Cemeti Art House presents:

Exhibition of Artist in Residence: Makan Angin #1

Jae Hoon Lee
During his residency period, Jae Hoon Lee tried to combine two objects with very different functions, which are a Buddha head statue and a barbell. For normal function of these two objects, a symbol of a Buddha has the objective reality, in terms of being worshiped in a Buddhist temple or shrine-like holy atmosphere. Paradoxically, Lee’s Buddha barbell blurs the boundary between two opposite functional usages of two objects, it suggests the threshold between a realm of spirituality (healthy mind) and physicality (healthy body). The Buddha barbell is not only used as a weight for building muscle or losing weight but also for meditational practice through focusing continuously on breathing in and out during a physical exercise. In addition, Lee produced two channels video work which shows volunteers from Yogyakarta exercising with a Buddha barbell and various surface textures of photographic images from his home ground and Yogyakarta printed on yoga mat. These two different works are integrated with Buddha barbells as one installation in the gallery space.

Jae Hoon Lee (born in Seoul, 1973), lives and works in New Zealand. He studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, United States, then continued his Master of Fine art at the Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland, and completed a PhD of Fine Art at Elam. (jaehoonlee.net)

Paul Hendrikse
Paul Hendrikse produces alternative sets of knowledge around historical ‘facts’. His works are centered on historic persons or events that have left a mark in the public realm. Leaving aside the master narratives of history and their polished protagonists, he turns towards the micro stories of individuals and towards the uncertainties, myths, speculations and distorting representations surrounding them.

“So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them; and perhaps the latter proposition is truer that the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.”
Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725)

During his residency, Hendrikse researched how encounters with ”others” by trade, war and during periods of colonization gave specific input upon the Indonesian culture and foremost on the realm of the body, creating a creole (body) culture including dance and martial arts. He studied how martial arts as Pencak Silat, a wide spread Indonesian form of self defense, have dealt with foreign influence and threat by mimicking and taking over the foreigners body language and how it affected movements and defending strategies. From this material he created a performance together with Citra Pratiwi and Rendra Bagus Pamungkas.

Paul Hendrikse was born in Terneuzen in 1977. He studied fine arts in Den Bosch, The Netherlands and completed a postgraduate at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastreicht, the Netherlands. (paulhendrikse.net)

Yaya Sung
As an artist who lives in Jakarta, Yaya Sung sees the artistic space of Yogyakarta as rather ideal, where the process of building an idea is as important as the final work. With the opportunity to undertake a residency in this rather “ideal” space, she proposes questions that test this conception of the “ideal space”; if every space itself has its own challenges and problematics, then what is this “ideal space”? Do people in an ideal space also have fears, and what are they afraid of? These questions moved Yaya to investigate this through direct and indirect interactions with people within the network. Direct interactions were produced through discussion groups and interviews, indirect interactions were implemented by way of a “box for sharing fears” that she placed at the school of art, photography communities, and several other art spaces in Yogyakarta. People could share their fears on a sheet of paper and contribute them to the box. Looking for solutions to problems that had been found turned out not to be the main purpose, but the network of relations to emotional events that occurred between her and the people with whom she interacted became more important. Yaya then came to a new awareness that an ideal space consisting of various phenomena may in fact imply other things than the city, such as the human body. Mental phenomena that intertwine within it are the result of the action-reaction process that different substances undergo as they enter the body. It is these issues that Yaya addresses in her work.

Yaya Sung (born in Jakarta, 1986) graduated from Visual Communication Design, Pelita Harapan University and continued her studies in a Pre-Masters of Fine Art Programme at Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts. She lives and works in Jakarta. (yayasung.com)

Opening : 23 May 2014 | 19.00

Performance by Paul Hendrikse : 23 May 2014 | 21.00 | Ark Galerie

Discussion : 31 May 2014 | 19.30