Marking changes in the metropolis

Marking changes in the metropolis

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Like a social scientist carrying out full-blown research,
Canadian artist Ken Pattern has in the past 17 years witnessed
the massive transformation of Jakarta from a collection of
tightly knit neighborhoods into a huge metropolis.

He has documented the changeover in his renowned, meticulously
drawn, portrait-like, black-and-white paintings and stone
lithographs.

Armed with camera, pen and ink, Pattern has witnessed with his
steely eyes that what is now a district of glass-and-steel
construction was once clusters of sprawling, traditional housing,
or kampongs.

The transformation was so immense that it subliminally
affected the style of his art, which has also changed over the
years.

As one of thousands of foreigners who made their way into this
archipelago, Pattern, who arrived in the country in 1988,
underwent a difficult time adjusting to its tropical climate. His
early works dealt with such climatic confusion.

His surrealism-tinged drawings, produced in the late 1980s,
carried images of icebergs melting in the tropical paradise.

And, like millions of tourists who were enthralled by the
country's idyllic nature, Pattern was also captivated by it and
his later works portrayed beautiful scenery he discovered on road
trips.

The routine persisted until 1991, when Pattern started to
realize that a lot had changed in a place where he based his
artistic work, Jakarta.

At first, he was struck by the stark contrast that prevailed
in the capital. "I lived in a gated and walled house with a
swimming pool inside. But outside the wall, it was just a regular
kampong and my house was like that of a rich person," Pattern
said in an interview with The Jakarta Post.

Pattern and his wife Helen Vanwel, once a consultant with a
private consulting company, then lived on Jl. Bangka, an affluent
neighborhood in the vicinity of Kemang, South Jakarta.

Driven by the stark contrast, Pattern went out to explore more
of Jakarta and later found out that by the end of the 1980s,
Jakarta was just a large kampong made up of small neighborhoods.

"I still remember that what is now known as the Sudirman
Central Business District (SCBD) -- just behind the Jakarta
Police headquarters -- was just a huge kampong," he said.

Pattern, who has remained a Canadian national, recalled that
there were not a lot of tall buildings along Jl. Sudirman. "At
that time, I thought that Jakarta was not a city, it was just a
huge collection of kampongs," he said.

He then decided to draw paintings of the kampongs by first
taking photographs and rough sketches of the scenes. "I took the
sketches and the photographs back to Canada so that I could do
the drawing there. But when I returned here, all had changed. The
places are all empty and in some places there were tall
buildings," he said.

Witnessing the rapid change, a sense of loss crept into his
mind. "The neighborhood had been there for so many years, but it
was taken away and a new Jakarta was being developed," he said.
Pattern had to rush in his work as the view was disappearing so
quickly.

The drawings that later came to fruition depicted the high-
rise buildings of Jakarta standing majestically above the tree
canopy, and rows of shanty towns below it, mostly in black-and-
white.

One of his famous portraits of the loss of the city's
innocence was the picture of a cow tied to a fence of a plot of
land surrounded by banana trees, with one of Jakarta's famous
landmarks, the Wisma Mulia building, looming large from a
distance.

The unchecked obliteration of the Jakarta's kampongs came to
an abrupt halt during the financial crisis, which hit the country
in mid-1997.

"Everything stopped and nothing really happened. In fact
people started telling me that I should produce drawings to show
that nothing happened in this city," Pattern said with a chuckle.

The advent of the crisis also marked another transformation in
Pattern's style.

Although he had lived here for over a decade by the time the
crisis struck, he still did not fully grasp the true nature of
the Indonesian people and their culture.

"The longer I stay here, the more I don't know what is going
on. Take the flow of traffic for example: To go from point A to
point B, you have to go through R and X, there is never a
straight line," he said.

Dealing with the confusion once again, Pattern returned to his
surrealistic roots and started using a labyrinth as a symbol. One
of his lithograph portrays Java as an island, with an intricate
maze connecting one spot with another. He also used it in a
drawing that aimed to describe the streets of Jakarta.

Another Javanese trait that has bewildered Pattern is the
flexibility of its people -- a penchant to bend the law and
regulations to reach an objective.

"In the West, people are so concerned about goals their
thinking becomes linear. They are so concerned about what is on
the horizon they don't see where their feet are standing. Here,
people are interested in the process and how to get there,
because by the time they get to their destination, it may have
changed anyway," Pattern said, whimsically.

Indonesians don't see what is on the horizon because they
are so busy about where their feet are, he said.

Born 62 years ago in New Westminster, Canada, Pattern
graduated from Emily Carr School of Art & Design, majoring in
printmaking. The incisive social critique in his art may have
been nourished when he took a sociology course at Simon Fraser
University, Vancouver.

He later found that stone lithography was his passion, despite
the fact that the art was fairly complex and demands a great deal
of skill.

Moving to Jakarta in late 1988 -- after years of living in
Beijing, which he called artistically `dry'-- Pattern never
foresaw that he would fall for Indonesia and spend a great deal
of time here, even embracing laid-back Indonesian demeanor.

"I have probably embraced it (the easy-going attitude) more
than I think I do. When I returned to Canada, I carried it with
me and it worked there," he said.

And after years of living in the "melting iceberg", Pattern
could not tell which was his first home, Indonesia or Canada. "I
think Indonesia is more in my blood than I think; even if I'm not
physically in Indonesia it's still going to be inside me," he
said.