Personal: Illustrator and video artist Jordan Marzuki's fascinating new book collects his childhood drawings.

Titled War, Astronaut, Death, Violence, Floating Mountain and Roman Soldiers Jordan Marzuki’s self-published book is a collection of his drawings between 1990 and 1999, beginning when he was 3 years of age until he was 12.

As its title generously suggests, the book’s 200-plus pages feature many renderings of war, both the earthly and galactic kind, a lot of planetary adventures, many depictions of death and carnage, and a good deal of the fantastical.

The drawings feature the rather-humorous physical scaling and liberal sense of structure, that is certainly befitting of its creator’s age at that time (most of these were drawn during his preteen years), but they also feature a lot of attention to complex detail that showcases the creator’s growing talent.

The war scenes in particular, are rendered with an obvious passion toward the mechanics of battleships, fighter planes and weapons. Depending on how it is viewed, the violence is both disturbingly omnipresent and humorously grotesque.

Pop culture also makes its way through Jordan’s pen and pencil, with sci-fi cinematic mainstays such as Blade Runner and Robocop and children-oriented books like the Where’s Waldo? series making appearances alongside Japanese cartoons like Doraemon.

News-worthy happenings also influenced the young Jordan, as with some short comic-like stories featuring the actions of SWAT teams filling up some pages.

All of these creations would not be so if it were not for the diligence of Jordan’s parents in always collecting their child’s drawings, even as he left them strewn around, and archiving them in a simple folder at home.

“The story is very simple, to be frank — my mom loves to keep sentimental things, and my dad loves art,” he recalls, “I guess that’d explain why they kept my drawings.”

Some of the gruesome and grotesque details that once came out of him felt like a surprise to Jordan — why did he draw them?

“Once I found out about the folder full of my childhood drawings, I was obviously very excited [but] had mixed feelings — there are so many questions I had about each drawing.”

Jordan remembers how his drawings disturbed some adults who saw them at the time — specifically those who had archaic ideas of what they represented. 

“I remember back then I had a conservative teacher who told me to stop drawing a figure of a man because it would lead to idolatry,” he recalls half-laughing, “My elementary school art class encouraged students to draw beautiful scenery and they judged everything based on the quality of the shape based on how realistic it was. Because at home, I drew ‘sinful’ things — there were no restrictions from my parents.”

That lack of restriction and the influence of pop-culture-style violence came with the time. Growing up mostly in the 1990s, Jordan watched what every other Indonesian children did — Hollywood action films on TV, starring the burly stars of the day – Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme and the like. There were also TV series like Baywatch and The A-Team.

“The censorship was very minimal back then, even for something like Baywatch. I remember every Sunday afternoon, the whole family would gather to watch David Hasselhoff’s hairy chest on that show. So in my memories, the ‘90s were awesome.”

It wasn’t only films that influenced his drawings, but video games and the science, history and natural history museums his parents took him to as well.

As a kid, the violence that existed was not something that was mean-spirited. It was merely an absurd extension of childhood fantasies. At that age, Jordan was already developing philosophical ideas.

“Violence was like fantasy back then. [Whether it was] the idea of a person with the tendency to murder another person; or the subject of war; or how men in uniform with guns had the legal right to kill their enemies. It was not only the violence itself but also the absurd ideas behind it that fascinated me during childhood,” he says.

“Today, I have the same fascination toward violence — but as an art. And I obviously didn’t grow up to be a serial killer but instead a pacifist in real life,” he explains, adding that his work today is more about interpretations of violence.

The more-fantastical imagery in the book came from a different source and still resonates more obviously in his work today, whether in his designs or videos.

“An interesting point that my friend highlighted is how I depicted so many toilets in these drawings. I think this was to add a sense of something ‘common’ in the middle of the chaos, destruction and absurdity,” he says, adding mischievously. “After all is said and done, in the end, we all need to go to the toilet.” (ste)

— Photos courtesy of Jordan Marzuki

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