Portrait and images courtesy of Eko Nugroho
Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho lives in the Javanese campus town of Yogyakarta, which has a highly competitive artistic environment—“try throwing a rock and see how many artists you’ll hit,” he says—but the 29-year-old artist has had no problem rising to the top.
Since his first solo exhibition, “Bercerobong” (or “chimney-ing”) at Yogyakarta’s Cemeti Art House in 2002, the artist has shown at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, the Kirk Theatre in Utrecht, the Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka, and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, where he also had a two-year residency. “The places art has taken me,” laughs Nugroho. “Who would’ve thought a Yogya boy like me would get to experience winter in Europe, twice?”
The native Yogyakartan is self-made, having put himself through art school selling rice and peddling souvenirs in the street. Like his hero, Malaysian cartoonist Lat, Eko’s works are rooted in the everyday; and while his work appeals to Indonesia’s younger audience, older folk have a hard time accepting his work as “fine art.” His images reflect Indonesia’s politically charged environment and feature humorous but disturbing social satires barbed with strong political statements and an inimitable brand of “Yogya surreal,” with part-man part-machine characters accompanied by funny yet disturbing lines like “Please shoot me from the back.”
“To be honest, I do not deliberately choose to be political or to adopt political messages in my work,” Nugroho explains. “My everyday life here in Indonesia is dominated by issues such as poverty, social injustice, religious fanatics, corruption, and it is difficult to turn away from it.”
Working with a diverse range of media, the artist’s comic-inspired work appears in a variety of forms: murals, paintings, drawings, comics, zines, video projection, animation, and large scale embroideries. “It is an ongoing storytelling journey through different medium with different audience at different sites,” he says.
Nugroho is also the founder of Daging Tumbuh (“Growing Skin” or “Tumor”), an independent comic/’zine published via photocopying with a loose collective of friendly collaborators. “Anyone is welcome to contribute, and people are free to reproduce (and even sell) copies on their own.” For Nugroho, photocopying is a way of subverting ownership and “the market,” encouraging a kind of interactive element between artists, art, and readers. “It really doesn’t make any money, but it’s a lot of fun!”
Issue 24 Apprentices
Comments
Have ‘Happy Ever After’, a figure, which is part of a limited edition.
The figure, which is part man, part mechanism, has at least three faces and several symbols, some of them apocalyptic, (such as a nuclear waste symbol morphing into a skull), and some benign, (such as a duck). One arm appears biomechanical, and finishes in a cutter/claw, the other is softer and finishes three fingered hand.
Must admit, I have had some trouble understanding it. The easy answer artists often give is: “It is what you make of it, or read into it”. but this is never a satisfactory answer.
I need to know if the general shape of the figure means something. What is the significance of the symbols such as the duck, the floral branch, the inscription, etc? Do they carry additional meaning other than the obvious, which is better understood in an Indonesian context? Are the three faces meant to represent a post-modernist view, or hypocracy, ambuguity, meaninglessness?
More please!
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