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span class="caption" style="width: 466px;">I Nyoman Masriadi, Sangat Tidak Lutcu, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of Gajah GalleryFrom the streets and small, independent spaces of Yogyakarta and Bandung to Jakarta’s finer galleries, art in Indonesia is flourishing, and on display.

At a discussion of museums in Asia, the founder of Magelang’s OHD Museum, Oei Hong Djin, said “[There are] a lot of very talented artists … but we don’t have a national museum [of modern and contemporary art] and the government is not showing steps to move in that direction. So we as responsible private collectors have to take over this role, especially at this moment when the world art scene is focused on Asia and Indonesia.”

Internationally, 2011 was a banner year for the country’s art, with the “Trans-Figurations — Indonesian Mythologies” show at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in Paris in June, and “Indonesian Eye: Fantasies and Realities” at the Saatchi Gallery in London in September.

This year, the Hong Kong International Art Fair, which ran from May 17 to 20, offered a selection of Indonesian art on its global stage. The fair, better known as ART HK, aimed to represent both East and West in its Hong Kong setting by having a 50/50 balance of gallery participation.

With five galleries from Indonesia and seven galleries from outside the country showing Indonesian artists — out of a total of 266 galleries — local art was well represented.

Jakarta’s Ark Galerie had one of the most exciting selections of Indonesian art at the fair, with exceptional works by Wedhar Riyadi like Connection and Big Pink, each with photographic black and white charcoal drawings under a layer of starkly colored and terrifyingly cartoonish imagery, and the Bandung-based collective Tromarama’s piece combining pretty ceramic plates and a looping video of a now destroyed colonial-era building.

Ark curator Alia Swastika told The Jakarta Post, “I think it’s a new situation now that we have an international audience that is getting more and more interested. For example, a collector collects Indonesian art, the museums want to show Indonesian artists, or institutions also want to collect and do projects with Indonesian artists. So the international recognition is really there already and I think it is a good opportunity for the people in the Indonesian art scene to do something with it.”

The fair included a section termed ART HK Projects, 10 large installations by “leading artists from around the world”. Organized by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, one of those projects was No Roots, No Shoots #1 by Handiwirman Saputra, a boat-like creation of curling tree roots and a body gesturing to men’s sarongs.

Handiwirman said of the work in a handout, “I want to present the visual configurations of things in such a way so that they can invite and challenge us, not just to look, but also to observe and scrutinize things, accepting their idiosyncratic qualities.”

Of the distinctive — perhaps idiosyncratic — works by Indonesian artists, Sin Sin Fine Art in Hong Kong was showing the delicate art of Jumaldi Alfi while offering “Earthly Evocations: Indonesian Art Now”, an exhibition of 11 Indonesian artists, at their space in Hong Kong’s Central district. The opening on May 17 featured wafting smoke from chicken satay being grilled for guests and a work of performance art, Neo Mooi Indie, by Bandung-based Tisna Sanjaya.

After beginning with a resounding “Assalamualaikum”, Tisna painted and spoke while a film flickered away on a sheet behind him. He then tossed sarongs to the crowd, everyone instructed to sit down in the steamy alley. Tisna said during the performance that it was “an artist’s prayer”.

At ART HK, Jakarta’s Nadi Gallery was presenting an eclectic mix of pieces by such artists as Agus Suwage and Eddie Hara, as well as Jumaldi Alfi’s lovely Re-Reading Landscape, Mooi Indie #1. Gallery owner Biantoro Santoso told the Post on the opening of ART HK, “I am truly very optimistic about the development of art in Indonesia.” During a visit later in the fair, it was clear that optimism was warranted, with, among others, Jumaldi’s painting and Handiwirman Saputra’s subtle pastel Kunci marked as sold. A gallery employee said pieces had gone to buyers from London, Paris and Singapore.

Singapore’s Gajah Gallery had a number of works on show by the noted I Nyoman Masriadi, including the powerful Sangat Tidak Lutcu, now in a private collection. Gallery owner Jasdeep Sandhu said two other Masriadi works had sold for something in the range of US$300,000 each.

“Our focus is mainly to try and get him out there beyond the regional market, and it is startling. If you speak to the auction houses whenever his work does come up for auction there’s quite a big base of international collectors from outside Asia looking for his work,” Sandhu told the Post.

Aside from Indonesian art selling for thousands and beginning to achieve a larger reach globally, this spanning of borders also includes the larger art world.

“I think its interesting because now art of course is beyond, it’s global, beyond nations. And also the artists, if you see the artists from one gallery from France it is also exhibiting artists from China, from Indonesia maybe, or everywhere,” one of the founders of Bandung’s PLATFORM3 gallery, Rifky Effendi, told the Post at ART HK.

At Christie’s, director of Asian and contemporary art Eric Chang expressed a similar sentiment. “Before, Asian regional markets were really independent — Korea, Japan, China were never together. Now we have buyers from China buying Japanese art, Hong Kong buying Korean, Singapore buying Korean, and a Chinese collector buying Indian art.”

And while this expansion indicates a loosening of boundaries, the continuing emphasis on nationality and provenance comes with its own questions.

Wedhar Riyadi, Connection, 2012, oil on ncanvas, 180 x 250 cm. JP/Deanna RamsayHong Kong’s Osage Gallery was showing Lure by the Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia that interrogates just this issue, and which drew large and curious crowds at ART HK. Passports were lined up in a neat yet snaking row on the floor, with those of different countries filling one of the ubiquitous claw vending machines often bursting with stuffed animals. Visitors were invited to play at choosing their own nationality, although the choice remained, as it is for most in real life, absolutely arbitrary.

And then some of those 67,205 attendees at ART HK 2012 moved on to gaze — perhaps shopping — at more of the massive collection of art on display, with overheard conversations including “How much did we just spend?”

Matthias Arndt of Berlin’s Arndt Gallery, which was showing a range of celebrated Indonesian artists at the fair, told the Post, “There’s a very young generation coming up and building and reinventing the country anew and everything that happens politically and economically also reflects in the culture and in the arts. And so this art that people like Eko [Nugroho], Entang [Wiharso], FX [Harsono], Agus [Suwage] and [J. Ariadhitya] Pramuhendra do, it’s really truly engaged in life and that is what excites me. I’m a successful dealer, but the business is the second part, first comes the art.”