Images of women, in various poses, “cut in neat pieces”, and each of those pieces redistributed separately on the canvas inside geometric, vertical/horizontal, surfaces. The attention is immediately drawn. But is it the delicate posture adopted by the woman that is thus appealing? Or the geometric construction of the painting? Should one think that the artist, in those compositions, simply wishes to add his own contribution to the millions of interpretations brought down to us from art history on the theme of the Woman? After all, these women, dressed or undressed, are virginal. Their body is never sexualized. So is he trying to give us yet another idealized version of the eternal feminine? Or is he trying to tell us more? Why this focus on women, this aestheticism, why this geometric structure in many of Chusin’s works?

These questions are all the more daunting as there are, in the exhibition under review, artworks with a quite different inspiration. Instead of gorgeous women, they present ordinary people, instead of focusing on the beauty of a woman, they present us with multi-focused scenes of daily banality. Instead of characters from the winning side of life, with beauty and all the attributes of wealth, one has characters from the losing side, with the attributes of a life of poverty.

What is common among these two types of paintings: they were made with the same painstaking attention to detail, and they issue from the hands of the same artist: Chusin Setiadikara, usually shortened to Chusin, 60.

Chusin is reputed to be one of the Indonesian masters of realism, and he has had, for some 15 years and more, a faithful following of art-lovers and collectors, many of whom did not miss the solo show he recently held at the National Gallery in Jakarta.

A master of realism, I just wrote above. Alright. But this realism must be qualified. As the opening paragraphs should make clear, Chusin’s “realism” should not be seen as a  singular, but as a plural. So different is his attitude that one should talk of Chusin’s “realisms”. He is not concerned with an objective representation of Reality. He knows reality to be not mono, but multifaceted, both in its physical aspect and in the way we perceive and approach it, view it and choose to represent it. In fact, as Chusin is certainly aware, the problem of “reality” is an old philosophical issue, and in the art world Reality as such, i.e. as an objective possibility for representation, has long been considered an invalid concept, at least since Impressionism. Chusin knows that there is no reality other than as a subjective and constructed fact, and thus he constructs his own reality with clear intentions in mind. That of aestheticism in the first instance—beautiful women in typical poses, set in an abstract-like geometrical setting—and that of social awareness in the second—the scenes with ordinary people. On top of that, something else is certain: in all these works, the painstaking “realism” does not belong to the scene, but to the iconic elements, i.e. to necessary, but secondary details. While these details do not have any meaning in themselves, they do “exist” in combination with one another as metaphorical instruments in the artist’s construction of meaning—of a private symbolic world of broad significance. And indeed it is because we can grasp this symbolic articulation of banal details that the works are interesting.

The different instances depicted above are two typical choices—aestheticism and construction of social awareness—but there are of course many other possibilities or combinations. And many other meanings. For example in Disharmony,there are women, but, aestheticism is not Chusin’s main concern here, in spite of his use of vertical horizontal construction. He is making a statement with a political connotations. The triangular geometrization is used here to emphasize not “beauty” but the metaphorical “demonstration” the work is all about. This work denounces and at the same time deconstructs the violence hundreds of Chinese-Indonesian women were the victims of in the 1998 riots. The vertical/horizontal grid symbolizes the psychological “prison” raped women find themselves in. Violence is hidden, in the background, and witnesses are speaking in hushed whispers. All the characters are realistically depicted.

All this shows that Chusin is this rare oddity in the Indonesian art world: an artist primarily characterized by his intellectual attitude, endowed with an uncanny ability to objectify not only his techniques and themes, but also to constantly objectify and question his choices and emotions. His art is highly sensitive, but also multi-complex and consciously articulated in each layer of its complexity. It combines intelligence and skill, a highly structured composition with painstakingly realistic details of metaphorical meaning. Such an art is not directly from the bowels, which surges out in a disorderly fashion, happen what may. Emotions in it are instead expressed in a meditative way by a well-focused interlinking of all its elements. On top of that it is an art that is constantly questioning its positioning toward art itself and the world at large. It is in this sense that it is contemporary.

Chusin does not hide these facts. When he talks about his evolution, he acknowledges them, for each of its stages. “When I painted my (geometrical) ‘women series’”, he says, “it was because I was impressed by the beauty of Balinese women, and I wanted to express this feeling while taking into account what Mondrian had shown us: that natural reality can be reduced to two structural lines: the horizontal and the vertical. So I organized my figuration accordingly, by combining realistic representation and geometry. I wanted to overcome the contradiction between the two.”

Concerning his later evolution, Chusin says: “My concerns are now different. It is not beauty in itself that interests me; it is the human issues that I see in the world around me.  So in my last Kintamani market, why do I show plastic objects? Because these objects are part of the villager’s understanding of modernity, which differs from ours. To us, plastic is unaesthetic, and is a factor in global warming. To them, it is a sign of their modernity.”

Chusin links his changing perception of Balinese reality to his maturity: he does not stay any more at the aesthetic surface of things. He tries to understand their deeper content. But it might well be too that this changing attitude is also a reflection of a changing Bali, a Bali that now strikes one as much with its social problems as with its beauty.

Chusin lives in Bali, but does not consider himself part of the Balinese world. He does not see the relevance of an art world, like that of Bali, largely organized around the expression of ethnicity and ethnic identity—see the article on Bali in this issue of C-Arts.But this is understandable. He is not Balinese, nor is he an indigenous Indonesian. His cultural world is not “local”, it belongs to the pan-Indonesian “network” that largely structures the economy of Indonesia; in other words he is Chinese-Indonesian, unlinked to the atmosphere of any particular “land”, to any ethnicity.

It could have been otherwise, but Chusin had in his past all the determinants that were to construct him as “Chinese”. He is from Bandung, a city long known for its tense interracial relations. He also belonged to a pure-blooded stateless Chinese family and was educated in Mandarin—before the closure of Chinese schools in 1965. All these references thus led him to emphasize in his culture the “Chinese” modern side rather than a Javanese or Sundanese one. Regarding art, as Supangkat explains in the artist’s catalog, realistic representation was viewed as a sign of modernity among the enlightened members of the Chinese “Diaspora”. So when the time came for Chusin to study, and given the fact that he could not go, as a Mandarin-educated Chinese, to a regular art school, he took up private courses with a string of realist painters. Owing to these conditions, his realism is not, and indeed could not ever become, that of old-fashioned academism. It originated, not from the mainstream, but from the margins and, as such, indirectly from the “meditative” “shi” process of Chinese art. It was never meant to be an all-encompassing system of knowledge and reproduction of visual reality, but a process of meditative-cum-intellectual dialog with this reality.

Chusin sees reality, quickly “grasps” its significant components and reconstructs it as a meditative image. He is a meditative realist.

Caption:

The Blue Sport Jacket