Hanura Hosea's art serves as a mirror

Ridlo Aryanto, Contributor, Yogyakarta

If, some day, an old friend or a relative who hasn't seen you for quite a long time comments, "Wow, you've gained weight now", you need not feel offended.

This old friend or relative of yours intends to praise you because he see you as "prosperous", perhaps. Often, though, people are offended when being so greeted.

For some people "gaining weight" means "fat" and is associated with looking bad and being vulnerable to disease. It is, then, the opposite of an ideal body shape: being slim.

For Hanura Hosea, 35, however, a skinny artist who has never experienced being fat all his life, it has become his obsession to be able to gain weight. Not surprisingly, when an old friend greeted him, "You went to Germany only for a while but, look, you've gained weight", he felt flattered.

In fact, "I'd gained only a kilo or two," said Hosea, winner of the Philip Morris 1997 award with a lot of national and international exhibitions to his credit, and laughed freely.

Hosea has such a strong obsession about gaining weight that he uses a fat body as a symbol for his works expressed in a variety of media. His art work is in an exhibit titled Soap Document at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta.

In expressing his works, all depicting fat bodies, Hosea is not satisfied with only one medium. He has many perspectives on obesity. That's why when the works were still in a master format, they were in the form of a 50-centimeter-tall genderless fat doll that he made of a stocking stuffed with elastic and flexible dacron. He made it while he lived in Koln, Germany, from mid-2001 to mid-2002.

Hosea wanted to observe the spontaneous reaction of people he met along the 6-km stretch of road from his house to his studio. The photographs capturing the expressions of these people when they reacted to the fat doll made The Long Way to My Studio, a unique and expressive documentary art work.

In his other work, Danang Werdiningsih, Heru Nigraheni, Bambang Nuraeni, Hosea places three fair-skinned genderless fat figures donning a sports T-shirt but wearing no pants. These three figures, whose names, unfortunately, cannot identify their gender, are placed in three different poses and presented as open-perception works.

By placing these figures in a row in front of the entrance to the mini theater that will screen the five-minute-long documentary called The soap clip, Hosea puts those wishing to enjoy his work in the same position as the artist himself, so that mixed responses and perceptions will be brought about from various perspectives.

"I do not want to dictate. I don't even dare to give guidance to the audience. This is a work free from reasoning and perception," said Hosea, whose wife is a German artist, Alexandra Kuss.

Again, Hosea gives prominence to the multi-interpretable characteristics of contemporary fine art in his Dewo Prabandari by featuring a flying fat body with twigs as the wings controlling four dogs made of ceramics. This work is intentionally created to give the impression of abstract art.

In this context, we may mistakenly believe that the fat god is the symbol of power, controlling dogs, which symbolize critical prodemocracy forces.

"I know that the interpretation will be in this direction. In fact, my message is trivial. Don't despise dogs as contemptible and useless animals. In many villages, dogs are more useful in maintaining security than the police or civil defense personnel. This is trivial but if we realize that we could save the dog population," said Hosea, who was born in Yogyakarta's western regency of Kulonprogo, on Dec. 24, 1966, laughing.

Then Hosea expresses his satire through Djoko Wulangsari, which he has created as his protest against the punishment he received when he was still an elementary school pupil. He was asked to stand beside the blackboard, turning his back on the class.

"I never believed that this educational model would be a solution to our educational problems," said Hosea, who also imbues his work with political flavor, as his drawing The soap clip, poster version testifies.

Here he features winged, obese people sleeping on a pile of pillows, fat people eating food while reading magazines that have catapulted them to fame. It seems he would like to capture the typical characteristics of present-day politicians. They call for a revolution but they continue to live in the lap of luxury.

Hosea uses obese figures as a symbol with which he records various social situations and routine activities around us, things that we have often forgotten. His works constitute a soap document, a symbol of the slippery character of a human being that can metamorphose to suit his purposes.

He conveys seemingly trivial messages that serve to remind people of the need to appreciate better routine activities in life. In his exhibition, Hosea presents his works as self- criticism and those who enjoy these works may also use them as a mirror.

-- Soap Document by Hanura Hosea at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, until Sept. 29, 2002.