Yunizar: New Perspectives
This catalogue is an extensive analysis of the Indonesian artist Yunizar’s playful, nonconformist 25-year oeuvre. Featuring an interview with Yunizar and essays by Aminudin T. H. Siregar, T. K. Sabapathy and Ahmad Mashadi, it also contains over 100 images of his paintings and sculptures. Siregar’s intimate dive into Yunizar’s background, education and early influences illuminates the artist’s practice and preoccupations, particularly his rejection of the kind of sociopolitical art that dominated the postsuharto reform era, which led to his paintings being criticised as ‘anti-meaning’ or art for art’s sake. The manifesto-less collective Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela (‘Jendela’), of which Yunizar is cofounder and member, is a pivotal influence on his work; Siregar likens Jendela to a ‘jazz group’ jamming.
Sabapathy’s focus on Yunizar’s arresting bronze sculptures oers a further line of inquiry. Though Yunizar’s sculptural foray is formally credited to the Yogya Art Lab, founded by himself and Gajah Gallery, in fact it was presaged by his participation in a large exhibition in 2011, which catapulted him into the company of reputable Indonesian artists working in threedimensions. The crossover between his paintings and sculptures is fascinating, and in his Garuda works (2014–16) the kinship emerges as subconscious commentary on the relationship between object and symbol, despite his disavowal of connotations to the Indonesian national emblem of the Garuda Pancasila.
Siregar’s essay casts light on ‘purity of feeling’ as the impetus driving Yunizar’s paintings, while the inclusion of Mashadi’s previously published text adds less insight. Mashadi’s conclusion that Yunizar and Jendela’s oeuvres remain open to interpretative contextualisation reads as noncommittal, raising again the charge that the ‘crude’ or childlike nature of Yunizar’s paintings is self-indulgent. Also touched on, but deserving of more investigation, is the Minang artistic tradition of scribbles and words, and Yunizar’s works that continuously plumb this influence from, as Siregar describes, a ‘mental state of the alienated’. As much as this publication elevates the importance of Yunizar’s oeuvre, it also suggests exciting possibilities of further study. Elaine Chiew