Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art

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Date: 16 May - 24 August 2008

Venue: NX Gallery, NUS Museum
Curator: Wang Zineng

One of the most important shows combining modern and contemporary Indonesian art opens in Singapore at the NUS Museum in May 2008. Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art is the first exhibition of Indonesian pioneer modern artist Sudjojono’s works outside Indonesia. The exhibition features works of Sudjojono (1914 – 1986) and 14 leading Indonesian contemporary artists at the NUS Museum from 10 May to 24 August 2008.

Curated by Wang Zineng – Singaporean curator, Southeast Asian art researcher and NUS alumnus – the exhibition brings together, for the first time in one space, 33 works by Indonesia’s most influential modern painter and some of its most successful contemporary artists in a confluence of generations, perspectives and styles in a common quest towards the ‘real’.   

The spectrum of Indonesian modern and contemporary art – contrasting the works of Sudjojono, widely acknowledged as the father of modern Indonesian art – with leading contemporary Indonesian artists is shown in a single exhibition through the theme of artistic representation of the real. No longer seen merely as a visual style in artistic representation but instead as enduring values and attitudes, the exhibition addresses the idea and discourse on the real by continually questioning the function of the artist in society and what constitutes the real as seen by them. From Sudjojono's idealistic articulations of realism as Indonesian nationalist and revolutionary aesthetic in the mid 20th Century, the exhibition traces changes and continuities in ideas, polemics and practices of realism from Sudjojono’s art to the works of contemporary Indonesian artists in the recent decade.

Click here for the exhibition brochure in PDF format.
Click here to view the media release.