Ong's photographs a visual homage to Malang

By Myra Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Long before World War II, during the era when painters toured Indonesia capturing the country's beautiful sights on canvas, a young man was taking photographs of these same scenes.

His name was Ong Kian Bie. Born in Malang, East Java, on March 1, 1907, the youngest of two boys, Ong's father passed away when he was two weeks old but his mother raised her two sons and gave them the opportunity to be educated in Malang's best Chinese school.

Unfortunately this opportunity was cut short, and when Ong Kian Bie was 15 years old and he was forced to find a job to make a living. One of his uncles gave him a Kodak brownie camera, a new invention in those days. His first project was to take pictures of a speeding train. Ong's success was honored by his uncle and he became an apprentice in this man's photo studio.

His portraits became well-known in Malang and he took photographs of most of the weddings that took place in the city at the time. His baby photos also became famous and during a visit to Europe decades later he met many of his former baby models, by then in their fifties and sixties, who proudly showed him their photographs which were still in beautiful condition and in some cases had even survived concentration camps!

But Ong did not limit himself to studio photographs. He ventured out into the mountainous areas around Malang, and also went to Bali and Lombok to capture images of the nature and people there. He would pay great attention to small details, the harmony of the subject against the background and also the chiaroscuro, so often found in European paintings.

Many of Ong's photographs were published in the Malay-language magazines, such as the Sin Po and Keng Po. However, Dutch language magazines such as Java Express and d' Orient also bought his nature photographs.

He was honored by Malang's city council with a commission to take all the photographs for a book commemorating its 25th anniversary in 1939.

During the Japanese occupation Ong was not allowed to practice photography. This was not surprising because the Japanese government had sent photographers to Southeast Asia to spy for them. He had to make a living by making and painting name boards for schools, offices, shops and hospitals.

His wife, who he married in 1931 helped by taking in lodgers to earn extra money. His only daughter, born in 1938, often accompanied him on his trips to find painting jobs or to deliver the finished boards to the clients.

During this time, Malang became a sanctuary for many poets and writers who were also robbed of their livelihood by the Japanese because of the ban on newspapers, magazines and books. They, together with musicians and painters, formed a circle and gathered regularly for musical or literary evenings, but also to discuss social and political problems. Ong was a regular contributor with his own poetry.

I met Ong for the first time in 1993 when I went to Malang to find data about a certain Nyoo Cheong Seng, whose biography I was writing. Nyoo was a member of the cultural circle and I went to interview Ong about him. He was 86 at the time, living alone in Malang since his wife died, soon after their 60th wedding anniversary.

He was very busy in his studio and impressed me with his excellent memory. I believed him when he told me that he was 68; in fact he was fooling me, he was 86!

I had known Ong's photographs from magazines that I read in my childhood, so it was quite an experience for me to meet the photographer in person. It was even more exciting when I was asked to open his photo exhibition at Erasmus Huis in Jakarta in August 1996. This exhibition featured his photographs of tempo doeloe (past times) and recent works.

The exhibition was preceded by a lecture about Malang in the past and present and the audience, mostly ex-Malang residents, was thrilled to see the beautiful photographs and enjoyed recognized places in their city.

Later that year Ong received another tribute for his lifetime achievements. He was honored in the book Malang, beeld van een stad (Malang, Image of a City), by A. van Schaik, a well-written and well-illustrated history of the city of Malang. The writer dedicated the book to Ong for contributing so many photos, especially those showing the changes in the city over the last 70 years.

He had taken pictures of these changes and of the assault on his city during the revolution, when hundreds of buildings were destroyed. He did not take the pictures to show the beauty, but as a silent, helpless observation of events. He also showed his helplessness when, in recent times, old beautiful buildings, such as the Concordia were considered obsolete and replaced with shopping malls and other hideous structures.

Ong Kian Bie passed away in the small hours of Nov. 16 last year in Dordtrecht the Netherlands where he had been living with his daughter Ay-ling for more than a year. A long and active life thus came to an end. He will never return to Malang to record more changes in the coming years but his photographs will remain forever.