FX Harsono

FX Harsono

FX Harsono, one of Indonesia’s most revered contemporary artists, has been a central figure of the Indonesian art scene for over 40 years. In 1975, he was among a group of young artists who founded Indonesia’s Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement), which emphasized an experimental, conceptual approach, the use of everyday materials, and engagement with social and political issues. Over the course of recent decades that have seen enormous transformations in Indonesia, Harsono has continuously explored the role of the artist in society, in particular his relationship to history. During Indonesia’s dictatorial Suharto regime (1967-98), his installation and performance works were powerfully eloquent acts of protest against an oppressive state apparatus. The fall of the regime in 1998, which triggered rioting and widespread violence, mainly against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, prompted an introspective turn in Harsono’s artistic practice. He embarked on an ongoing investigation of his own family history and the position of minorities in society, especially his own Chinese-Indonesian community. The recovery of buried or repressed histories, cultures, and identities – and the part that the artist can play in this process – have remained a significant preoccupation. Through looking into his own past, Harsono has touched on concerns that resonate globally, foregrounding fundamental issues that are central to the formation of group and personal identities in our rapidly changing world.

screen shot from writing in the rain # 3.jpg

Courtesy of the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And then I think after the fall of Suharto in 1998, art historians and commentators have said that your body of works began to turn inward, and your portrait of yourself began to make an appearance in your works, for example, in My Body as a Field (2002) and Open Your Mouth (2001). What led to your turn inwards and your examining of your personal history as a Chinese minority in Indonesia?

FX HARSONO

After 1998, the political situation changed totally. We called it Reformasi (reformation). The culture also changed. A lot of things changed. During the New Order of Suharto, we only had 4 TV stations. One was government-controlled, and the other three were controlled by Suharto and his sons and daughters. After 1998, suddenly a lot more TV stations were developed, so people had more freedom to speak, and to criticise the government. The media or news can do so. I made a work about the transition, called Open Your Mouth. Everyone can speak, why won’t you open your mouth, but I realised that even with the freedom to speak, and lots of people are criticising the government, but the talk and criticism is no good, it had no value.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Is that why all the mouths in the work are all white spaces?

HARSONO

It means there is no content in the speech.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Maybe they don’t even know what to say?

HARSONO

Yes. Blank Spot on my TV (2003) is another work I made. Every evening when I came back from the office, I saw the news on TV. Very interesting, and everybody can criticise, so I documented what’s on TV with my camera. I selected some and presented it as an artwork. I placed the photograph of the TV as a white spot on the TV, so that it looked as if all the activists have disappeared.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It was also at this time that you came across some of the photographs your father took of the victims of...

HARSONO

That’s later. 2009. Before that, I started to question myself. What do I want to do now that the situation has changed so much that people have the freedom to criticise the government?

During this time, I realised that I’m Chinese and a minority in Indonesia, and have experienced a lot of discrimination. I’ve been focussing so much on the government and its acts of suppression, but I’ve personally experienced a lot of discrimination, so I felt that I wanted to talk about being Chinese.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You have a Chinese name?

HARSONO

When I was 18 years old in 1996, I had to choose between being an Indonesian citizen or being a Chinese citizen. In Indonesia, a baby born Chinese isn’t automatically Indonesian. When he or she reaches 18, he or she has to choose. When I chose Indonesian citizenship, the new rule after 1965 was that you had to choose an Indonesian name. Prior to 1998, the school was prohibited from teaching Chinese as a language. Chinese people couldn’t practice Chinese rituals or culture. This changed completely in 1998. Schools could teach Mandarin. Chinese New Year became a holiday and Chinese people could celebrate it. They could go to the temple to pray. I realised I had a prior Chinese name. I started to learn again how to write my Chinese name and I made a performance using my Chinese name.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What is that name?

HARSONO

Ho Fong Wen (in Mandarin). Or Oh Hong Bun (in Hokkien). I changed it to Harsono. FX stands for Francis Xavier.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Do you know what your Chinese name means?

HARSONO

Fong means harvest. Wen means literature. So it means harvest of arts, culture and literature.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So you were always meant to be in the arts.

HARSONO

(laughing) Yes, it does look like I was born to be an artist.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Writing in the Rain (2012) then becomes a very powerful work, because there you are consistently continuously writing your name in Chinese using black ink. And then it all gets away by rain. What was in your mind when you were performing that work?

HARSONO

I want to say I have a Chinese name, and I want to show that in the video performance. I write it again and again. But the rain comes and washes all the text away from the glass. It means for me that even though I have a Chinese name, for 32 years I used my new name. People know me as Harsono. I exist as Harsono. I’m thinking my Chinese name is unnecessary and not remembered.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What’s interesting for me experiencing watching the video of Writing in the Rain and then encountering a different work of yours Pilgrimage into History (2013) where you made rubbings of Chinese names from a mass gravesite. There’s a congruence between the two works. They echo each other, and it’s a troubling echo, a sad one. This rewriting of the names is something you keep coming back to. Different works you’ve produced have this aspect of the writing of the Chinese names. What draws you to this, that you keep coming back to it again and again?

HARSONO

The work you mention Pilgrimage to History is a textile rubbing from Chinese characters engraved on tombstones. The work started from my research into the massacre of Chinese people during the 1960s. I started this research because of my father’s photographs. He started to make documentation about the killings of the Chinese people in my hometown. I also visited some mass graves in other places, and when I saw them, there were tombstones which had Chinese names of the people who were buried in these mass graves. I thought about how I could make a work from this. I could take a photograph, but somehow it’s just a photograph. I wanted something that was part of this mass grave. It then occurred to me I could make a textile rubbing, it would be a trace of the original, and it would be part of the gravestone. When I started making the rubbings, I realised it was also my pilgrimage. It’s the way I make a pilgrimage to the victims. So I made a documentation of my performance and also as part of my journey of pilgrimage.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So, the writing of your personal name becomes part of the collective identity of being Chinese Indonesian, and in the larger fabric of Indonesia, it’s very much tied to this erasure by the Indonesian Government of the Chinese identity.

HARSONO

Yes. If someone has a baby and gives it a name, it’s not just a name, it’s a hope and a prayer from the parent to the baby. A name is a prayer – the parent is saying I hope that you will become a good person, or a rich person, or a wise person. So when the government forces a person to change his or her name, it’s erasing this hope and prayer of the parents, and replacing it with a new hope and prayer. A hope from the government, not the parent.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I like that. A beautiful way to say it. That your name is a prayer. So how does it feel then to have your work shown in Times Square NY on a major digital billboard where you’re writing your name in front of all these New York lights and glamour?

HARSONO

I was fairly shocked at the time. It’s amazing. Suddenly my video wasn’t showing on just one LED panel, but on sixteen panels. The feeling was amazing, very heavy for me.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What has been the reaction, or the reception, that’s filtered back to you?

HARSONO

On social media, lots of people have said it’s amazing.

Voice of America, in my interview with them, also said I’m the only Indonesian artist who has shown this work on Times Square.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I want to recircle back to our theme of education, since this is an educational initiative at The Creative Process. I want to talk about the role of art in education. I understand that you’re a teacher as well. How do you see the future of art in education? How can we incorporate art in education, in a way that isn’t stratified or top down?

HARSONO

If someone understands art, the effect is not just concerning the art, it’s a feeling. The mental and the ethical aspects become more cultured, and more socially aware. Art as education provides a way to help us respect others, respect their culture, their humanity.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It connects us to the human condition, doesn’t it? It’s a universal thing and it’s democratic.

HARSONO

Yes. Indonesia is very diverse, and it’s very important that people understand it’s not a monoculture but a multi culture. We meet and interact with a lot of the other ethnicities and we know that they have a different language and culture. We must respect this. Art is very important for educating, not how to become an artist, but how to understand and learn about others.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Thank you so much, Pak FX, for your time and your body of work as a witness to multiple decades of Indonesian history. Your work is a monument to not forgetting the sacrifices of people and victims in the past.

HARSONO

My pleasure.

Photo courtesy of Sullivan + Strumpf and the artist

It's about, can you handle the complexity of these things and, with American Indians, it's overwhelming, for the American public, this terrible tragedy and seeing Indians as part of the 21st century. Seeing Indians who are engineers or contemporary artists at Biennales is hard for people becaue they're always thinking about (not always, but) many of the kind of people who go to our museum. They're coming from a place of guilt and also not knowing how to process things. And so to always see Indians as of the past, which is sort of what happens. We're only Indian as much as we're like our ancestors, is something the museum has always been trying to challenge. And, you know, it's difficult. This is not a good time for complexity and nuance. We're trying to flip the script from the idea of just tragedy, this terrible past, to say, American Indians are part of the 21st century doing all kinds of interesting things. And the connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep, and it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the opressor. It's much more complicated than that.

–PAUL CHAAT SMITH · ASSOCIATE CURATOR
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I actually assumed in graduate school that I would become a teacher and I've taught in a number of different universities, but it was working with art objects and seeing them in museums like the Metropolitan Museum or The Frick that made me want to go into museum work and ultimately become a curator. So when I was finishing my dissertation and had to think about a career, I applied to a lot of teaching jobs and there was one job that year in America in my specialized field, which was European sculpture, and I was very lucky. But a professional career is a bit of luck as well as predisposition, so I knew I wanted to work in museums, and I was lucky enough when
I was able to find my way here.

–IAN WARDROPPER · DIRECTOR
THE FRICK COLLECTION
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think there are certainly social aspects to this because, you know, whether painting a landscape or doing a conceptual piece or large sculpture, I think artists, who are all involved in this creative process, I always say they are almost like bellwethers. They pick up on trends, pick up on anxieties, pick up on things in the world almost before the rest of us do. And artists get up, eat their cornflakes, go to work. They really do. And it's this creative process, which as Chuck Close once debunked and said, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and work." It's not always inspiration, but another great quote of his is that he always, anytime he sees a lot of painting like going to a museum, he's always astonished by the transcendent moment when you realize that this is just colored dirt and pigment laid on the surface with what's arguably just a stick. There's such a metaphysical moment when these images are created on a surface. In three dimension, if you're talking about something that has reference in the natural world. In three dimension on a flat surface, it's kind of a head-scratcher to start. So great art has a transcendent moment.

–ALICIA LONGWELL · CHIEF CURATOR
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is. I think it's very helpful to know history. I don't believe that history can teach for the future, but history can give us another dimension, can make us wiser with more abilities to judge our present. Sometimes we think that we invented everything, but this is not true. The history of human thinking is very important, is very useful for us to know different thinking of other people. At the end of the day, multicultural civilization is also very helpful today. I know, for myself, for example, I concentrate on antiquity, but sometimes I work on other civilizations. Some months ago I organized an exhibition on a very famous Chinese emperor – Qianlong (1711-99). And through this opportunity, I studied a little about Chinese culture, and I found very exciting things. And I can compare these things with our Western civilization. All this is very fruitful because we open our eyes, and we are not going on only one track. There are different approaches in life and different interpretations of the world and of societies.

–DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS · DIRECTOR
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

The whole thing is to get them to feel like no matter where their background is from, the difficulty they have in their personal lives, the isolation that they feel in relationship to that, that within the art community they are embraced, they are welcomed. All they have to do is just keep getting better at it, but the community is there. I think that something we're all looking for is where we belong.

–ERIC FISCHL
ARTIST
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

When I first started acting, I came to Los Angeles for a one week job. I was with my dad and we went to a production of a play called Fences. And James Earl Jones was the star. And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small town New Mexico. I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African American man in Pittsburg and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at thirteen, fourteen years old about a world that I really knew nothing about. Not even from school, even, but certainly not this feeling empathy for this specific man and wife, and she was peeling potatoes on a rocking chair and monologing ire at his character. And it was so moving. I did think, even back then I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.

–NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER, MAGICIAN & SINGER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator. Gropius said the artist is an exalted craftsman. “In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art, but proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination." And Steve Sondheim said, "Art is craft, not inspiration." And Rilke mistrusted any artist's knowing participation in his own creative process.

–TONY WALTON
ART & THEATER DIRECTOR · COSTUME DESIGNER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process