Artwork: Dadang Christanto, Kuranthil #4, 2012, Cast aluminium, gold leaf and enamel as coating layer
24 x 16 x 16 cm
Dadang Christanto is featured in the 2023 Art Collector's Under 5k Issue.
“Christanto selflessly seeks solace for the innumerable victims of this tragedy memorialising the friends, family and strangers lost in time.“
A freedom of expression underscores the enduring career of preeminent IndonesianAustralian artist Dadang Christanto. Migrating to Australia in 1999 at the age of 42, Christan to was a key figure of the burgeoning Indonesian New Art Movement in Yogyakarta and Bandung in the late 1980s.
The artist steadily developed international recognition, exhibiting as part of the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993 before embarking on an illustrious three-decade long career taking his work to Japan, Korea, Switzerland and beyond.
Much of Christanto's work emotionally reflects on the politicidal mass killings and disappearances across Indonesia from 1965-66 perpetrated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Christanto selflessly seeks solace for the innumerable victims of this tragedy memorialising the friends, family and strangers lost in time.
Created in collaboration with master craftsmen in Java, Wuku 4 - Kuranthil, 2012 is both an homage to the past and a contemporising of traditional craft practice. As one of 30 cast aluminium busts Wuku 4 - Kuranthil abstractly embodies the personalities of those killed during 1965-66. Christanto created one anonymous bust for each of the 30 Javanese wuku, analogous to the western zodiac, memorialising the very real human beings rendered nameless in the casualty tallies of this harrowing mass murder.
Christanto worked on a smaller scale when painting the Painted Black on Their Faces series in 2017. The works are darkly confronting, drawing upon the artist's personal scarring memories of encountering lifeless bodies of political victims washing downstream in a local river; their faces cruelly disfigured with thick tar to render the individuals unidentifiable. Christanto's violently gestural brushstrokes and material treatment channels such brutality, triggering a forlorn bodily response.
The bodies of work Wuku, 2012 and Painted Black on Their Faces, 2017 courageously humanise those passed on an intimately individual scale with delicate attention paid to the characteristic personhood of each cast aluminium bust and acrylic portrait on canvas.
Text by Con Gerakaris
