Heri Dono at the Triennial Art Exhibition

Heri Dono at the Triennial Art Exhibition

Chyntia Webb, Contributor, Brisbane, Australia

One of Indonesia's most internationally renowned artists, Heri
Dono, has been a welcome visitor at the Queensland Art Gallery
since 1993, the year of the first Asia-Pacific Triennial Art
Exhibition (APT).

Heri has participated in most of the prestigious events
including the APT of 2002, which recently ended. He returned to
Brisbane in January 2003, to take part in the Summer Spectacular.

This year the finale of the fourth APT was 15 days of Asia-
Pacific arts, cultures, myths and legends -- presenting
activities especially for children. The Summer Spectacular was
visited by about 2,000 children per day, during the summer school
holiday season.

Working with children is perfect for Heri, who is a Peter Pan-
style character. He has the capacity to see and enjoy the world
around him, with eyes and heart wide open, as children do.

He has always welcomed the local children to his Yogyakarta
studio-workshop and has often drawn inspiration from them. They,
in turn, are fascinated by his medieval style magician's
workshop.

It is full of recycled gadgetry, flying angels, fleets of
strange-wheeled vehicles, puppets, masks, groups of rather
menacing stone torsos with impassive faces, and much more.

In Brisbane Heri has engaged with the children in three
different activities: creating and playing the Bangelan, a
collection of weird musical instruments made from recycled
objects, staging a wayang (shadow play) and a creative project
decorating paper angels. For the latter activity there was a
large tent in the garden where the children created angels and
hung them up by the thousands.

As a child Heri was told stories about angels, which captured
his attention. For Heri, angels now represent the freedom to
dream and imagine. "Without imagination, life would be very dull.
Angels are free to fly wherever they want", says Heri. They
symbolize his wish for people to think freely, and fulfill their
dreams.

The angel theme refers to his striking installation, Flying
Angels, which greeted all visitors to the APT as they entered the
main gallery. These were a number of winged dolls with swinging
legs and male genitals. Embedded in their chests was a mechanism
to move the wings. Wearing helmets, they bravely hung above the
heads of visitors, delicate little faces inviting art-lovers to
fly with them to the realm of dreams and to explore the world of
contemporary Southeast Asian art.

When Heri was a student at a Catholic primary school, he was
punished for drawing pictures in the margins of his workbook.
When he was in high school he decided that he must look for a job
from which he would never have to retire, and in which he would
not have to wear a uniform. His personal dream was to become an
artist, so that he would be free to explore the life around him
and the world of his own imagination.

So he became a kind of art-angel, flying around in his own
amazing and creative realities and dreams. He has always enjoyed
looking at comic books, which have also fed his vivid imagination
and inspired his creations.

Heri is happy to be working in the field of visual arts,
because it is an interactive medium, and the viewers can bring
their own perception to the work they are seeing. In this way,
deeper meanings sometimes reflect back to Heri often something
which is unseen, "behind life", and often social and political
issues.

The fact that so many of Heri's installations have been made
up of groupings of figures or objects, which are all the same in
appearance, seems to symbolize and affirm his oneness with his
people. All three of his major installations in the APT are
groupings of the same object.

The Orang Kecil (little people), of Java are people whose way
of life often sees them supporting each other in various forms of
togetherness. Group activities and projects create bonds, and
offer mutual assistance, improving the quality of life for the
community. This can be seen at the village level, and in kampongs
within the cities, right through to the enormous group effort,
which achieved massive political change in recent years.

Heri also frequently works on his art creations in a
collaborative way, receiving input from friends involved in
electronics, crafts, mechanics and various other fields.

Heri's work reflects and comments on what he sees happening in
the society around him. He believes it is the role of artists to
inquire and reflect, to point out injustices, stupidity,
paradoxes, and violence.

In fact art has been one of the few vehicles for doing this in
the past. Heri has managed to go under the radar of censorship
using visual symbolism, while creating works in which he referred
to controversial and even dangerous contemporary issues.

Heri is profoundly influenced by the wayang, shadow puppet
theater, and has studied it for several years with Sukasman, an
innovative dalang (puppeteer) in Yogyakarta. Of course the wayang
has always been a powerful educative and communicative tool in
Indonesia.

One of the culminating events of the children's festival was a
wayang performance, narrated and performed by the children as
dalangs, accompanied by instruments from the Bangelan and some
atmospheric piano playing.

The children of the gallery employees, participated in the re-
telling, through the shadow puppet theater, of a story based on
the Japanese folk tale of Momotaro (The Peach Boy). Heri chose to
adapt a story from another culture to emphasize the fact that all
people of the world have similar myths and legends and are,
therefore, one family of humanity.

A brief glimpse of shadow in profile behind the screen, with
the young Australian puppeteer, wearing his hair
characteristically knotted at the back, brought to mind the
wayang character Petruk. Heri possesses the quality of being able
to merge into the mythological world which inspires his art, and
here was a powerful visual reminder of that.

Heri Dono will be in Washington D.C., later in February 2003
for his next solo exhibition.

(The writer is a cultural networker for the Australia Indonesia
Arts Alliance, www.aiaa.org.au. AIAA aims to foster friendship
and understanding via the creative arts.)