Abstract
Taking as a point of departure the practice of Chinese-Indonesian Australian artist Tintin Wulia (1972–), the article investigates possibilities for social critique offered by the photographic image as it is co-opted by artists working in post-Reformasi Indonesia. Building on scholarship that aspires toward a more historically informed understanding of contemporary Southeast Asian art, the article connects Wulia's reworkings of photographs to a longer history of image making. This focus on the entanglement of the contemporary and the historical is sustained throughout an analysis of three works by Wulia—Ketok (2002), Invasion (2012), and Great Wallpaper (2012). In highlighting the ways in which Wulia's artmaking responds to, mirrors, and troubles broader structures of seeing, documentation, and representation that have shaped national identity, the article suggests that the reanimation and reproduction of family and identification photographs unsettle forgotten and suppressed histories of trauma unique to the experience of the Chinese ethnic minority in Indonesia.
Introduction
Part of a younger generation of contemporary artists working in new media in Indonesia, Tintin Wulia has emerged as one of the country's most internationally celebrated artists.1 Her practice spans installation, performance, sculpture, and video—a multidisciplinarity perhaps best captured in her 2017 site-specific installation at the fifty-seventh Venice Biennale, which connected the European city to a mall in Jakarta through live video surveillance feeds. Escaping the limelight of global art fairs, however, is Wulia's fascination with the photographic image, which surfaces in her early video work and installations. What might the presence and interplay of these photographs suggest about the kinds of aesthetic strategies adopted by socially engaged artists in contemporary Indonesia, and what role might they play in the navigation of the politics of cultural identity in local and global contexts? With a wariness of the meanings and historical specificities that may be lost in the international reception of her art practice, I reevaluate Wulia's early works by contextualizing them against the politics of image making and documentation in the constructed geographic and cultural expanse that is contemporary Indonesia.2 My methodological approach is thus one that recognizes that, as art historian T. K Sabapathy has theorized, “the contemporary and history are encountered as intersecting in manifold ways, generating varied shifting, fluid networks that may be apprehended historically.”3 In this spirit, I examine Wulia's manipulations of found photographs as a case study for the hauntological renascence of ethnocentric political skirmishes, repressed national trauma, and the fetishization of the document in contemporary Indonesia.4 I argue that her reworkings of the photographic unsettle and reawaken repressed memories of trauma and violence by accessing and manipulating the ways of seeing and documenting that have emerged in contemporary Indonesia. Thus, Wulia stages a protest against the strategic amnesia that obscures the violence inflicted on ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, disturbing and opening for painful recollection the most contentious core of such problematics in Indonesian history and collective memory—the “coup” of September 30, 1965 (G30S).5
A key work of interest is Ketok (2002), an early experimental video that reanimates found photographic objects while co-opting a distinct televisual language of horror that emerged in the aftermath of Suharto's resignation in 1998. The analysis of Ketok is accompanied by a close reading of two installation works, Invasion (2008) and Great Wallpaper (2008), both of which reproduce documents from Wulia's personal archives and further illuminate how Wulia deploys found photographs to unsettle misremembered histories. Tracing these early interchanges between photograph, video, and installation, I propose that Wulia accesses and occupies a liminal space of spectrality, secrecy, and haunting, transforming it into a site for renegotiation, speculation, and uncertainty—one that does not exist outside or independently of the top-down master narratives of state and nationhood but which is indelibly marked by them.
Image Making in Post–New Order Indonesia
Marking the end of the New Order after years of economic crisis and civil and political unrest, President Suharto's resignation in 1998 appeared to signal the beginning of a new era of democratic rule in Indonesia. For an earlier generation of artists who were considered the vanguard of the country's contemporary art movement throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, this era of reformation (Reformasi) paved the way for new possibilities of artistic expression. Many had been associated with the radical, anti-elitist art movement, Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, of the mid-1970s, which was motivated by a growing disillusionment toward the stagnation of the Indonesian art academies and its fixation on painting and sculpture as primary art forms.6 The emergence of art photography, new media, and intermedia art then, in the Indonesian context, was intimately tied up with the birth of a new set of values among contemporary Indonesian artists and the desire to find an authentic visual language of their own which would be capable of responding to and expressing the realities of contemporary Indonesian society.7 After the relaxation of censorship laws, those who were considered the pioneers of experimental art forms: Krisna Murti for video, Heri Dono for installation, Arahmaiani for performance, among others, adopted more politically aggressive messaging.8 Art historian Amanda Rath remarks, “it was as if the corpse of Suharto's presidency was forcibly exorcised through vicious imagery, political satire, and propagandist art and literature.”9 Yet decentralization and liberalization did not only impact the realm of arts and culture. For the ethnic Chinese minority, a sense of liberation was delivered in the form of a legal prohibition of discriminatory terms that labeled Chinese as non-pribumi (non-native) as opposed to pribumi (native Indonesian) by President B. J. Habibie in 1998 and the revocation of laws that forbade public celebrations of Chinese culture and the use of Mandarin Chinese by President Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000.10 Following these reforms, first-generation contemporary artists of Chinese heritage, most prominently, FX Harsono and Dadang Christanto, began to produce self-referential and experimental works that more readily engaged with the politics of cultural identity.11 Such concerns emerge also in the works of a younger generation of contemporary Chinese-Indonesian artists, including Wulia, Yaya Sung, and Octora.12 It is only recently that such a connection between trauma, national amnesia, and aesthetic practice in the Indonesian context has begun to appear in the scholarship on contemporary Indonesian artmakers, notably in the work of feminist scholar Wulan Dirgantoro, who examines the work of diasporic Chinese-Indonesian artists such as Wulia and Christanto.13
My focus, however, is to bridge this historical treatment of contemporary photo-based practice with an exploration of the sociopolitical concerns that emerge in the artmaking of this younger generation. Concentrating on the work of Tintin Wulia, a Bali-born artist of Chinese descent, I examine how her image making connects to historical contentions originating in New Order Indonesia while situating it within the general social and artistic atmosphere of post-Suharto Indonesia. For Wulia, the year 1965 is marked by the forced disappearance of her grandfather Liauw Liong Kee on December 18, in Denpasar, Bali, during the mass killings of suspected communists that began in October of that year.14 In her artworks, 1965 signals personal loss, secrecy, and state violence, serving as a temporal interface where personal, national, and global memories collide. Of particular interest are the ways in which 1965 has been reimagined and retold within Indonesia as part of an official, state-sanctioned history; to quote Wulia: “Whatever the State propagates becomes a ‘reality’ constructed by the State.”15 I suggest here that her conceptual explorations are indexed to the complex historical conditions that have framed image making in Indonesia and uses of the camera as a tool for documenting, recording, and truth-finding, and equally, for creating, world-building, and deceiving.
Wulia notes the influence of one film, released in 1984—Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI: “This film was our only official audiovisual resource on the communists’ so-called bloody coup attempt in 1965. It was compulsory for us to watch it during our school days in the 1980s.”16 Produced by the national film organization Perusahaan Produksi Film Negara in 1982–83 and distributed in 1984, the film was based on an official historical account of the G30S coup, written by Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh.17 Upon commercial release, it reached record figures in viewership—an achievement not unrelated to the fact that it was televised annually on September 30 and shown to students in compulsory screenings.18 For its remarkable domination over Indonesian memory, Ariel Heryanto describes the film as a “master-narrative” in Indonesian history.19 However, given that the film's plotline—which it presents as a truthful historical account—is derived from an unresolved controversy in Indonesian historiography, Heryanto conceives of Pengkhianatan also as a simulacrum.20 The gory scenes of torture, of Gerwani women gouging the generals’ eyes and mutilating male genitalia,21 and of a despairing wife smearing her face with blood, all formed part of a national strategy of image making and memory making based on unverified anecdotes—a hyperreal projection that sustained the New Order regime. Writing about cinema during the New Order, film critic Krishna Sen claims that “almost every film produced in New Order Indonesia . . . has a narrative structure that moves from order through to disorder to a restoration of the order.”22
The emergence of video technology in the late 1970s, then, was perceived as a threat to this carefully crafted vision of state order. Creating new possibilities for private consumption and channels through which foreign goods could be circulated, the video industry quickly became subject to government regulations and censorship, with twenty-one decrees designed to control the circulation of video cassettes enacted between 1983 and 1987.23 Yet, even within the closed power system of the New Order, video afforded some latitude for what Sen refers to as “disorderly readings.” Returning to the idea of a cultivated orderliness as the linchpin of the New Order regime, Sen underscores the potential of video to disrupt the narrative order by offering the Indonesian consumer new freedoms in the viewing experience—“of watching a film where and when they liked, turning it on and off, fast-forwarding, watching the film in bits and out of sequence.”24
These new modes of consumption, alongside the advent of internet forums, meant that widely televised films such as Pengkhianatan became accessible points of reference that could then be enlisted in “disordered” readings in online discourse. As an example, Sen and Hill identify comments made by an anonymous user regarding the proposed banning of a James Bond film, GoldenEye, in 1996 over an image of a hammer and sickle that appears in the film. In a letter to the Apakabar Internet mailing list, the university student penned: “[Does] a mere symbol have the magical power to turn viewers into Communists? . . . Even the film [Pengkhianatan] G30S/PKI which clearly depicts the hammer and sickle flag? Indeed the film is broadcast every year.”25 Similarly, Heryanto reflects on the ways in which Pengkhianatan as a discourse in itself may be read against the grain: “The master-narrative can be silent about, but cannot ignore, the 1965–6 massacres. . . . While invoking the 1965–6 trauma, the master-narrative is incapable of incorporating it within its discourse, control and manipulation. Images of the trauma must be left to the silent and heterogeneous fantasies of the general population.”26 Even as the so-called master-narrative of Pengkhianatan demonstrates a complex intertwinement of the state, national identity, and the photographic and filmic image, it captures only one facet of the plurality of documentary and image making practices that make up the contemporary Indonesian visual economy. But, as implicitly expressed by Heryanto, such top-down and bottom-up discourses do not operate separately but rather converse and respond to one another. Thus, to establish the context for Wulia's artmaking more fully, I wish to note here the changes and continuities in photographic practice that occurred with the start of the Reformasi era. Besides the obvious relaxation of state control over the arts and media industry and an emboldened push for democratic reform, there was also a symbolic shift in how students—who were seen to be the predominant agents of sociopolitical change and movement in Indonesian history—perceived the character of their group identity.27 After 1998, the student movement was increasingly thought of as a moral force, which would serve as an unerring guard for the ideals of Reformasi, democracy, and the people (rakyat).28 This moralistic turn in the framing of what was meant to be a modern and politically engaged Indonesian was accompanied by the bestowal of a new value upon photographs and ever-more accessible photographic technologies as “witnesses of history” (saksi sejarah)—documents tasked with preserving and recording the ongoing history of Reformasi as truthfully as possible.29 In this respect, Reformasi did not truly mark a disruption of the fundamental logic of image making and seeing that formed and crystallized in New Order Indonesia. Rather, the New Order regime's desire to procure the evidence for an irrefutable narrative of national development and unity, and of a linear historical progression from disorder to the restoration of order, is mirrored in Reformasi's preoccupations with “straightening out history” (meluruskan sejarah),30 authentication, and objective documentation. It is this logic of image-making, occurring both at the level of the state and more diffusely among the general populace in the post-Suharto era, that has continued to characterize a contemporary Indonesian culture of documentation31—a logic that Wulia's manipulation of photographic images and appropriations of contemporary televisual tropes not only responds to but also is deeply marked by.
Resurrecting 1965
How, then, might Wulia's playful reworkings of photographic material connect and respond to these quandaries of authenticity, truth-finding, and objective documentation and interrelations between image-making and identity, inherited from the New Order period? Beginning with Ketok, I explore the ways in which the work gestures toward absence, secrecy, and irretrievability as a response to moralistic fixations on truth-telling and factuality in the Reformasi period, even as it draws upon a familiar visual syntax borrowed from Indonesia cinema and television of the era to relive and remember the violence of 1965.
Ketok was one of Wulia's first works to receive recognition at an international event, receiving special mention at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival. Coinciding with the sudden growth of the local video art scene in Indonesia in the early 2000s, and the internationalization of several celebrated contemporary Indonesian artists such as Krisna Murti, Arahmaiani, and FX Harsono, Ketok appeared to mark a turning point in Wulia's career, launching her works into the purview of a global limelight. Even so, few critics have examined Ketok in relation to the historical conditions that frame the usage of photographic technologies in contemporary Indonesia. In a passage from her exhibition catalog, Catherine Somzé broached the subject matter briefly: “The tension built through the interplay of absence and presence, the ingression of the unfamiliar into daily life, and the impossibility to reconstruct an image of the past on the basis of documentary evidence . . . all point to the deep-seated denial of memory and the need to give body to a reality that remains invisible and repressed.”32 Continuing this line of inquiry, I revisit Ketok and the photographic objects within it, examining the ways in which they directly converse with a history and culture of documentation that is inextricably intertwined with representations of (Chinese-)Indonesian identity. I argue that, for Wulia, this engagement is critical to finding a viable visual language to (re-)remember the events of 1965, amid the pluralization of narratives of national identity in the Reformasi era and an ongoing silence around Chinese-Indonesian experience and memory. An important contact point between Wulia's artmaking and the overlapping historical narratives and mediascapes of post-Suharto Indonesia is found in Ketok's appropriations of popular horror tropes emerging in the early 2000s. Speaking about the work, Wulia divulges: “Ketok (2002), another of my short films, was intended to, amongst other things, poke fun at the then-popular horror TV series in Indonesia. The film was an amusing hit amongst my Indonesian audience. However, a few non-Indonesian viewers asked whether the events of September 1965 were behind the light-hearted story. Apparently, in making the film I utilised the language of horror I was most acquainted with, the core of which might have originated in 1965.”33 At the time of Ketok's making, the Indonesian horror film genre, or film mistik, was experiencing something of a revival in television formats. In the late 1990s, reruns of old horror films, both Indonesian and foreign, were screened on Thursday nights—a weekly occurrence referred to commonly as Malam Jumat (lit. “Thursday night”). Not long after, private television networks began to produce their own original series to capitalize on the popularity of horror.34 In 2001, a new formula for the genre was popularized with the airing of Kismis (a contraction of kisah misteri, translating to mystery tales) produced by the television station RCTI. This new variety of television horror was often described as infotainmen horor35—a format that combined the genre's long-standing fascination for the supernatural and sites of haunting with a pseudo-documentary style of interviews and dramatic reenactments of stories narrated by a host. The success of Kismis was followed by the popularization of a horror television series introduced in 2002. The show, Percaya nggak percaya (Believe It or Not), replaced the interview format with a presenter who recounted excerpts of horror/mystery stories to a reporter, who would visit the haunted site with an eyewitness and an expert in the supernatural (praktisi supernatural). Katinka Van Heeren, who has written extensively on the horror film genre in Indonesia, suggests that the outstanding factor that differentiated the series from films made during the New Order, was its fixation on authenticating the supernatural experiences it depicted, by invoking the authority of a religious figure. She notes: “The key word reiterated in the depiction of the supernatural in the horror infotainment series was ‘real.’ All series were based on true stories (kisah nyata), and what was recorded or reconstructed was claimed to be authentic and not fabricated (bukan rekayasa).”36 This inclination to authenticate the mysterious, as Van Heeren argues, is what disrupted the discursive boundaries of the New Order, intermixing the previously fixed categories of the real and supernatural and permitting, therefore, the unknown access into the lives of ordinary Indonesians.37 Indeed, the oppression of the Chinese minority during the New Order was justified by the regime's propagandistic use of visual media and cinema to enforce an ideological segregation between orderliness and disorderliness, native and foreign, real and supernatural. Within this visual regime, Pengkhianatan occupied a dominant position as the authoritative reference point for the events of 1965—becoming, in the words of the historian Adrian Vickers, a “national political horror film,” which, through the graphic depiction of torture, bodily mutilation, and corpses, “intended to almost literally demonize communists,” relegating them to a realm of supernatural, disorderly evil.38 More startling still are the confessions of the perpetrators of the mass killings, which testify to the affective impact of the propaganda film. In Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, Anwar Congo, a gangster (preman) responsible for the death and torture of hundreds of suspected communists, confesses that watching Pengkhianatan “is the one thing that makes me feel not guilty.”39 For Congo, and figuratively speaking, within the broader national imaginary, the film is a source of reassurance, serving to assuage any trace of guilt, to keep at bay the ghosts that return to haunt him by upholding those ideological divides that vilified the victims of his crimes. Ultimately, however, in the absence of such images, and in the quiet moments of remembrance, reflection, and imagination that lie outside the control of Pengkhianatan's filmic narrative, the trauma of 1965 returns. Congo muses, “When I'm falling asleep, it comes back to me. That's what gives me nightmares.”40
With its interludes of darkness and static, mysterious shadows cast upon walls and doors, and an interview-style narration between Wulia and her parents as eyewitnesses, Ketok borrows from the visual tropes of the infotainmen horor shows of the early 2000s, playfully undermining the rigid demarcation between the known and unknown and the orderly and disorderly. True to the genre, the work places an emphasis on visuality and an urgency to see and witness—the recession of the photographs into the pupil of a large, blinking chalk eye in particular accents the eminence of the optic (fig. 1)—even if only to highlight the myopic habits of perception and remembrance.
As the narrators attempt to recall the cause of the knocking noise, the images and video footage within the work appear in rapid and frenzied succession, hastening to offer some sort of visual aid. In one sequence, the woman and man speak over each other as they try to map the physical site of the memory:
Woman: It was just like some knocks on the . . . door, sounded like the floor was knocked, you know?
Man: That house of ours . . . 41
With no precise visual correlative to the spoken words, Wulia repurposes a photograph depicting the paneled exterior of a wooden house, which, as the image is rotated and cropped, appears to momentarily resemble floorboards. Taking over the narration, the man continues to explain the events of the night: “Now. One night . . . because I felt very sleepy . . . I went to sleep earlier . . . um and . . . I slept on the first floor. Usually, I sleep on the second floor.”42 As he speaks, the camera again traverses the expanse of two photographic images. First, viewers encounter the scene of a light-filled bedroom featuring the gauzy curtains of a four-poster bed, which never quite falls into the line of sight (fig. 2). Then, the narrator's brief remark concerning the change in floors is elucidated in a haphazardly navigated photograph of an old stairwell. Here, Wulia cleverly reanimates and rotates a heavily magnified portion of the photograph to give the impression that the viewer has traveled up and back down the staircase. Such instances of optical trickery point toward the fundamental predicament of Ketok—the instrumentalization of photographic objects to service and supplement the deceptive tendencies of memory.
In Ketok, this frenetic, almost feverish scramble for a visual and near phenomenological reconstitution of the most mundane details of a “supernatural” occurrence—an impulse that, in infotainmen horor, unfixed the New Order's boundaries between the real and fantastical—brings a sense of denotative ambiguity. Although garbed in the ostensibly kitschy tropes of contemporary Indonesian horror television, Ketok's imprecise and ultimately ambiguous attempts to reconstruct a picture of the past opens a space for speculation and analogizing. Indeed, it is in the intrusions of darkness, static, and white noise that we find an overture to more troubling themes of repressed trauma and unvoiced histories of violence, provoking commentators and critics such as Santy Saptari to wonder if Ketok may refer to a sense of fear and suspicion which emerged under Suharto's New Order, “which could turn any medium—from a film and newspaper to a human body and possibly also a door—into a tool for instilling terror and controlling society.”43
Such ambiguities also point to discrepancies within Ketok's appropriations of the horror genre. Straying from infotainmen horor's voguish compulsion to authenticate, in the spirit of Reformasi's mantra of “straightening out history” (meluruskan sejarah), Ketok gestures, instead, toward the fallibility of memory and vision. In Ketok there is no paranormal mediator and thus no way of verifying the presence of the supernatural. Moreover, the narrators—Wulia's parents—are by no means reliable witnesses. They speak in sporadic sentences and breathy voices, at times hushed and at times exclamatory, over grainy, out-of-focus, and overexposed photographs, which reveal nothing in particular. Manipulated by Wulia's stop-motion filmmaking techniques, these objects appear to have a life of their own, spinning, rotating, and traversing the distance between them and the viewer in a matter of seconds. While they bear no apparent relation to the events of 1965, such photographs take on an unruly and haunted quality, signaling the elusiveness of memory as they accompany her parents’ attempts to speak forgotten and irretrievable stories into remembrance. For Wulia, who is generationally distanced from the killings of 1965, such objects serve as a medium for what Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of Holocaust photographs, has termed “post-memory,” that is, “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.”44 There is a generative dimension in Hirch's elucidation of the (post-)memory concept which offers new analytical possibilities in understanding photographic images and objects. For Hirsch, unassuming photographs taken during the Holocaust and extracted from personal archives are “ghostly revenants from an irretrievably lost past world,” enabling the viewer to access the past and “to reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic ‘take,’” despite there being “nothing in the picture that indicates its connection to the events.”45 Post-memory transforms the conventional and mundane domestic family picture into an image—or after-image—of horror.46
The photographs in Ketok perform a similar function. In one, there appears the blurred and barely discernible face of a person standing at a window shrouded in darkness (fig. 3). In another, a young woman stands with arms outstretched, mimicking the posture of a scarecrow in a grassy field. These innocuous, sentimental images of what might appear to be a childhood home are marred by imaginative, indeterminate approximations of the kinds of suffering and terror experienced by the victims of both 1965 and 1998, which continue to remain as a taboo but publicly known secret. As if to stress the sullied, haunted quality of these objects, Wulia incorporates within them her own edited composites: as the camera zooms in on a grainy image of a well-trodden path, between intermittent flashes of darkness, a ghostly, faceless figure cloaked in black drapes which blow in the wind, suddenly materializes (fig. 4). Within the photographic plane—spaces of imaginative possibility and of material obscurity and indecipherability, which mediate the creative projections of post-memory—1965 returns as spectral phenomena.
If Pengkhianatan formed a crucial fulcrum of power, a central node in the collective reconstruction of the events of 1965, Wulia's Ketok signals the possibilities of an ever-expanding discursive site. Ketok harnesses the potential for the television format of Indonesian horror to collapse distinctions between the real and the supernatural, to allow for the ingression of social traumas into ordinary life. Through the tropes of post-Suharto horror television, the sense of disquietude and fear surrounding the events of 1965 are remembered, translated, and experienced once more, in ominous low-angle shots of imposing doors and swinging pendulums (figs. 5 and 6). It is in Ketok's lapses in vision that we gain a sense of incompleteness and absence of the master narrative, leaving us to wonder about and imagine the horrors that went unaccounted for in official histories and monuments.
The Photographic Image and Chinese Presence-Absence
Ketok, however, is not Wulia's only work to contain photographic images. Invasion (2008), for example, features a delicate site-specific installation of paper kites, hooks and nails, magnets, razor blades, and string, which tether the kites to small white flowerpots filled with crimson sand (fig. 7). Upon close inspection, the paper kites are revealed to be photocopies of legal documents—personal identity documents, complete with portrait photographs, which belong to Wulia's family members.
Agung Hujatnikajennong, a Bandung-based curator, writes about the work as a simultaneous exploration into “the fragility of cultural and political identities . . . both in the newly born, formerly colonised Indonesia and between the Sukarno and the Suharto government[s]” and “[Wulia's] self-projection and identification amidst the presently drifting, unsettled world.”47 For Edwin Jurriëns, Invasion vocalizes a frustration with bureaucratic procedure: “The white pots in this work function as embodiments of ‘the self’ which is symbolised by the grains of red sand. The self is connected by the red threads which can be seen as representations of blood vessels, to the bureaucracy, symbolised by the identity documents in the kites.”48 Such inferences are well-founded; regarding what Wulia has described as her “passport works,” that is, installation pieces created between 2007 and 2012 that include passports, the artist herself has stated her desire to “investigate issues of identity in the context of the nation-state” and mobilize the symbolic value of the passport as “a personal and political signifier of identity.”49 I am, however, more interested in applying to my analysis of Wulia's work what the theorist Ariella Azoulay has observed to be an ontology of photography.50 More precisely, I refer to Azoulay's conception of the photograph as an event—an ongoing process rather than a material output that allows for the civil co-optation of photographic objects previously embedded in systems of control and repression. For Azoulay, “The forms of gaze, speech and action of citizen mediated through photography are not wholly subordinate to sovereign sanction, and often bypass, suspend or evade such sanction.”51 Thus, my focus here is on the implications of Wulia's subtle but intentional displacements of these photographic documents as ubiquitous objects of bureaucracy in contemporary Indonesia.
I argue that Invasion must be understood in relation to the status of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility assigned to the Chinese ethnic minority under the New Order's regime. Studies of the Chinese in Indonesia have often described their legal and social identities as one of “in-betweenness” and unbelonging.52 Their liminal status in Indonesian society can be traced back to a tripartite system of ethnic segregation instituted during the Dutch colonial period as part of a policy of “divide and rule.”53 Along with Arabs and Indians, Chinese were classified as “Foreign Orientals,” ranking below Europeans but above “Natives”—indigenous Indonesians or pribumi. Fueled by a distaste for the perceived economic prowess of the Chinese minority, this system sowed the seeds of ethnic division and fostered a deep resentment toward the Chinese, which continued to manifest itself in the discriminatory usage of terms such as pribumi and non-pribumi and asli or non-asli in independent Indonesia.54 This widespread anti-Chinese sentiment was only exacerbated by the changes in political climate in the lead-up to the Cold War. Arguably, the most prolific scholar on overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, Wang Gungwu, outlines the two predominant perceptions of the Chinese within the region:
The first concerned the Chinese as an external threat, a potential fifth column for China. Before 1949 they were seen as possible agents for a powerful nationalist China asserting itself in the region; and after 1949, they were seen as possible subversive elements who would be tempted to work for international communism on behalf of the Peking regime. The second view concerned the internal threat in several countries if Chinese economic power was allowed to be the basis of an unsettling and irrepressible political power.55
It is important to note also that the social and political ostracization of the Chinese did not correspond to a cohesive or unified group identity. Notably, the bifurcation of the group into the categories totok and peranakan, based upon the extent to which ethnic Chinese assimilated to local society, signaled intra-group divisions and differing degrees of affiliation to the motherland.56 In the formal political arena, these cleavages were represented by those who favored integration, led by Baperki (the Indonesian Citizenship Consultative Body), and those who favored assimilation, led by the Institute for the Promotion of National Unity (Lembaga Pembina Kesatuan Bangsa).57 The split allegiances of Chinese-Indonesians were only complicated further after Chairman Mao Zedong decreed that all people of Chinese descent were considered citizens of the People's Republic of China and by the subsequent pronouncement of the Dual Nationality Agreement between Indonesia and China in 1955.58 In response, the Indonesian Ministry of Justice issued Law 62 of 1958, instituting the new category of a “locally born alien” to describe one “who was born and resides in the territory of the Republic of Indonesia, whose father or mother—if he or she had no familial relationship with the father—was also born in the territory of the Republic of Indonesia.”59
Neither fully Indonesian, nor fully Chinese, those who chose to remain in Indonesia shuttled between competing identities as local but “alien.”60 Increasingly, their position within Indonesian society began to be defined by a paradoxical status of hypervisibility and invisibility. The beginning of the New Order, marked by the brutal 1965 anti-communist purges, saw state-sponsored attempts to eradicate all aspects of Chinese culture and language.61 This included the substitution of Chinese names with Indonesian-sounding ones, the closure of Chinese-language schools, prohibition of the public use of Mandarin, and bans on Chinese imports, media, publications, and Chinese festivals.62 Yet these acts of erasure and forced assimilation were contradicted by the renewed hypervisibility of a select few elite Chinese-Indonesians in the public sphere. As Suharto's government, and its systems of patronage and clientelism, became increasingly centralized and rife with korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme (corruption, collusion, nepotism), the president's favoring of wealthy Chinese businessmen only aggravated anti-Chinese sentiment among the populace, for whom “Chineseness” now seemed to unavoidably coalesce with corrupt behavior, immorality, and economic opportunism.63 In a bureaucratic sense, the hypervisibility of the ethnic Chinese increased also with the expansion of a system of identity cards (Kartu Tanda Penduduk or KTP) in the New Order era, which regimented a comprehensive structure of state surveillance. Strassler writes: “Routinizing the act of sitting for a photograph, of submitting one's image and information to the agencies of government, was perhaps the KTP system's most effective contribution to this new regime of visibility. The KTP established a visible model of the position of the warga [citizen] as an individual under surveillance.”64 Notably, if the holder of a KTP was Chinese-Indonesian, their card would bear a special code to indicate their ethnicity. After the establishment of Law 62 in 1958, ethnic Chinese were then required to carry an additional document proving their citizenship—the Surat Bukti Kewarganegaraan Republik Indonesia (Proof of Indonesian Citizenship Document)—to access state services.65 In 1992, a periodic re-registration process was mandated by the government, requiring Chinese-Indonesians to go through a lengthy and difficult process of reapplying for such documents. At its legal core, the practice of issuing and reissuing identity cards sustained a paradoxical notion of the “local alien” or an internal other, perpetuating, to quote James Rush's invocation of the words of a fictitious Javanese of the late nineteenth century, the idea that “the Chinese are everywhere with us, but they are not of us.”66 Indeed, as Strassler observes, “The more they were asked to acquire documents, the more Chinese-Indonesians were marked as non-asli, or ‘inauthentic’ Indonesians.”67 Yet, as Strassler has convincingly argued elsewhere, Chinese-Indonesians still occupied key positions as the bricoleurs of a national image of a modern Indonesian self, even as the outward markers of their ethnicity were subjected to scrutiny.68 Here I suggest that it may be valuable to read Wulia's reworking of photographic documents in light of Strassler's appeal to examine the “lives” of objects such as studio portraits and identity photographs and to contemplate how they might unveil a triangulation of varying gazes, hidden agencies, and strategies of seeing within budaya dokumentasi that are unbound from top-down ethnonationalist frameworks.
In Wulia's Invasion, such legal documents are transformed: materially, spatially, and potentially symbolically. Folded into rhombic shapes and suspended by tautly stretched strings to mimic an image of kites in flight or, perhaps, scattered sheets of paper afloat in mid-air, the documents are physically repurposed for the construction of a skittish and child-like scene. At the same time, there is a sense of playful irreverence for the document—extracted from the trimmings of bureaucracy, of carefully preserved, uncreased paper, stowed away preciously in safes and lockboxes and removed from ordered, hierarchized, and procedural systems of filing, their air of authenticity dissipates. Correspondingly, the identity photographs become detached from state narratives of surveillance and hypervisibility in the space of the museum. To an unsuspecting viewer, there is no certainty as to whether the documents and the photographs within them are real or entirely staged; in fact, there is no guarantee that the casual viewer will even discern that the kites are composed of legal documents. Here, in the space of an international museum, the racialized markings onto the Chinese-Indonesian body, inscribed through repetitive bureaucratic structures of legal identification and documentation, are undone, even if only momentarily. Yet it is this potential for reinterpretation within the photographic image that also allows for the trauma of the past to resurface in the present. As Strassler reminds us, “The imprint of the identifying function remains, refractory and not entirely assimilated, even as the [object] is drawn into new circuits of recognition and identification.”69
In Great Wallpaper (2008), the remnants of a violent past are more readily gleaned (fig. 8). This time, the identity document and photograph are transcribed onto a wall, achieved through a time-consuming process of retracing a magnified image cast by an overhead projector. Rendered in almost imperceptible washes of pale blue watercolor ink, the work is visually evocative of a quality of hauntedness; curator Lisa Catt describes the wall paintings as “ghostly reminders” of the bureaucratic discrimination endured by Wulia's family, reasserting that “their belonging to Indonesia was not one of birthright; it was an administrative relation, authorized by those in power so that they could control, survey, and intimidate.”70 I argue, however, that the reworking of photographs here, as in Invasion, allows for a symbolic transformation of the object, transgressing those denotations of state and bureaucratic authority.
Conveyed from a photosensitive surface, mechanically imprinted by light, to a wall, through a fraught and human process of drawing, the work itself is generated through a process of transcription, from one medium to another. In this way, Wulia is only able to limn a superficial likeness of the photographic referent—the actual trace of the subject is lost in the transfer. In the absence of this indexical trace, there operates what could be described as a “para-index”—a term coined by scholars of cinema and the archive in the wake of the digital turn to describe a permutation of the Peircean “index,”71 which was originally theorized as a trace of the real, generated through the inscription of the light of an object onto chemical celluloid.72 The para-index is, as Jong-chul Choi puts it in his reading of Walid Raad's Atlas Group archive, only a simulation or “prefiguration” of the real, a “tangible indexical fantasy,” which draws upon the imaginative faculties of artist and viewer.73 The transcribed identity photographs in Great Wallpaper, in their tender and faulty re-renderings, inevitably gesture toward the absence of its referent, as they attempt to approximate and imagine it. The most captivating, emotionally striking feature of the photograph—the punctum of the image, to borrow the terminology of Roland Barthes74—is not the ghostly reminder of burdensome and oppressive bureaucratic procedures but the lingering and painfully conspicuous absence of the subject, haunting its photographic “presence.” In the space of the gallery, Wulia transforms such identity photographs into memorials and ghostly monuments, unleashing them from the rigid relation that they once served to embed between state and citizen.
Conclusion
Examining Tintin Wulia's art practice as a case study for broader movements in new media and photo-based art in Independent Indonesia, the article has argued for a historically situated reading of contemporary art practices that activate the photographic image and object. I have demonstrated that, as Wulia playfully reanimates and relocates photographs and documents in Ketok, Invasion, and Great Wallpaper, invoking but also overturning the habits of seeing that have imbued those objects, they become receptacles for the rereading and re-remembering of a silenced history. Given new life in her works, the innocuous family photograph mediates the haunting and reawakening of unspoken guilt and horrors of 1965. Likewise, the identity photograph, which functioned previously as a signifier of the far-reaching domain of state control and surveillance, is overlaid with new affective significance in Wulia's installations. Displaced, rearranged, and re-presented with care, they ask and implore us to consider if Indonesia's 1965 can be remembered in more than one way. In adopting this approach, the article also invites a critical focus on contemporary Southeast Asian photography that bypasses anti-colonial or globalizing fixations in reading art practices from the region, instead looking toward more nuanced histories of artmaking media that intersect with national, transnational, and personal histories and trauma. Future directions in research may involve the building of lateral connections between other contemporary artists working in art photography and new media in Indonesia, further scrutiny of the relation between photographic practice and the formation of ethnic minority identity, and regional studies that establish transnational affiliations in usages of photographic media.
Notes
Since the early 2000s, Wulia has exhibited in several high-profile international art fairs, including, in chronological order, the Istanbul Bienale, Yokohama Triennale; Jakarta Biennale, Moscow Biennale; Gwangju Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennale; Yogya Biennale, Sharjah Biennale; and Venice Biennale. See Wulia, “How Tintin Became the Most International Artist in the Universe.”
My argument is indebted to Benedict Anderson's theorization of a concept of an “imagined community” to describe the emergence and consolidation of national identity. See Anderson, Imagined Communities.
Jacques Derrida introduces the concept of “hauntology” in Specters of Marx . The English-language version was published a year later by Routledge. I borrow it here to suggest a rupturing of past/present/future time in my reading of Wulia's work.
The controversial “coup” of 1965 took place on September 30, involving the capture and execution of six military generals. The identity and motives of the mastermind behind the movement are still disputed in Indonesian historiography. The failed coup attempt, however, was blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party in a propaganda campaign led by then General Suharto and the military. Feeding into a long-standing hatred of communists and the ethnic Chinese, the campaign was followed by the purging of communists and the mass killing of actual and alleged members of the Communist Party. In the wake of the chaos, Suharto was elected president in March 1968. The killings of 1965 have remained a taboo subject in Indonesia.
Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society's Wounds, 22. See also Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru's manifesto, which outlines “the five lines of attack” of the new art movement, including the goal of “banishing as far as possible the images of ‘art’ which have been accepted up till now”: “Lima jurus gebrakan Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia,” in Supangkat, Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia, xix.
Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society's Wounds, 22. See also Yudoseputro, Pengantar seni rupa Islam di Indonesia, xvi. On photography, Zhuang Wubin discusses its emergence as a contemporary artform alongside other photographic practices in Indonesia. See Zhuang, Photography in Southeast Asia, 62–131.
Edwin Jurriëns suggest that the earlier generations of Indonesian new media artists responded to the fall of the New Oder regime and increasing availability of digital media with explicit interrogations of topical political issues in their work. See Jurriëns, “Between Utopia and Real World,” 50.
Habibie issued Presidential Instruction 26 of 1998; Wahid revoked Presidential Decree 14 of 1967.
Harsono and Christanto are arguably the two most widely recognized Chinese-Indonesian artists outside of Indonesia and are often lauded for their politically charged critiques of Indonesian history, as well as their open advocacy for the expression and recovery of a “lost” Chinese-Indonesian identity. See, for example, Genesis Creative Center, “Forget or Forgive?” See also Rodriguez, “Post D.”
It is worthwhile to mention that Wulia has directed collaborative, transnational projects that examine the 1965–66 killings. See, for example, #1965setiaphari or #living1965 (http://living1965.org/index.html). See also her ongoing project “Protocols of Killing: 1965, Distance, and the Ethics of Future Warfare” (https://www.gu.se/en/research/protocols-of-killings-1965-distance-and-the-ethics-of-future-warfare).
More recently, Wulia has opened up about the impact of her grandfather's forced disappearance on her identity and art practice. See, for example, her three-part narrative piece titled December (2021) from her ongoing project “Protocols of Killing” (2021–), which she discusses in “December, Protocols of Killing (Gothenburg).”
See Kompas, October 21, 1984, 6.
Gerwani was a leftist women's organization affiliated with the PKI and active in the 1950s.
Aspinall argues that the concept of the student movement as a moral force remains the most dominant frame of reference for conceptualizing student activism in contemporary Indonesia. See Aspinall, “Indonesia,” 155.
On the concept of “straightening out history,” see Vickers and McGregor, “Public Debates on History.”
I borrow Karen Strassler's concept of budaya dokumentasi or (culture of documentation). See Strassler, Refracted Visions, 16–17.
For usage of the term, see “‘Infotainmen’ Horor di Televisi Hasratnya Mencekam, Wujudnya Menggelikan,” Kompas, January 13, 2002. See also van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film, 149.
Tintin Wulia, Ketok (2002), color, stereo, single-channel video.
Wulia, Ketok.
See, for example, Purdey, Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 23–26, 29. For a detailed analysis of perceptions of the Chinese ethnic minority in Indonesia, see Suryadinata, Pribumi Indonesians, 9–68.
For relevant commentary on the distinctions between the two terms, see Skinner, “Chinese Minority.” See also Suryadinata, Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians.
For further explanation of the 1955 Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty, see Mozingo, “Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty.”
See Article IV(2) of Law 62/1959; see also Presidential Decision No. 52/1977—two key discriminatory laws that forced Chinese-Indonesians to change their names to Indonesian-sounding ones and banned the public observance of traditional Chinese customs and celebrations respectively.
Thung Ju-Lan's dissertation elaborates on the varieties of identity at play for the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, classifying respondents under four categories: persistence of Chineseness, a feeling of assimilation to Indonesian-ness, a global identity, or the conviction that work dominated their lives and that identity was irrelevant. See Thung, “Identities in Flux.”
See the Cabinet Presidium Decision 127 of 1966, and the Presidential Instruction 14 of 1967.
The author and former correspondent Adam Schwarz quoted an interviewee in 1989 as saying, “To most Indonesians, the word ‘Chinese’ is synonymous with corruption.” See Schwarz, Nation in Waiting, 98. See also Heryanto, “Citizenship and Indonesian Ethnic Chinese,” 75.
For a detailed discussion on the implications of the Surat Bukti Kewarganegaraan Republik Indonesia, see Thung, “Contesting the Post-colonial Legal Construction.” See also Effendi, “Never Indonesian Enough.”
Strassler, Refracted Visions, 200–201. Heryanto makes similar comments on this process of (re)constructing Chineseness, emphasizing the effects of physical attacks on ethnic Chinese properties and bodies. See Heryanto, State Terrorism, 30.
I refer to Charles S. Peirce's notion of the “index” within his system of semiotics. See Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce. See also Barthes's discussion of referentiality—“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. . . . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze”—in Camera Lucida, 80–81.
I refer to Roland Barthes's theorization of the punctum as a “wound” or “prick” that punctuates the “studium” or an intelligible system of meaning, often escaping the control and intentions of the photographer. See Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26–27.
