Sudjana Kerton: A pioneer of transnationalist identity

By Astri Wright

VICTORIA, B.C., Canada (JP): The largest exhibition of Sudjana Kerton's work opens today at the Ministry of Education and Culture's exhibition gallery across from Gambir Station.

In the history of exhibitions of modern Indonesian art, this one is of great importance. It marks the kind of effort that Indonesian art history and the art public so much needs, a broad, retrospective chance to view and discuss the work of the generations of modern Indonesian artists now deceased.

These artists witnessed the transition from the colonial period to Independence and fought with pen and brush (and sometimes arms) alongside amateur soldiers and self-trained guerrillas in the revolution.

These artists also witnessed the transition from traditional arts to Europeanized, touristic arts, and finally to a modern art with roots in the directly perceivable reality of Indonesian history and society.

The first generation Indonesian artists have not yet received their art historical due. Because art history is not yet taught in Indonesia as a specialist discipline with its own focus, its unique integrity and specific approaches, and because the modern Indonesian art world is still comparatively young, the books and articles that are published are like independent fireworks shot into a randomly conceived space.

Although Affandi's work was very visible during most of his long life, only a single major book has been published about him. The art historical dimensions of his work and the meaning and aesthetic of individual works still need to be explored further.

Major exhibitions of the work of Soedjojono and Hendra Gunawan have yet to be held; apart from one PhD dissertation in French on the former artist and a few scattered essays on the latter, there is no in-depth and publicly accessible art historical writing about these major artists.

Ahmad Sadali, Soedibio, Kartono Yudhokusumo and others have slipped into a fog of general oblivion except in artist circles where first-hand memories are maintained by those who are still alive.

Artists like Basuki Abdullah, whose work was of less importance in terms of innovation and the creation of broad artistic movements, have received more attention because they were good at promoting themselves.

Other artists of significance to the history of Indonesian art -- like Zaini, Wahdi, and Nashar -- have passed away nearly unnoticed. A very few first generation nationalist artists remain, like Hariyadi, Amrus and many others. Will they also pass away before their stories have been told to the public and their art is documented from all the scattered sources in which it exists today and is exhibited?

It is within this context that the mustering of a major retrospective exhibition of Sudjana Kerton's work is of great importance to artists, art students, art collectors and the generally interested public.

Innovator

He ranks not only as one of the important nationalist artists, but also as an important innovator in recent decades.

An artist's work is rooted in how that artist perceives, and places, him or herself in the world in relation to important ideas, religious practices, and community relationships. For some artists, the self is encountered best in contrasts, new experiences and surroundings, among strangers and foreign customs; for others, they are encountered in the less dramatic but equally profound journeys that take place internally and externally, at home.

The life and work of Sudjana Kerton, born Nov. 22, 1922, provides an eloquent illustration of this process, an example rooted in different ways in the cultures of Sunda, Indonesia and in America.

Sudjana's life and work seen as a whole place him simultaneously inside and outside of Indonesian art history, as he, in one period, followed patterns typical of first generation, nationalist Indonesian artists, and at a later period, pioneered patterns similar to those of younger generations of artists emerging in the last ten years.

One might say that Sudjana Kerton's life encapsulates elements one regularly sees over the span of several generations of artists in Indonesia, spanning nationalist and internationalist, local ethnic and universal concerns. His life can also be seen as contributing to related designs traced in immigrant histories in the "New World", where identities become bipolar or pluralistic.

Always open to change, Sudjana Kerton did not get stuck in one psychological, cultural, stylistic or thematic mode; nor did he slip into the inertia that early fame often spawns, in Indonesia as elsewhere, once it has become institutionalized.

Sudjana was always on his way, moving on, while carrying his memories with him like a snail carries its shell. He always drew, painted and made graphic art that alternately reflected where he was physically at the moment and the memories that were the most important to him, memories of the shapes and forms and events of his childhood in Sunda.

Three phases

Initially, Sudjana worked as an integral part of the relatively small group of artists who in the 1940s pitched their talents in with the battle for independence, working side by side with underground soldiers, activists and politicians hunted by the Dutch colonial police and army. He produced scores of drawings on the battlefield, in the meetings halls during secret underground nationalist leadership meetings, and during international meetings like the Linggardjati meetings in 1946.

While foreign journalists took photographs of some of these events, Sudjana documented them for Indonesian publications who had to rely on simpler technologies of documentation and reproduction. Some of these drawings still exist and can be seen at the exhibition; others must still exist in surviving issues of the newspapers, in national and colonial and research library archives around the world.

Since most of Sudjana's early paintings were destroyed by fire when the Dutch invaded Yogyakarta during the revolution, his most famous painting from this period is Napitupulu, from the mid- to late 1940s, was reproduced in the first edition of the Sukarno collection publication (Beijing 1956, 1959). However, for some reason this painting is missing from the second edition, published in the early 1960s in Japan, and the whereabouts of the painting is today unknown.

In the second phase of his career, Sudjana went abroad and stayed, disappearing (so it seemed) from the stage of modern Indonesian art. He spent time studying art and traveling in the Netherlands, France and eventually America, where he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York and settled, marrying and fathering three children. Working at a range of different jobs, most of them connected with his Indonesian background in some form or other, he continued painting in new styles developed during his studies. But the motifs and themes remained mostly Indonesian ones.

While his work during the 1950s and early 1960s was somewhat cool in color tonalities, and academically semi-abstract and restrained in forms, Sudjana's visit to Mexico in 1963 caused a radical shift in his art. Here, for the first time since leaving Indonesia, Sudjana came in touch with another people who had resisted colonization and carried out a revolution of their own, in which artists like Diego Rivera had played a major role and had, since the revolution, been recognized by the state with major commissions of public art.

During his visit to Mexico, Sudjana's colors exploded into a tropical intensity and richness, the human figure returned as the most important form to be explored expressively, set against a contrasting background, and the desire to return home to Indonesia which had never left him seemed to increase in intensity. This, and family circumstances in Indonesia, caused him to return home for his first visit in 1964.

The final phase of his life and career saw Sudjana's return to Indonesia in 1976, in his mid-fifties. Looking back, this was an attempt to pick up, personally and professionally, where he left off at the age of 28. The last 18 years of his life he spent in Indonesia, leaving only on short trips to visit the U.S. and the Netherlands. Once he had built his studio-home near the summit of the Dago Atas mountain in Bandung, he settled into very productive years of painting. His work from the 1980s and early 1990s is more familiar to Indonesian exhibition goers from several solo exhibitions and numerous participations in group shows.

To this period belong classics like Massage, Sundanese Wedding, Wayang and Family on Motorbike.

Coming home, Sudjana brought with him the benefit of years of study and exposure abroad to things foreign and, more importantly, to a culture becoming increasingly influential world-wide. With the clarifying of insight filtered through basic personality traits that age and exile can bring, Sudjana desired to contribute something new and different to the art world.

In particular he desired to develop teacher-student relationships and a dialog with art students and younger artists, having something different to offer from the experiences and knowledge of the artists of his generation who had never left home or had studied abroad more short-term.

He also desired to create significant mural paintings as a contribution to public art in Indonesia. Some of his dreams were never realized: the teaching of art had become institutionalized during the years he was away and the role of the state and the government vis-a-vis art patronage had changed after the end of the Sukarno era. Sudjana's response was to just keep on developing his art.

Art histories

With the increase in population movements (refugees, short- and long-term immigrants and travelers) and with families split up between continents yet maintaining contact and exchange in several places, the way that art histories are written will change. Art histories can no longer be exclusively limited to histories of single nations. As the Western art and academic worlds increasingly embrace the notion that plural cultural and ethnic roots inform ever more complex patterns of identity and concerns, new models of art history must be developed.

As a nationalist, Sudjana Kerton was fueled by passions of resistance, battling destruction and imagining new forms of construction.

As a battlefield artist and patriotic visual journalist, he explored new ideas about society, power and government while documenting underground activities and realities. Most importantly, through this intensive immersion in life-and-death action and existential reflection, Sudjana explored what it might mean to be that new thing, an "Indonesian". As an international traveler and eventually an emigrant, Sudjana explored yet another level and type of art ideas, forms and media, seeking art teachers, heroes and loves in different countries.

As an Indonesian and an artist, at home and abroad, Sudjana Kerton explored the various aspects of his self -- his family and cultural heritage, his memories, and his environment, testing and seeking to give form to the various resonances that arose in the course of his dialog with the world.

These are some of the issues which the art public can enjoy the fruits of in the present exhibition. Apart from the opportunity to view Sudjana Kerton's work in a broad context, it is a first and perhaps last chance to see his early work and his work made abroad before it disappears into private collections. Finally, and of significance to a nationalist artist, the exhibition is held in the space which is slated to in the near future become Indonesia's National Gallery -- a long-overdue fulfillment of the dream of Sukarno, later Adam Malik, and every generation of serious Indonesian art patron since. The exhibition runs through mid-December, with a symposium scheduled for the second week of December.

The writer is associate professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.