Astri Wright
Semsar Siahaan: In memoriam (2005)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 28 Feb 05 Semsar Siahaan, known to many people in Victoria involved with art, human rights activism, and Indonesia, died of a sudden heart attack in Tabanan, Bali, on Wednesday February 23rd. Semsar was born in Medan, capital of North Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1952, a Batak with Indian blood via his...
Nindityo Adipurnomo: From solo to mass, spiritual to social (2003)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 01 Aug 03 It was all much simpler in the late 1980s. Then Nindityo Adipurnomo was a painter, just graduated from art school. A painter who fitted neatly into the category of contemporary Asian artists adapting select materials and styles of Euro-American invention as foreign media with which, combined...
Abdul Aziz (1928 - 2002): In memoriam
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 01 Feb 02 Abdul Aziz (1928 - 2002) Nationalist and revolution era painter Abdul Aziz passed away on January 22nd, at 10.30 am. He was buried the same afternoon in accordance with Muslim custom. Being a Hero of the Republic for his services in the Revolutionary Student Army, 1949, Abdul Aziz was put to...
Hendra Gunawan "returns" to Indonesian public (2001)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 16 Sep 01 Astri Wright, an associate professor at the University of Victoria in Canada and a long-standing researcher of modern and contemporary Indonesian art, is the co-author of Hendra Gunawan: A Great Modern Indonesian Painter, a new work on the life and oeuvre of Hendra Gunawan, the famous...
Diyanto at Museum of Modern Art, Pessau, Germany (2001)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 02 Sep 01 Diyanto. Victim 1, (1987). Modern Indonesian art is making inroads in new places. The Cafe Museum exhibition, in the Museum of Modern Art in the small southern German town of Passau, includes works by Indonesian painter Diyanto, who is also one of 14 artists taking part in the exhibition Not...
Contemporary batik collaborations: Mountain meets ocean (2001)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 27 May 01 On June 1, a unique exhibition opens at the National Gallery. Not only are the art works which will be hanging there unusually long; their textures and consistencies are dramatically different from what is usually encountered in contemporary art galleries. These art works bear the traces of...
Sudjana Kerton at the Mexican Embassy, Jakarta (2000)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 08 Jun 00 Residents and visitors to Jakarta can now see an exhibition of the late Sudjana Kerton’s art which is quite different from earlier exhibits in Jakarta. Exhibited through the end of this week at the Mexican Embassy residence is a selection from last year’s major exhibition in Yogyakarta that...
Semsar Siahaan: Hero into exile (2000)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 02 Apr 00 With Suharto gone, Indonesia’s most outrageous anti-Suharto artist chooses exile. Why? Born in blood by the authority of guns, the New Order’s preferred art was sweetly decorative and/or abstract-spiritual. Fine art genres in themselves, they were also seen as politically toothless, thus “safe”...
Indonesian artists reflect on past horrors (2000)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 16 Jan 00 The staged and spontaneous riots with violent repercussions in Jakarta in early 1998, leading to Soeharto’s stepping down, continue to reverberate through contemporary Indonesian art. While this was evident at home, throughout 1998 and 1999, it has become increasingly evident abroad as well. The...
Yumie Kono at Rogue Gallery, Victoria, Canada (1998)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 02 Sep 98 Since the early 1970s, Japanese artist Yumie Kono has established herself both in Japan and in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where she exhibits regularly. Defying being type-cast as a "Japanese" artist abroad, she has, over the past 20 years made choices in media, form, and content which...
Hilda Soemantri in Victoria, British Columbia (1998)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 24 May 98 Hilda Soemantri holds a long list of "firsts". One is that she is the first Asian scholar to be Orion Program Artist-in-Residence, an exchange program at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. It is the second time in two years that Hilda Soemantri has spent the spring...
Indonesia: Why the art market needs art history (1997)
→ Creative Business / EntrepreneurshipAstri Wright - 15 Nov 97 Astri Wright offers her thoughts about how the art market can combat against thefts of artwork and forgeries in Indonesia. "Crime does not pay," the old saying goes. That is a truth, however, that must be qualified. When intelligence, careful planning and control of large networks of loyalty...
Heri Dono: Experiments in culture (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 06 Jul 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Photo of Heri Dono, 1988. Photo: Astri Wright. Heri Dono (b. 1960) is among the most experimentally minded of the youngest generation of artists in Indonesia. Born too recently...
Dede Eri Supria: Urban chronicles (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 05 Jul 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Dede Eri Supria (b. 1956), Indonesia’s most important urban painter, takes photographic images of the metropolis apart and reassembles them into disconcerting but strangely familiar...
Sudjana Kerton: A nationalist comes home (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 16 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Sudjana Kerton, 1990, with plaque that reads "Veteran of the Republic of Indonesia, painter of the struggle for independence 1945", near the painting Two guerrillas, 1985, oil on...
Kartika Affandi-Köberl: Rebirthing a modern woman (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 09 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Photo of Kartika Affandi-Köberl, 1988. Photo: Astri Wright. Kartika Affandi-Köberl (b. 1934) is the daughter of the celebrated painter Affandi and his first wife, Maryati, who was...
Indonesia: Women artists in the 1980s (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 08 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. In the last decade, a few women have emerged who insist on defining themselves as artists, professionally, and women, privately, choosing to operate with, and managing to juggle,...
Indonesia: Women and the art world (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 07 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Few early paintings or modern art works in other media by Indonesian women exist. Many talented women were cut off from devoting their lives to art. In 1901, Kartini wrote to Stella...
Images of women in modern Indonesian painting (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 06 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. The problem areas that Indonesian women have identified since the beginning of the indigenous women’s movement in the 1920s and 1930s, are the same ones women face world-wide: equal...
Affandi: The existentialist self-portrait [1] (1994)
→ café libraryAstri Wright - 04 Jun 94 Excerpt from Astri Wright’s book Soul, spirit and mountain: Preoccupations of contemporary Indonesian painters. Affandi (1907?-90) is among the first Indonesian painters to become preoccupied with the human condition and to probe the depths of human emotional experience in all its diversity,...
