DADANG CHRISTANTO

Dadang Christanto: A biography and an autobiography of victims

Robyn Maxwell

Dadang Christanto’s work revisits the scenes of terrible crimes. It is provoked and inspired by the horrendous violence of 1965–66 Indonesia, when many thousands were slaughtered in army-sanctioned vendettas that saw mass killings settle political, communal and personal differences. Dadang’s family tragedy, with his father snatched away never to return, remains a constant gnawing wound played out in every work that the artist creates. The recurring faces, sketched on gold and silver speckled joss paper or etched in rough clay, even cast in gleaming bronze in the National Gallery of Australia’s poignant Heads from the North, 2004, always allude to Dadang’s personal loss. Seemingly self-portraits, the enormity of the artist’s anguish is accentuated by the multitude of faces and repetition of the tears of blood in the monumental Red Rain, 2003 (also in the National Gallery’s collection), where 1966 faces recall the worst year of human genocide in modern Indonesian history.

Yet the works are not specific to time and place. Dadang’s autobiographical experience is unfortunately shared by many, not only in 1960s Indonesia but also in the current decade when many have again been slaughtered in the cause of politics and religion. And the slaughter of innocent victims is everywhere visible daily in the media, most brutally, at present, in Iraq. The artist’s biographical experience is shared by countless faceless others, yet Dadang Christanto continues to count and give faces to the violence victims. His face is their face and their tragedy deserves the attention of his practice. He calls it the ‘Count Project’, the never-ending reckoning of the victims of violence.

Like the trees in past works, the faces are also witnesses. As the artist explains, where in the past he invited the trees to be witnesses to executions that took place in forests, the pained yet strangely vacant faces of his latest works are also those who were spared. In his vision, the arbitrary nature of suicide bombers means there is little to distinguish the slaughtered and the spared.

The output of Dadang Christanto’s pain has a brilliant formal serenity, reflecting a vivid imagination and an isolation of elements of violence and bloodshed, as well as a distance and simplicity achieved through meditation on the theme of human suffering and grief. The faces of the bright metallic and white joss papers are gently splashed with the black ink and the blood-red paint of ‘dark and violent memory’ or linked with fine thread. The elegant gold and silver of the papers burned for Chinese ancestors contrasts with the artist’s use of rough cardboard from cartons found in the street. While Dadang alludes to the white spots or dots as numbers of victims, the result resonates with autobiographical references – to the wax-spotted brown batik cloths sold in his parents’ shop during a calm Javanese childhood before the storm of 1965, and to the recent years of teaching and working in Darwin where Aboriginal artists were part of that vibrant creative environment. The combined power of the panels of dots and faces, large and small, conveys a sense of the magnitude of the number of victims of violence.

The installation of old clothes – held in rigid empty forms with glue or fibreglass – is another recurring theme in Dadang Christanto’s work. In the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s They Give Evidence, 1996–97, stiff empty shells of clothing of innocent victims – men, women and children – are cradled poignantly in the arms of large, emotionless human figures. The artist conveys the pain of both the dead and the living in the face of violence and injustice. In Unrecognised, 2007, this theme is revisited: the pathos of the clothes of victims of violence strung up on a rack is underlined by the recurring colour of dried blood.

Tragically, Dadang Christanto will never find an end to the human violence that is the consuming focus of his art. In his imagination his own childhood trauma is recreated every day in some corner of the world. Yet Dadang’s surprisingly peaceful artistic responses to his contemplation of the inhuman treatment of many victims continue to disturb, confront, provoke and profoundly move the viewer. His face is the face of the countless others who have suffered; his autobiographical experiences illuminate the biographies of those whose numbers he would count and whose deaths he would have us mourn.


Robyn Maxwell is Senior Curator of Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra