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Jakarta Post

Max Kisman, `Wayang' takes shape in graphic design

Born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and a Javanese father, graphic designer Max Kisman grew up immersed in Western European life, with no conscious connection to his Indonesian heritage

Isabel Esterman (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, June 25, 2009

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Max Kisman, `Wayang' takes shape in graphic design

Born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and a Javanese father, graphic designer Max Kisman grew up immersed in Western European life, with no conscious connection to his Indonesian heritage.

"Our family was completely cut off from that culture," he said during a lecture on Monday at the Erasmus Huis in Jakarta. "I was raised completely as a Dutch boy."

In studying visual arts, Kisman was following in his illustrator father's footsteps. But he views his chosen field, graphic design, as a fundamentally Western art form. Its production, he explains, is intimately tied to the process of industrialization and its visual language is based on a shared knowledge of symbols and iconography.

"A lot of the idea of graphic design is very much related to developments in the Western world," he says.

Throughout his career, Kisman kept at the cutting edge of modernity, becoming a leading figure in the development of computer-based design. But he has recently come to appreciate an aesthetic link between the visual style he developed and the traditional forms of Javanese wayang.

Not that he realized it at the time.

Kisman spent the early years of his career immersed in the emerging music world of the Netherlands, designing concert posters and working for a music magazine called Vinyl. It was an exciting time when musicians were inventing new forms of experimental and electronic music.

In that pre-digital era, designers often cut letters out of film and projected them onto paper using a darkroom enlarger. Kisman found the results fascinating. The blocky letters, sharp edges and stark black-and-white images created an intriguing interplay between positive and negative space.

"What shapes what we see? Is it the letter itself or is it the space around it?" he found himself asking. "Can you make nonexistent things physical?"

In the 1980s, the introduction of computers as a design tool opened up new possibilities, but it also presented new challenges for designers, forcing them to push past the ordered, error-free and uniform images computers naturally produce.

"As a person, as a human, you have to do something with computers, so that they will not control you," Kisman says.

One of the first designers to create fully digital publications, Kisman tried to keep a connection to what he calls the "poetry of shapes".

Today, his work combines the sleekness and portability of computer design with the free spirit and lines of manual design, while staying true to the simplicity imposed by working with block-shapes and limited colors. "By bringing something down, paring it down to even one element, you can broadcast a strong message," he says.

"I always doubt a little myself whether simplicity is laziness or simplicity is an achievement."

But he embraces the discipline it imposes, saying "limitations are very important in making decisions." It puts you in touch with your gut feelings, he explains. "Which also is sometimes called intuition."

Over the years, though, Kisman felt the style of his drawings separated him from many of his contemporaries, and he wondered why. "Well," a friend told him, "that's because your work is linked to the wayang kulit."

Kisman says he first dismissed the idea as nonsense but began to reconsider when a wayang kulit exhibit came to Amsterdam last October.

There was something familiar in the decorative use of negative space and the combination of form and non-form to create a dynamic image in two dimensions. "Maybe that is the link between the two," he says. "The link in my genes from my Indonesian heritage."

Once he looked for it, he spotted that link in many of his creations. A print, for example, of a man and woman embracing. Despite the tools of modern digital printing, Kisman still chose to create a flat cutout, stark black over a gray background, to create an image of intertwined limbs - a distinctly modern image that could still carry a dramatic meaning projected as a cutout onto a back-lit screen.

"I thought, maybe there is a connection," he says.

At the time, Kisman had never been to Indonesia. He always planned to, he says, but the trip always got pushed back for one reason or another.

Now, armed with this new insight into his work, he is able to come for the first time to the country where his father was born.

The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.

A selection of Max Kisman's designs are on exhibit until August 12 at the Erasmus Huis, Jl H.R. Rasuna Said Kav. S-3, Kuningan, Jakarta.

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