FX HARSONO

Interviewed by Elaine Chiew

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

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Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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