Illinois State University Wonsook Kim School of Art welcomes to campus three contemporary visual artists with roots in Indonesia for a two-day visit that will include a panel presentation and workshop. Each event will focus on the meaning of diaspora and the position of diasporic artists in the global contemporary art world.
Public panel presentation
Thursday, April 10, 3-4:30 p.m.
University Galleries, Uptown Normal
Free and open to the public
This presentation will feature three contemporary artists with Indonesian roots working across the United States including Adam de Boer, Leonard Suryajaya, and Entang Wiharso. Alongside a brief presentation by each artist, Dr. Katie Bruhn, assistant professor of global art and visual culture, will moderate a discussion on themes including Indonesian history, the concept of diaspora, and how each artist navigates their relationship to “home” through their artistic practice.
Workshop
Friday, April 11, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
Office of International Engagement, Fell Hall second floor
Free (limited participation). Registration is required.
This workshop, led by visiting artists Adam de Boer, Leonard Suryajaya, and Entang Wiharso, alongside Dr. Katie Bruhn, invites participants to explore heritage as a lens for understanding identity as a fluid and evolving construct. After brief presentations by each artist, participants will collaborate on a mixed-media mural-map incorporating family photographs, batik textiles, and other materials.
Adam de Boer‘s work has combined traditional Javanese crafts, such as wood carving and batik, with Western oil painting as a way to connect his artistic practice with those of his distant cultural forebears. His coastal scenes and cityscapes explore the visual textures, cultural minglings, and socioeconomic realities of California and Indonesia. De Boer’s recent work depicts the cultural hodgepodge that is Los Angeles while maintaining a strong connection to his own Dutch-Indonesian immigrant heritage. De Boer is currently a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow and in 2017 was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Java, Indonesia.
Leonard Suryajaya uses photography to test the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family. His works show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential. In elaborately staged photographs bursting with competing patterns and colors, Suryajaya creates absurd but affectionate tableaux featuring his family and community. Enlisting his loved ones into his photographic project, he encourages ever more wild combinations and poses as means for them to perform their loyalty. The results are photographs that are tender and critical, bound up as they are with the struggles of familial authority and self identity. He has recently extended this in his work with school children and the complex but fragile societies they form among themselves and in relation to cultural forces both popular and traditional, local and global. Many of Suryajaya’s investigations are rooted in the particularity of his upbringing as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, as a Buddhist educated in Christian schools in a Muslim-majority country, and as someone who departed from his family and his culture’s definitions of love and family. Suryajaya is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
Entang Wiharso’s multi-disciplinary practice speaks with urgency through diverse media including painting, sculpture, video, installations, and performance. His dramatic visual language is instantly recognizable with its unique depictions of contemporary life, and its relation to the mythologies of a centuries-old Javanese and animist past and the high-speed, hyperconnected lifestyle of the 21st century. His work brings into sharp focus issues of national identity, migration, race, and power conflicts layered with social, political, and sexual critique, revealing a complex picture of the human condition. Recent work focuses on the duality of cultures and experiences in his two homelands, Indonesia and America, building on ideas that connect spirituality and transcendence with national narratives about progress and destiny through a sustained exploration of landscape and geopolitical structures. Wiharso is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.
These events are sponsored by the American Institute for Indonesian Studies.
Please email Dr. Katie Bruhn at klbruhn@IllinoisState.edu with any questions or if you need accommodations to participate in this program/event.
