Ken Pattern, a Canadian-born artist who has called Indonesia home for the past 25 years, is renowned for his drawings and stone lithographs that meticulously document the changing urban landscape of Jakarta.

His latest exhibition, “On Marina Bay”, focuses on a very different city: Singapore. The pieces in this collection depict surreal and absurd versions of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, an expensive integrated resort and casino complex that opened in 2010.

In one painting, The Wiener Takes All, the building’s upper section is replaced with a giant sausage, while Silverado sees the complex reclaimed by jungle foliage.

In other pieces we see hot-air balloons, circus tents, bananas, enormous sharks, sand dunes and waterfalls. The paintings are bright and playful, with a sharp satirical edge that pokes fun at the excesses of contemporary Singaporean life.

The current exhibition at Galeri Hadiprana in Kemang, South Jakarta, which runs until Jan. 4 next year, also includes an impressive retrospective of his works since the early 1980s, some of which are being displayed in Indonesia for the first time.

Pattern explained that he ended up in Jakarta by pure chance; his wife was offered a one-year contract with an aid project in 1988, and here they remain, 25 years later.

He admitted that he knew very little about Indonesia before moving here.

“Most Canadians don’t even know where Indonesia is,” he said.

Ken Pattern: (JP/Meghan Downes)
But Jakarta’s distinctive streetscapes, filled with contrasts and contradictions, immediately captured his imagination, and he has been creating beautiful images of the city’s local kampung areas ever since.

“I wanted to know what was beyond the walls,” Pattern said when asked what first drew him into the narrow lanes and backstreets. “Most foreigners live in cages, but there is so much going on in the kampung areas.”

He described these areas as “labyrinths” where one could wander for hours, and recounted how he “always came out exhausted and sweaty, but fulfilled and elated by the contact with people.”

“People are so hospitable […] all you need is a smile,” he added.

When he noticed local kampung areas being bulldozed and replaced with skyscrapers during the 1990s, he felt like his artwork was an important way to document these disappearing communities.

“Kampung buildings may not have much architectural value, but they definitely have social heritage.”

At a leisurely pace, the artist shared these stories, pointing out his art really is all about these personal experiences.

While walking through the exhibition, he told fascinating anecdotes behind each artwork, such as when he discovered the old man featured in his lithograph Eyewitness was in fact blind, and when, during a previous exhibition at the Four Seasons Hotel, a hotel worker approached him excitedly, explaining that he lived in one of the riverside houses in his Kali Sunter piece.

He also enjoyed pointing out the jokes and puns he has worked into many of the pieces and their titles. A recent lithograph titled All about Mie features a food cart proclaiming “Mie Ayam Here”, which read aloud is “Me, I am here” though it actually advertises chicken noodle soup.

Babylon Revisited. (Courtesy of Melbourne the Photographer)<)