The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

31 ARTISTS Top: Negotiation of Understanding 2016–17 Oil, synthetic polymer paint and giclée on canvas / 270 x 580cm / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore Below: When it Shook – The Earth stood Still (After Pirous) 2018 Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 120 x 200cm / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Zico Albaiquni Born 1987, Bandung, Indonesia Lives and works in Bandung The history of painting in Indonesia is a melange of disparate and interwoven influences. Alongside the country’s sacred, ethnic and indigenous painting histories, the traditions bear traces of foreigners who were mesmerised by the beauty of the archipelago, and of colonial powers attempting to commodify its riches. The stylistic shifts in the modern era occurred in dialogue with the Indonesian independence movement of the 1940s, and contemporary artists have continued to be influenced by more recent social and political contexts. Zico Albaiquni is obsessed with painting, and he has become a student and scholar of Indonesian painting. He tests and deconstructs the medium, particularly by analysing how representations of the landscape have been constructed and instrumentalised at different times, and he investigates the various roles of pelukis (the painter). His works have evolved around the Indonesian concept of lukisan (roughly translating as ‘painting’), and its differences in intent to the individuality of painting in a Western context. He considers the ethnic role of lukisan , where it is tied to the ritual, exchange and creation of sacred objects. 1 In his mural-sized, realist paintings, Albaiquni plays with the picture plane and different points of perspective, with figures, environments and imagery from different aesthetic paradigms inhabiting intersecting registers. He embeds motifs by seminal artists such as the Romantic painter Raden Saleh (1811–80), the revolutionary social realism of Sindudarsono Sudjojono (1913–86), and pioneering figures of the contemporary movement, such as AD Pirous, Dede Eri Supria, FX Harsono, Heri Dono and Arahmaiani. His recent works have also featured museum dioramas, taxidermied animals, exhibition settings and backdrops based on iconic examples of international contemporary art. Albaiquni draws together several historical perspectives to offer viewers multiple narratives about the processes and approaches to painting over time. His multilayered works explore unexpected juxtapositions, blending elements of high and low art, and incorporate the settings and tools of the artist's studio. He paints spectators into the works to probe the relationship between the viewer, the subject and the artwork. He pieces together irregular-shaped canvases, allowing picture planes to intersect, and he places his paintings in installations among studio objects or in unusual contexts. This experimentation with process stems, in part, from his interest in the genre of Mooi Indie (‘beautiful Indies’), a formative European style of Romantic painting propagated by Dutch painters, and later used to sell the beauty of Indonesia to foreigners. Albaiquni has developed a distinctive palette based on archetypal colours of the period, with the addition of new colours from combinations of these pigments. He also considers these colonial representations in terms of more recent examples of the commodification of the Indonesian landscape, such as the kitsch aesthetic of tourist art, or the idealism of real estate and advertising. These approaches sit side by side in his compositions as he experiments with the difference between ‘painting about landscape’ and creating a ‘landscape about painting’. 2 Albaiquni investigates the ways in which both local and foreign audiences have interacted with and circulated forms of Indonesian art; he sometimes travels with his paintings to expose them to different communities, which led him to incorporate aspects of ethnic Sundanese traditions into his work. He has installed works in natural areas destined for development, and also includes figures in his works associated with traditional Islamic art practices or fundamentalist groups, reflecting on how these affect the image of Indonesia today. Amid his broad experimentation with different painting styles and iconography, Albaiquni remains self-aware — he sees himself as part of a long history of Indonesian painters, and realises his works also become commodities in the art world. 3 For Zico Albaiquni, to think about painting brings together aspects of spirituality and belief with experiences of trade, colonialism and contemporary culture. He considers the function of art in the past, and the endless ways that art histories can be read to develop art for the future. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Zico Albaiquni, email to the author, 12 February 2018. 2 Zico Albaiquni, email to the author, 24 November 2017. 3 Zico Albaiquni, email to the author, 29 March 2018.