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View all search results‘Names in our Veins’: Two generations, one inherited history
Artworks by FX Harsono and Vincent Ruijters trace erased names, mass violence and ancestral memory across the Chinese-Indonesian diaspora.
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Writing through darkness: A combination of images shows "Writing in the Dark Rain" (2025), a single-channel video work by FX Harsono in which the artist writes against a dark backdrop streaked with paint. The work is part of Names in Our Veins, on display from Sept. 3 to Jan. 3, 2027, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the Netherlands. (Courtesy of FX Harsono/-)
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t a time when advanced contemporary art is trying to imagine “other futures”, Buro Stedelijk within the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, instead looks back to history and the human condition.
Brought together by Malaysian-born, internationally recognized curator Jo-Lene Ong, Names in our Veins brings together two generations of artists from the Chinese-Indonesian diaspora: seminal Indonesian artist FX Harsono (b. 1949, Blitar) and Dutch internationally recognized contemporary multimedia and intermedia installation artist Vincent Ruijters (b. 1988, The Hague).
Their works are prompted by an intrinsic desire for honest clarity in confronting questions of authentic identity and humanity within the Chinese-Indonesian experience, discrimination in the case of Harsono and ancestral memory in Ruijters’ work.
While Harsono’s works confront state politics, erased Chinese names and mass graves he witnessed firsthand, Ruijters speaks from a double-diaspora perspective in the Netherlands.
The exhibition displays three of Harsono’s videos: “Writing in the Rain” (2011), “Writing in the Dark Rain” (2025) and “Rewriting on the Tomb”, as well as “Pilgrimage to History”.
Harsono’s “Writing in the Rain” shows him relentlessly trying to write his Chinese name against a glass plate, only for it to be washed away each time by downpours of rain. The work is metaphorical of how any sign of Chinese culture during the Suharto regime was countered.
But whatever happens, his name cannot be erased. It emerges and is documented in 2025 in “Writing in the Dark Rain”, in which Harsono wipes away black paint from glass to reveal his name.
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