Djoko Pekik is working at his studio in Yogyakarta.

'We hunted a celeng [wild boar] in 1998; we cornered it then captured it. It should've ended there and then,' Pekik told a group of young journalists earlier this week.

The painter was referring to his famous painting 'Indonesia 1998 Berburu Celeng' (Indonesia 1998 Hunts Wild Boar), which was unexpectedly sold for Rp 1 billion (US$879,900).

Berburu Celeng depicts a captured fat wild boar hoisted upside down with its feet tied to a large bamboo stick. Around the boar are various characters performing traditional folk dances while celebrating the capture in front of thousands of onlookers.

Pekik made the painting during the weeks around May 21, 1998, when then president Soeharto stepped down and ended his 32 year dictatorship of the New Order era.

The painting was the second in the 'Trilogy Celeng' (Boar's Trilogy). Tanpa Bunga dan Telegram Duka (Without Flowers or Condolence Telegram) was the final installment of the trilogy.

Tanpa Bunga shows the captured boar lying on an arid ground in the middle of a burnt forest, its face black and blue with greenflies and black crows feeding on his back, cutting its body open and exposing its ribs.

A celeng, to him, represents angkara murka ' wrathful evil: anger, hatred, greed. Soeharto seized control of the military, and later the government, after an aborted coup in 1965. The New Order regime oversaw the purge of hundreds of thousands of alleged communist sympathizers.

'It should've ended there, but it didn't. Now everyone's turning into a celeng given half a chance.

'Leng ji, leng beh; celeng siji, celeng kabeh ' One [turns into] a 'celeng', all [turn into] a 'celeng',' Pekik lamented.

'Nothing much has changed during the Reformation era. You see it yourself on TV and in newspapers. Everyone's corrupt. It's very chaotic; all of us have been possessed,' he said.

Pekik was born into a farming family in Purwodadi in Grobogan, Central Java, 1938. He grew close to his hometown's traditional folk art and quickly started drawing, painting and crafting his own toys.

Fueled by his interest in art, Pekik went to Yogyakarta to study at the Indonesian Painting Academy (now the Indonesian Institute of Arts) in the second half of the 1950s. He was immediately surrounded by opposing critical discourse, among others: East vs. West, modernism vs. feudalism, and communism vs. liberalism.

In 1961, he joined Bumi Tarung Studio, whose members practiced social realism and socialist realism. Bumi Tarung was later affiliated with Lekra, the cultural arm of the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Pekik became one of the numerous victims of the systematic military-supervised persecution of members of the PKI following the aborted 1965 coup. Many of the original member artists of Bumi Tarung died in the aftermath of the purge.

In 1966, he was imprisoned without trial at Wiroguna Penitentiary in Yogyakarta. In 1972, Pekik was released only to be an outcast in society, shunned by fellow artists and relatives in the following decades.

'After I was released, I had nothing. My family and I were dirt poor and hungry. I still painted from time to time, but in secret,' Pekik said.

He supported his wife and eight children by offering sewing services on the street and selling traditional clothes.

'I could've made flowers or scenery paintings and sold them for money, but I refused. Art work is the crown of my pride as an artist; I'd rather not eat than paint beautiful paintings,' he said.

In 1981, he began producing artwork more actively and was later invited to a number of exhibitions, including the first Yogyakarta Painting Biennale in 1988. Local and international art observers began taking interest in his paintings, which considered representing a style that was strong in 1960s Indonesia. The decade also saw more attention from international researchers about the 1965 killings.

In 1989, his paintings were included in the Indonesian Modern Art Exhibition in the United States (KIAS), which created controversy. In the same year, Canadian researcher Astri Wright wrote that Pekik's canvases offered something different compared to those produced by other Indonesian artists.

'We see and feel the hardship of the poor: The people who live in the depressed and infertile mountain areas; unemployed rural men seeking work in the alienating city; the loneliness and fatigue of 'becak' drivers and night watchmen and women carrying meager supplies for miles, to and from distant markets,' Wright wrote.

Pekik's latest work was Pawang Kesurupan (The Possessed Tamers), which he completed in 2012. In the painting, a group of Jathilan (bamboo horse) dancers are performing in front of a panel of judges, but the dancers are not the only ones in a state of trance, the tamer and the judges are also possessed.

'My paintings are the expression of my curses. I see things that disturb me and hurt my heart; they settle in my heart, over and over again. Accumulating into a layered feeling of anger and loathing, which then turns into a theme for a painting,' he said.

Many of his works are not for sale. His paintings are permanently exhibited at his sprawling residence hidden under a canopy of trees a few kilometers south of Yogyakarta.

'I don't sell them because they have many functions. Many college students or researchers come to my house to study and ask about my paintings,' said the painter, who spends his leisure time looking after and playing with his 17 grandchildren.

Pekik, however, has remained devoted to his artistic ethics.

'The duty of an artist is not to do jobs, but to create art work, excellent art work!' he said.
 
' Photos courtesy of P. Gogor Bangsa

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