Introduction: Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society & History

In pre-pandemic 2019, when it was possible to organise international art exhibitions, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) curated and presented an exhibition of contemporary Indonesian art to show the diversity and richness of art in new millennium Indonesia. Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia was the first major survey of post-1998 Indonesian art seen in Australia and a significant number of the works were acquired for the national collection.1 The genesis of this book was a scholarly international conference organised to complement the NGA exhibition by the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University (ANU), working in partnership with the NGA.2 The three editors of the book were among the conference conveners. The conference was intended to provide a broad scholarly context for Indonesian art and had a much wider historical time frame than the NGA exhibition. It reflected new research on themes in Indonesian modern art that echoed the dramatic social and political changes of the nation’s political history: Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule, the pre-independence period of the 1930s and early 1940s, Japanese occupation during the Pacific War, independence under President Sukarno (1945–65), the New Order of President Suharto (1966–98) and the period of Reformasi (1998-present).3 The book adopts the same time frame as the conference to explore new perspectives on Indonesia’s modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art from the 1930s to the present. It is intended as a contribution to Indonesian art history and art historiography as well as to the emerging scholarly discourse on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia and Asia more generally in terms of both national and regional art histories.