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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Enough of voyeurism: The artist Erika Ernawan is the first one to bang the hammer against her artwork at the opening of her exhibition, on April 9.Erika Ernawan’s solo exhibition at Vivi Yip’s art room testifies to a new generation of Indonesian women artists.

As she refutes the male gaze or anyone else’s voyeuristic tendencies, she engages her audience in literally breaking the glass ceiling of the conventional.

At issue is the male gaze that sneaks into private rooms to secretly enjoy “forbidden” pleasures. It is also about cultural taboos and social biases against women, which hamper their path to becoming persons in their own right.

Erika (born in 1986) is boldly going beyond this all. Shattering the works that look beautiful but rife with complicated layers, she also makes sure she does not do so on her own.

For the opening night of her solo show on April 9, she prepared a happening performance with her works featuring images of nude female bodies, their breasts exaggerated for the male gaze.

These were photographs of a model — which she had shot herself, printed and pressed between acrylic and mirror sheets.

Color paint applied on the inside of the acrylic sheet somewhat shrouded the excessive body parts adding an element of mystique and the mysterious.

To view the works, one had to step on a floor covered with mirror sheets. The exhibition invitation specifically warned invitees not to dress in short skirts or wear high heels.

Visitors knew the works would be smashed, but for the rest, they were held in the dark.

The floor was covered with mirror sheets, and a cracking sound heightened the anxiety of what was to come, people entered the viewing space treading cautiously.

Two specially made hammers, one layered with a plated Prada, lay ready to be used.

The first to come along with a hammer was Erica herself. Walking past several works, she finally stopped and swung her five-kilo heavy hammer onto the work, her facial expression slightly twitching.

While uttering “What do you see from here”, the hammer hit the work, causing cracks that distorted the body, and the gaze. Awed by the cracks the blow had caused in the works, the audience was at first reluctant to come forward when invited to join the smashing spree.

But one bold young woman, a collector, did come forward and cracked the work with gusto. She later admitted she related very well to Erica’s works, having often wondered about society’s bias against women.

When swinging the hammer she felt an unusual strength that translated into anger.

Male collectors or art lovers who swung the hammer attacking the artwork, apparently had other sensations, as they smashed the artwork so hard, that not only did it crack, but it actually broke.

Seeing one’s distorted face against the female body parts is bound to strike a chord.

Erika revealed she had not experienced personal or sexual violence, but as a photographer who often teamed up with peers at the campus, mostly as a model, she was extremely annoyed by her male colleagues who always spoke about women’s bodies, about beautiful women, and the like.

That is how she came up with the idea of distorting the image and the view.

In her first series that she had called Mirror Sees Me, she had modeled herself for the images in the work, and the smashing then gave her the satisfaction of getting even with those voyeurs. But in her second series, she wanted to see other people’s reactions.

She used a model and took the pictures, not from the front, but of reflections seen on a round convex mirror placed above her model. Body distortions are not only caused by smashing but also by this way of taking a photograph.

Curator Asmudjo Irianto views these distortions as metaphors for deformed constructions created by a patriarchal culture about women.

But not wishing to get stuck in the issue of patriarchy, Erika continues exploring and while so doing, is on her way to the sublime.

To that end, she experiments with different techniques, for example using lenticular acrylic which provides optical depth.

While no mirrors are involved, the glass reflector placed in front of lenticular acrylics allows viewers to see their reflections, albeit slightly hazily.

Erika says these series of works are part of the process that will lead her to her next project which will be about the face of humanity.

Erika Ernawan’s images of her first series Mirror Sees Me won her a prize at the inaugural Bandung Contemporary Art Awards last January. She leaves for Germany soon to pursue further studies. It will be interesting to see how her work evolves.