Boom or Bust

Indonesian art is in high demand today, and works by Yogyakarta-based artists are being snapped up at auction by international collectors. There are good and bad sides to the boom, Christina Schott writes.

Wild, loud, funny – the opening of Bayu Widodo’s exhibition at Museum Tanah Liat in April this year featured an experimental performance followed by a punk concert and reggae music.

In the gallery’s small courtyard, a happy crowd filled with mohawks, dreadlocks and gaudy costumes celebrated in the typical style of Yogyakarta’s “anak ISI” as the students of the Indonesian Institute of Arts are usually called.

Yet something was rather untypical: The exhibition was almost sold out by the hung-over morning after the opening. It’s something a recent graduate like 29-year old Bayu could only have dreamed of a year ago.

“Art boom” is the explanation, but people whisper the words as if the new phenomenon could disappear as fast as it emerged.

“I am happy, but somehow overwhelmed by the sudden interest in my work,” Bayu said incredulously. “I even got several offers from galleries in other cities. However, I want to learn more about their conditions first.”

The often cited starting point of the current boom in Indonesian art was an auction at Sotheby’s Singapore in April 2007. A work of Putu Sutawijaya, a Balinese painter based in Yogyakarta, fetched S$100,000, more than ten times the originally estimated prize.

“I was walking inside a mall, when I got the phone call. I thought I misunderstood something,” Putu recalls.

The work of a young Indonesian artist had never sold this high. Only a month later works of two painters from the Yogya-based Jendela Group reached even higher prizes at an auction in Hong Kong. The boom had started. A work of I Nyoman Masriadi, another Balinese painter based in Yogya, reach the astronomical price of US$500,000.

“For a long time everybody focused only on China,” art collector and gallery owner Deddy Irianto explains. “But Chinese art became so costly that people started looking for other markets where they could find the same quality for much lesser money. India became very interesting and Vietnam, too. But many connoisseurs turned to Indonesia.

“Within Southeast Asia, we have not only a very well established history of local art collectors but probably also the biggest number of artists.”

Within Indonesia, Yogyakarta has long enjoyed the status of a hub of culture and education. There is its strong tradition of sanggar – art communities who work together in organizing events and swapping viewpoints – which have been the ideal basis for young artists to develop.

“To be successful in the long term, we need to build up awareness for each other, since every artist needs also an artistic surrounding. When I was a student, I learned and got a lot of help from my sanggar. Now it is time to give them back some of it”, says Putu Sutawijaya, who after his success last year opened Sangkring Art Space.

The two-story gallery in the village of Nitiprayan shows mostly works of young artists still making a name for themselves and provides at the same time space for the local artist community.

“I am not at all surprised about this happening in Yogja. It’s all about the atmosphere here, people being very open and accepting different lifestyles,” says Bayu, who was raised in Lampung, about the boom.

“The community here is great and sharing is one of the most important things for an artist. But now the boom has started to kind of disturb the community. Many friends suddenly are busy with only themselves, the competition is getting harder and a lot of jealousy arises.”

In fact, the changes are evident in many ways. While the notoriously cash-strapped artist community formerly frequented cheap sidewalk stalls or got their fill of free buffets at different events, they nowadays gather for fancy dinners at fashionable cafés or display their brand-new laptops at the WiFi-Hotspots recently popping up all over the city.

“Friends who would just drop by for a drink at the opening of an exhibition now often hold lunch meetings or conduct other transactions at our café,” grins Yustina Neni, manager of Kedai Kebun Forum who also coordinated the Jogja Art Festival in July this year.

Becoming part of the boom – and thus being able to buy the newest camera or tune up an old motorbike – has a lot to do with self-presentation and the right contacts. The rest can be attributed to luck in meeting the purchaser’s individual tastes.

Investment bankers and businesspeople from Jakarta, Surabaya and small-town Magelang are nowadays fascinated by selling and reselling art, which has become the new favourite status symbol pursuit of affluent Indonesians.

Unfortunately, many of them don’t really have experience how to judge good or excellent works.

“Many of the newer art dealers just follow hearsay. They act like brokers at the stock exchange,” says Trisni Rahayu, the treasurer of Museum Tanah Liat and manager of her husband Ugo Untoro, who was already a success in the art market before the current hype.

“The situation is not healthy. With the boom probably soon dying down, there will be a natural selection. Some artists might mentally drop by then and need their community again.”

More experienced collectors watch askance as some auction houses give out orders for certain sizes, colors or styles of paintings believed to sell better. The snapping up of works by young, inexperienced painters fresh out of the art school – believed still having a future with a forming process ahead – makes it even worse. Not surprisingly a lot of paintings nowadays feature an unmistakable similarity to the works of pop art painters I Nyoman Masriadi or Agus Suwage, who command the highest prices currently.

Time pressure and given orders lead to mass production, artists get stressed out by working to order and the quality drops.

“The current art market fostered by brokers will not consist for much longer than another year before it buys itself out,” Deddy Irianto predicts. “Only some will stay on top afterwards. An artist needs time to develop consistency in his own creativity. He needs to build up a reputation to make collectors believe in him. Only then one can estimate a realistic price.”

The newest project for the owner of Langgeng Gallery in Magelang is to have a discourse among young artists to develop new ideas for the long term. The Langgeng Art Project, operating out of a small blue house amidst the rice fields of Nitiprayan, opened in June with the first of a series of exhibitions under the title “Re-Form”. The works shown represent the fresh, non-conformist ideas in Indonesia ten years after reformasi – the result of several intensive discussions among the artists themselves.

“Working with Langgeng in this project was almost ideal: They were not asking for prices, but for concepts – I really enjoyed that”, participating artist S. Teddy D. said. “We cannot avoid the boom. But while it is dangerous on one hand, on the other it is very fortunate. It is in these times that we are tested on our strategies. We just have to stay honest with ourselves.”

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