The name FX Harsono emerged in the 1970s when artists in Indonesia were busy exploring and questioning new grounds, whether in terms of themes or artistic media and aesthetics--abstract, figurative, and decorative. FX Harsono was an "art-activist," and a marked figure in the "new art movement" in Indonesia.

Around that time, Harsono displayed his work that would be seen as a representative work: a rifle in a wired cage with the text Paling Top '75 (The Top One '75). The work symbolized the various aspects of the contemporary political situation under the New Order Regime, about the country's military spending, and about the public memory of armed violence. At the same time, the work marked a new phase in the development of contemporary art in Indonesia with the use of new media and the application of objects with the representative systems that surrounded them.

FX Harsono was active in many cities and towns in Indonesia where the art world was throbbing with energy. Internationally, he was also involved in various artistic endeavors. These experiences had influenced Harsono's view on art as a modern terminology with unstable constructions. Harsono was aware that various aspects outside the art world itself also helped construct the ways art was expressed. He realized that those aspects also influenced the choices of techniques and media used to convey the artist's thoughts.

If in the first decade of his artistic career Harsono largely questioned about the dominating aesthetics in the Indonesian art world, in his second decade he was mostly engaged by thoughts about the dominance of the political power. Harsono's works revealed these two preoccupations, with the themes ranging from environmental matters, urban issues of the developing world, to various representations of the society. Harsono mostly chose to express his thoughts with installation projects, although works in the forms of photography, digital images, or printmaking had also enriched his oeuvre.

Perhaps Harsono is now facing a new phase in the third decade of his artistic career, where the mass media has taken over from art the function to express social and political grievances. The public has become more critical, and even dominant some of the times, although this newly gained power had not reached an equal footing with the state. Critical works of art are overlapping with criticism through the mass media or through non-governmental organizations. His latest solo exhibition, Displaced (2003), was for Harsono mostly a representation of his restlessness about the production and reproduction of signs, his meditation on identity and on the essence of being human. It also betrayed his musing about the mistakes of history, and the alienation of the individual in time and spatial context. His previous concern about the social issues, however, was still present in some of his later works.

Aminudin TH Siregar

Born on March 22, 1949 in Blitar.
Studied at Indonesia Fine Art Academy (ASRI), Yogyakarta; (1974), Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) (BFA; 1991).

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1998 "Victim", Cemeti Gallery, Yogyakarta.
2003 "Displaced", National Gallery, Jakarta.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1998 "Meet 3 : 3 in Yogyakarta", 3 Indonesian artists and 3 German artists, Purna Budaya Art Centre, Yogyakarta.
1999 "Volume & Form, Singapore; "Art Document 1999 in Kanaz", Kanazu Forest Museum, Japa.
2000 "Kwangju Biennial", Korea; "Indonesia Reformations & Protests in Beeld 1995-2000", Nusantara Museum, Delft, Netherlands.
2001 "Print in the Future", Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta; "International Print Triennial in Kanagawa 2001", Kanagawa, Yokohama, Japan; "Reading Frida Kahlo", Nadi Gallery, Jakarta.

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