Featuring: Muhammad “Mice” Misrad, J. Casey Hammond, Hui Yew Foong, Leo Tigor

Moderator: Lim Cheng Tju

Join us for the launch of the English translation of Indonesia 1998 by Mice, one of Indonesia’s leading cartoonists!

When 32 years of brutal and corrupt dictatorship ended in 1998, Indonesians experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom. Just one example: a political cartoonist could, for the first time, draw without fear of government censorship. Muhammad “Mice” Misrad, then starting his career as a cartoonist, tells this story in Indonesia 1998. First published in 2014 and now translated into English by J Casey Hammond, Indonesia 1998 is designed with two dimensions of history. Part of the book is a compilation of old cartoons drawn by Mice in 1998 that satirised the disorientation and unrest in Jakarta after the resignation of Suharto. Another part is an entirely new comic book in which Mice contextualises his old cartoons by telling, from a present-day perspective, the story of events that compelled him to draw the original cartoons nearly 20 years ago.

During these intervening years, Mice’s body of work has achieved iconic status in his homeland. As noted by internationally-acclaimed writer Eka Kurniawan: “Mice’s cartoons marked an era in Indonesia. They are grotesque, often visceral, and usually self-mocking. Like street life in Indonesia, they are both funny and rude. In that way, they made political and social life more bearable.”