In another work, titled Project Coconut Cloning, he creates a parody of current food technology research, showing a synthetic food scientist waking from a nightmare in which his team has cloned the wrong nut, namely Adolf Hitler.

The event is organized by the Japanese Cultural Center and the Japan Foundation in cooperation with the Association of Indonesian Cartoonists.

Also included in the exhibition are 20 works from local Indonesian cartoonists, a feature which the cartoonists' association president, Pramono R. Pramoedjo, believes will encourage new cartooning talent.

The message is clear in M. Syaifudon Ifod's cartoon, showing a Jakarta scene in which a foreign couple queue for traditional food from a street seller, while a group of Indonesians laugh and point while queuing for fast food.

Indonesia, explained Pramoedjo, has a cartooning history which dates back to the revolutionary days before its independence in 1945. Many of these early works were caricatures mocking the Dutch colonists.

"Cartooning also was influenced by the works of Indonesian Expressionist painter Affandi. Many of his sketches were not unlike cartoons, and there also was a satirical message within many of his works," said Pramoedjo.

Pramoedjo commented that the reform movement and the fast changing media environment freed, to some extent, the hands of many of Indonesia's newspaper cartoonists.

"In the past we had to tread carefully, and often use symbols to represent leaders, but today's satire is much more direct."

The exhibition, which is located on the second floor at the Hall of the Japanese Cultural Center, Sumitmas building, Jl. Jend. Sudirman Kav. 61-62, South Jakarta, is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. until Aug. 3.