Indonesian children's art show travels U.S.
JAKARTA (JP): Curator and critic Joseph Fisher, who played a leading role in the KIAS exhibition of Modern Indonesian Art that toured the United States in 1990 in conjunction with the Festival of Indonesia, has once again curated an exhibition that is sure to stimulate a lively interest in artists of Indonesia.
This time round, however, Fisher has chosen to focus not on established painters but on the children of Indonesia as artists. In choosing to focus on children's art, Fisher says that he aimed to present "children as creators, citizens and important contributors to society, thus offering a needed alternative to viewing children as objects, consumers and victims of a world chosen for them by adults."
The exhibition, titled The Giant Who Swallowed the Moon: Indonesian Children's Art from Java and Bali, first opened in 1994 at the Museum of Children's Art in Oakland, California and by the end of 1995 will have appeared in venues ranging from the Children's Museum of Manhattan, New York to the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Many well-known folk themes are illustrated in the show. These include the title piece that "depicts folk behavior in response to the eclipse of the moon or the sun" as well as paintings featuring the Kancil, or "Mousedeer" tales and the legend of Joko Tarub. Other paintings feature cultural events like traditional marriages and cremations, the Jatilan "hobby horse" dance, performances of shadow theater or the celebration of Idul Fitri.
While nearly all of the paintings in the exhibition are "traditional" in the sense of aiming at some form of representationalism, many paintings reveal a boldness in the use of color and line that might well offer food for thought to artists of the older generation. Some paintings, like Veronica Triyasni Dewi's Women Making Batik Cloth, are marked by a sophisticated balancing of contrasting elements of form into a unified composition that would be the envy of many an abstractionist.
Fisher began to work on selecting works for the show in 1993, at the same time that he was completing work on his now published The Folk Art of Java (Oxford University Press, 1994). He dreams of bringing the show to Indonesian venues in 1997. He says that he hopes to stimulate further interest in younger creators of Indonesia, noting that "their creativity is nurtured by their ready access to a still-intact traditional culture and an educational system that allows them the space and uninterrupted time to expand their creativity."
Major contributors to the show include A. Hari Sentosa, director of the Sanggar Melati Suci in Yogyakarta, Nyoman Rudana of the Rudana Gallery in Ubud, Bali and Agung Rai of the Agung Rai Gallery, also in Ubud.
Sponsors include Yayasan Nusantara Jaya, Chevron, Inc. , Consulates of the Republic of Indonesia in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Houston and the Indonesian Embassy in Washington D.C.
-- Tom Hunter