Copyright 1999 by Astri Wright

Published on Javafred with kind permission of the author.  Forthcoming in Laura Summers and Bill Wilder, Eds. Gendered States, Modern Powers: Perspectives from Southeast Asia. England: Macmillan Press, St. Martin’s Press. In Press (1999). Note: the reproductions referred to in this paper are not yet included.

'Difference in Diversity': 
Women as Modern Artists in Indonesia

by Astri Wright

 The author is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art,
University of Victoria, BC, Canada.

Integrating beyond the personal self:          

Both Kartika and Lucia Hartini show, in their work in the 1980s, a process of searching for honest depictions of self -- either an essential self-image (Kartika) or a kaleidoscopically shifting one (Lucia Hartini). When these artists refocus and begin to depict others, or to depict themselves in relationship with others, a new perspective on the artists and their worldview emerges. 

Lucia Hartini's search for an uncompromised image of herself as a free and empowered individual began with the most tentative inclusion of a frail human presence into a turbulent cosmic landscape in the mid-1980s (“Dunia Harapan (World of Hope)” from 1980 appears to be one of her earliest depictions of a human figure), and reached an apex with the 1993 painting "Srikandi" (Reproduction 9).[1] In the sense of depicting a woman's/her own ability to face the challenge of life in the material world, this is the strongest self-image in Hartini's entire oeuvre. In the context of contemporary art by Indonesian women, it is rivalled only by Kartika's work.

In the last two years, Lucia Hartini's art has taken a new direction. Not only has she focused her ability to create empowering portraiture on two other living individuals (rare in the work of someone who has nearly exclusively painted herself or deceased teacher/role-model figures, such as Salvador Dali or Marilyn Monroe), but she has also created unambiguous, even visionary statements about herself as a spiritually (rather than mentally and physically) empowered being.

In the artist's first solo-exhibition in 1994, a single painting stood out dramatically from the numerous depictions of women, animals and landscapes: in one canvas, a young long-haired man was shown climbing a rocky crag towards a glowing planet. The title of the work was "Meraih Matahari [Reaching for the Sun]" (1993). With one arm raised to cover his eyes from the blinding light, the young man's drive to continue his quest is signalled by the other hand's clenched fist. It is not clear if he has been blinded, but to me the implication of the work is one of hubris about to receive its final blow -- a Javanese-surrealist and perhaps feminist response to the Icarus archetype and the artist's personal experiences. 

In 1996, Lucia Hartini painted a portrait of the same young man, identified later to me as her husband, from whom she had been estranged for years. This canvas shows a young man standing in a mountain-range, holding a bouquet of white roses (Reproduction 10). He has stopped, mid-step, uncertain whether to proceed or turn back, an expression of anxious reflection on his face. His army-fatigues indicate battle or struggle, the flowers indicate beauty, longing, ideals. The artist told me that with this, she has painted what she calls a wishful portrait of her husband, where she visualizes him with the power to fulfill his dreams.[2] The title is unusually dense, even for Hartini, necessitating a more open-ended translation than usual, to include the possible reference to a reconciliation between the two artists. These paintings represent a clear concern with the pain and struggle of another human being. Not only do they signal an important step beyond Hartini's involvement with her own personal challenges but a step towards bridging the gender-gap ('bridging' in the sense of connecting, not erasing) in her works which, till 1993, had maintained a near-total absence of men in her painted worlds.

Although Hartini herself was not sure who the woman in her painting represented, she is said to have stated: "Only through that woman can people get protection." It was followers of Suma Ching Hai (who refer to her as 'Master') who figured out that the woman in the painting had to be Suma Ching Hai, who "perfectly fits the description" and who appears in one of her many glamorous photos dressed as a Thai queen, with one shoulder bare. [7] (The facts that the umbrella-woman is much taller and slimmer, indeed resembling Lucia herself, both in real life as well as in her self-portraits, and that Suma in the "Thai queen" photo is laden with Boddhisattva-like jewelry while the figure in the painting is unadorned, are not commented on). The SCHF proclaimed Lucia Hartini a "spiritual painter" and sent representatives to Java to meet with her.

From this moment on, Hartini has held a new and special status among large circles of spiritual news-watchers in Indonesia and abroad (as well as in the narrower, less commercialized or internationalized part of the Asian art world which sees art as a vehicle of spiritual teachings). She is now hailed as a visionary. Outside of Indonesia, this reputation is spread mainly through the vehicle of the Suma Ching Hai Foundation, which published her painting on the inside cover of their newsletter. After Hartini's meeting with members of SCHF in 1997, she was moved to become a vegetarian, give up smoking and begin meditating[8] and she and her siblings began to prepare for initiation.

From an analytical point of view, it is both significant in terms of her worldview and consistant with her earlier work, that Lucia Hartini chose to paint the supreme protector of humankind as a female figure. The fact that she would choose as her spiritual teacher one of the few women gurus who have significant international followings,[9] shows the close connection between her art and her life. Choosing a teacher who is believed by her followers to be the incarnation of Kuan Yin, Hartini also has begun to make changes in her personal life that embody the message of active compassion, such as allowing for renewed communication with her estranged husband. Interestingly, the artist's choice of the female form to represent her Master and the holder of life-affirming power in the universe, both in the generic form originally painted in "Umbrella Two Thousand" and in the specific portraits of Suma Ching Hai after her acceptance of the Taiwanese woman as her teacher, mirrors on the individual level the historical process by which the Indian prototype of the Bodhissatva of Compassion, Avalokitesvara, (Chenrezig in Tibet), always shown in the form of a young man, was transformed into a mature female figure in China in the figure of Kuan Yin. 

Finally, in terms of the argument of this paper, it is significant that Lucia Hartini's newfound status as a visionary is one which increases her potential audience by many times, compared to the relatively small percentage of Indonesian society involved with contemporary art. One might say that with the shift in her work away from issues of personal female struggle and liberation into embracing a spiritual idiom, where gender matters less on the symbolic level, Hartini has moved beyond a marginal discourse into one of the dominant social ones, all the more resonant with the widespread disillusionment with the government and the possibilities for an improved material future in the last five years, and particularly after the environmental and economic crash of 1997.

During this same time period, Hartini painted a life-size self-portrait of herself, seated peacefully on the weathered limestone cliffs, dressed in a thin white T-shirt dress, a clear light over her face as she gazes sky-ward, beyond the transparent planets that hover above (Reproduction 2). Unlike most of her earlier paintings, there is no vortex evident in any part of the picture. The clouds out of which she rises are like a softly billowing, gentle foam and the rocks are without their jagged, cutting edges. Unlike "Srikandi", where the artist demands that the viewer validate her self-presentation on her own terms, in this painting, it is as if she is pointing beyond self and other, artist and viewer, to something outside of the canvas, validating a greater presence than herself or the individual. And this presence is one that is so powerful that it quiets the turbulence of the cosmos.

In turning to the work of Kartika Affandi, we move from a spiritual to a secular mode in seeking to integrate beyond the inidividual self.[10] We also move from an area that has less intrinsic resonance to contemporary western art theory to one that engages current frameworks and vocabularies more directly. 

Although her individual self-portraiture recurs as a theme throughout Kartika Affandi's work, even here certain works have shown a powerful pull towards a pluralist depiction, as in her triple self-portrait, showing her mother's and her father's faces as part of her own (see "Selfportrait with Mami and Papi," (1989), Wright 1994a). Furthermore, throughout her own personal and artistic struggle, and especially since emerging as a strong and integrated artist in the mid-1980s, Kartika Affandi has frequently used her own experience of gender discrimination, emotional suffering and social ostracization as a vehicle to connect with and to represent other people, mostly but not exclusively women, inside and outside of Indonesia, who have experienced oppression or disaster of various kinds.[11] Meanwhile, her selfportraiture continues to document the cyclical nature of the individual's/her experience of personally/socially inflicted fragmentation and pain, before new levels of integration are reached (Reproduction 14 ).

Although Kartika has always painted people from other national or ethnic groups than her own Javanese one,[12] she has since the early 1990s produced a more unified and voluminous body of portraits of individuals from other ethnic, religious and geographical backgrounds in Asia and beyond. In an era where critical discourse has long centered around questions of representation and the 'other', but focuses on comparing 'white'/'western' and 'non-white/'non-western',[13] Kartika's portraits of 'others' offer a provocative case study of a woman of 'colour' painting individuals of (different) 'colour(s)' (Reproduction 15). These works offer an opportunity to compare 'local knowledge' and 'other knowledge' with 'western'-centric post-modern theories, feminist critiques of postmodernism, and Black criticism. This research represents the beginning of an argument of how a theoretical approach can both inform and be informed by work originating outside the sphere that gave birth to the theory, more specifically, how art-work like Kartika's challenges and contributes to opening up new areas within the framework of contemporary western-based theory, contributing towards a more globally relevant theory of relationship and representation.

The paintings I will show here, then, represent an example of someone who in western academic analysis might be referred to as an "other", but rather than being the object of the attention of a western subject (e.g. her being painted by a western artist),[14] this "other" is herself an active subject and is painting "yet others". The artist, according to my reading, attempts to represent these people as active co-subjects. This constellation is a fine example of realities and relationships that exist beyond 'east-west' (or 'north-south') frameworks, which always somehow privilege the 'west' ('north') by positing it as one partner, and often a dominant one. The fact is that much cross-cultural scholarship originating in the west or constructed according to western-academic models, fails to see that there is a whole world of linkages or relationships "out there" in which the actors do not worry about hooking up to anyone or any place in the west for validation (Reproduction 16). This pushes people of my own background and profession to question the fallacy that individuals or institutions from the west have to be a significant partner to any interesting or important event that happens in our fields. Yet, the fact that we need to continually reexamine the former and ongoing colonial imbalances in relationships, does not automatically entail that we cannot be partners, of a new sort, in specific cross-regional, cross-cultural relationships.

In December 1994, Kartika returned to her home at the Affandi Museum in Yogyakarta from a three month painting tour in China, bringing back twenty freshly painted canvases. Herself raised a Javanese in a dominantly Islamic culture (though in a very free-thinking family), Kartika has in the past five years painted Christians in Austria, Hindus in Bali, followers of primal religions like the Asmat in Irian Jaya and aboriginal peoples in Flores and Australia, and Chinese (communists? Christians? Confucian-Taoists?) in China. (Reproduction 17).

Both in the actual paintings as well as in the way Kartika works, there is little apparent distance between the artist, as active creator-subject, and her subject matter, people of dramatically different backgrounds from either the artist or each other. Frequently, physical as well as psychological closeness result.[15] The members of one "Aboriginal Family" (1993), for example, sit patiently for the brown-skinned painter with features different than theirs (see Reproduction 15). During the days Kartika spends in the desert getting to know them and other members of their community, they have become familiar with her. She is no longer quite the outsider, barging in, wanting something of theirs, offering nothing in return. As they have given, slowly relaxing to her presence, she has given her interest, listening, and a sharing of stories. With her unusual way of working her art, directly from tube to hand or canvas, and directly in the setting, before her motif, she offers community entertainment. She has also shown them, in her perception of the Australian landscape, that she understands how it is a living thing, dreamed into being by human song, every feature inhabited by spirit.[16] Perhaps the squiggly lines of paint that overlay rock, bush and gullies echo the idea of the aboriginal songlines. 

In the course of the two or three hours this family spends posing for the painting, their gaze occasionally meets Kartika's as she glances up from her paint-covered hands and the canvas rapidly being filled with coloured form. When not meeting eye-to-eye, their six pairs of eyes take in the painter's form and search in the less tangible dimensions of her being. Unlike a snapshot, which takes a second to produce and facilitates the taking of people's likenesses without their consent or collaboration, (common crime of tourists, photographers and artists who work from photographs), this encounter, in contrast, and the accompanying artistic negotiation, takes days. On the canvas, each of the family members emerges as an individual, engaging the artist and viewer with a different energy. Each face tells different facets of their shared story. In no part of the painting is poverty, otherness or ethnicity romanticized or glorified. And although Kartika's mark is clearly felt in the energy with which she brings people into the life of her canvases, she is as interested in the lives of these people as she is in expressing herself.

In her work, while not negating but carefully noting necessary details of 'difference', Kartika manages to establish a personal and artistic connection across ethnic, national, geographical, sociological or gender boundaries, to encompass many different realms of experience. Where she shares the language with her onlookers, a very lively exchange characterizes a large part of the time spent painting.[17] In these works, she is noting and recording disparate identities, but at the same time she is using the transcendent and universal experience of suffering as a way to build bridges between them. Thus there is both 'diversity' and 'unity', without the one being imposed on, or subsumed under, the other.

          One of the provocative techniques Kartika on rare occasions uses to note and overcome difference, is one I would call 'identity merging'. When in 1992 an Australian aboriginal woman Kartika had befriended decided she did not want to be painted, after all, leaving Kartika alone in the desert without a subject, the artist proceeded to paint herself with aboriginal features. The same can be seen in one of her portraits of flood victims/herself from Flores, Indonesia (1993), and in one canvas from China (1994), where she appears as a "Chinese", wearing a blue cotton sweater and 'Mao' cap (Reproduction 17). Whether the painter intended to make herself look Chinese or not can be debated. The result is ambiguous and this very ambiguity is eloquent. Kartika depicts 'herself' lost in reflection against a swirling background of red, yellow and blue. The deep, dark red that engulfs the square is reflected on her face. Its 'heat' makes us think of fire and our thoughts follow what appears to be the course of Kartika's, to the colour of communism and the People's Republic's flag, but even more poignantly to the blood that Chinese people have shed in their fight for freedom, at Tian An Men - the "Gate of Heavenly Peace", both symbolically and for real, the last time in June 1989.

These paintings occupy a liminal position - they are neither pure selfportraiture nor pure portraiture. Auto-biography and other-biography are blended and mixed here in the same way Kartika blends factory-made oil or acrylic colours from other parts of the world with the sweat from the skin of her own hand before spreading it on the canvas with her fingertips and palms. While she works, there is no separation between the woman and her medium, no distancing or mediating between her and the colours by a brush or other tool. In the image she creates, in these canvases, there is also no separation between herself and other.

I am not in this paper arguing that appropriation does not occur. I argue that this kind of identity merging, can, if so suggested by the data, be seen as coming from a position of empathy, solidarity and bridge building -- from an "urge to merge"-- which negates the fragmentation, powerlessness, and dispossession that characterises much post-modern analysis. Kartika's work challenges Derrida's position that all (including action) boils down to speech and negates his assertion that speech/action, according to a post-Sartrean nihilist logic, cannot make a significant difference in the world (Brodribb 1992). Kartika's work and life also challenge the postmodern elimination of the subject and the subject's potential for meaningful links with other subjects, an aspect of contemporary theory critiqued by some feminist scholars (de Lauretis 1989; Barry 1990). Kartika's radical portraiture and self-portraiture, rooted in real life contexts and carrying narrative meanings, in a visual way parallels one school of feminist writing's approach to individual identities and experiences. bell hooks writes: "Identity politics emerges out of the struggles of... exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose ... to struggle. Critical pedagogies of liberation ... necessarily embrace experience, confession and testimony as relevant ways of knowing (hooks 1991:180). 

While Kartika's verbal narratives are not analytical or overtly political, her observations and intent go in the same direction as certain feminist writers; first, she identifies lacunae of concern, then she attempts to cross over to that place, becoming a human bridge. She becomes a listener and sounding board to other people's experiences, in this way sharing empowerment and respect. Ultimately, in her work, Kartika creates a marker of this exchange, a signpost (a painting) which has an element of advocacy to it, as it carries the traces of other people's voices further afield.

Such artistic challenges to the notion of what women are and what women artists should create, and the boundaries and motives they claim the freedom to define for themselves, as their own place of free commentary, also provide a parallel and an argument for how and why a woman of my own ethnic background may still be allowed/allow myself to research and write with and about women/people of other ethnic backgrounds -- working from a point of departure that takes into account issues raised in Black criticism, avoiding, as far as possible, the mono-focus and bias of what bell hooks criticizes as "white men and women ... producing the discourse around Otherness" (hooks, 1990:53) and keeping always within sight the importance of ethics in research theory and method. Seeing oneself as part co-author, and, like Kartika, as involved with creating signposts or markers to carry other people's voices or presences further afield, is one possible answer to avoiding the pitfalls of dominance and appropriation in cross-cultural work.[18]  

 Final Reflections:

Art works are the products of individual psyches and imaginations in dialogue with the broader cultural matrix in which the artists are embedded, even in resistance. Literary and pictorial utopias are interesting both for what they depict and for what they leave out; it is the presences and absences which delineate the tension between the utopia and the real. "Theorists of utopia see the genre less as a specific blueprint for change than as a reflection of social lacunae" (Kessler 1990:70).[19] Missing from the works discussed are harmonious images of men and women together. While the work is dominated by images of women alone, there are also images of women with children, other women or an animal. There is the occasional image of a male alone (Hartini) and of male and female relatives together (Kartika), but these are in each instance depictions of individual or group suffering, whether psychological and/or material. The images of empowerment are almost always of a woman facing the viewer (or an infant, or the universe) alone. Finally, the setting is rarely a space that is recognizably "Indonesia" - it is a variety of abstracted landscapes, often abroad, in which the artist appears to feel equally at home (Kartika), or it is a place on the edge of outer space, removed, except on a symbolic or "psycho-topographic" level, from the world as we know it (Hartini).[20]  

Kartika and Lucia Hartini, senior and junior role-models for Indonesian women who wish to pursue careers in their area of choice, also in professions not conventionally open to them, both paid a heavy psychological and social cost for their decision to pursue careers and lives as artists. However, both have demonstrated that it is possible to survive and succeed in Indonesia as a whole woman playing multiple roles, including developing as an artist and challenging resistant art world institutions. If they remain the exceptions within the circle of Indonesian women artists, it is because they have dared to pioneer paths with little immediate return from the world around; at each stage in their lives, hardwon new self-insights and artistic bordercrossing have made it increasingly harder for them to conform. The path of their integrity and honesty, once evident to them, could not be abandoned or masked by the type and degree of social roleplaying they formerly participated in and which are tacitly demanded of women. In different ways, both Kartika and Lucia Hartini have torn off mask after mask, to uncover someone they finally recognize as themself. This self is not proclaimed as a constant entity or one that represents all women, or even all women artists. But it is a self which, once known and accepted, can be used as a bridge to other selves, either on the spiritual or the social level. Most importantly, each artist models the idea that it is in the individual artist's own power, and the skill of her own hands, to define and give shape to what is their knowledge of self and of life, even as it changes. 

One important aspect of this process to note is that, however unusual Kartika and Lucia Hartini appear to be within the modern Indonesian art world, and among more mainstream Indonesian women artists, they have not looked far afield to find their inspirations: they have not copied a western artist's or woman's art or life in the process of shaping their own. Their painting techniques have been learned from male teachers of the modern idiom, hence ultimately though indirectly from the west, but technical aspects of art are only the most external part of the artistic venture. It is in the construction of content, meaning and expression that the deeper work lies, and for this Kartika and Hartini have used themselves and their experiences and their immediate contexts as their working material.[21] Their art-works are documents of hope, bearing witness to the emergence of individuals who succeed in chipping away at imposed gender norms and norm-enforcing institutions. What since the nationalist period has been called 'modern Indonesian art' must now increasingly include the women artists, however "differently" they construct their artistic images, public and personal, and their lives’ paths, national and international, from the conventional, masculine-priviledging norms of their culture of birth.

 Go to Part 1

Bibliography:

Apinan Poshyananda. 1996. Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia. New York: Asia Society Galleries/G & B Arts International.

Barry, Kathleen. 1990. "The New Historical Synthesis: Women's Biography," Journal of Women's History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Winter), pp. 74-105.

Bonner, Frances et al, eds. 1992. Imagining Women: Cultural Representation and Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press and The Open University.

Brantenberg, Gerd. 1985. Egalia's Daughters, a satire of the sexes. Seattle: The Seal Press. Originally published in Norwegian in 1977.

Brodribb, Somer. 1992. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co.

de Lauretis, Teresa. 1989. "The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain,"Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer), pp. 3-37.

Ewington, Julie. 1994. "About-Face" (Review of Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit and Mountain), Far Eastern Economic Review, June 30, 1994, p. 39.

Gamman, L. and M. Marshment, eds. 1989. The Female Gaze, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1979. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1988. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantyne Books.

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

_____. 1991. "Essentialism and Experience," (Review of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York: Routledge, 1989) in American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 180.

Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 1988. 'Sultana's Dream' and Selections from 'The Secluded Ones'. Edited and Translated by Roushan Jahan. New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY. 'Sultana's Dream' originally published in 1905.

Kessler, Carol Farley. 1990. "The Grand Marital Revolution: Two Feminist Utopias (1874, 1919)," in L.B.Jones and S.W.Goodwin, Feminism, Utopia and Narrative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, pp.69-84.

Kompas. 1997. "Warta Payung Dua Ribu". 2 February, 1997. 

M. Dwi Marianto. 1994. "Lucia Hartini: Srikandi, Marsinah and Megawati." Art & Asia Pacific, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June 1994), pp. 79-81.

Moore, Margaret and Michael O’Ferrall. 1993. Confess and Conceal, 11 Insights from Contemporary Australia and South-East Asia, Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Freehill, Hollingdale and Page.

Putu Wijaya. 1977. "Wanita Macam Kuda." TEMPO, 14 May 1977, pp. 26-27.

Raaberg, Gwen. 1991. "The Problematics of Women and Surrealism," in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Gwen Raaberg, eds. Surrealism and Women. London/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 1-10

Sanento Yuliman 1988. "Wanita dan Seni Rupa di Indonesia: Sebuah Catatan unutk Nuansa Indonesia," Exhibition Catalog, 23-20 November. Jakarta: Dewan Kesenian Jakarta, 1988, pp. 8-11.

Supangkat, Jim. 1990. "Two Forms of Indonesian Art," in Fischer, ed. Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change, 1945-1990. Jakarta: Panitia Pameran KIAS, New York: Festival of Indonesia, pp. 

_____. 1996. "Multiculturalism/Multimodernism," in Apinan, ed., Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia, New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996, pp. 70-81.

Taman Ismail Marzuki. 1988. Nuansa Indonesia III, Jakarta: Cipta Publishers.

_____. ed. 1979. Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia. Jakarta: PT Gramedia. 

Wright, Astri. 1991. Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. PhD Dissertation, Cornell University.

_____. 1994a. Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Kuala Lumpur-New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_____. 1994b. "Undermining the Order of the Javanese Universe: Kartika Affandi-Köberl's Self-Portraits," Art and Asia Pacific, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June 1994), pp. 62-72.

_____. 1994c. "The Emerging Herstory of Modern Art in Bali: The Seniwati Gallery for Women Artists." Paper presented at "Southeast Asia and the New Economic Order", the Sixth Annual Conference of the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies (NWRCSEAS), University of Washington, Seattle, November 4-6, 1994.

_____. 1994d. "Imagine a World without Men where All the Elements and Space Itself are Yours: Lucia Hartini, a Javanese Surrealist painter." Paper presented at Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Boston, 24-27 March, 1994. 

_____. 1995. "The Seniwati Gallery for Women Artists in Bali." Art and Asia Pacific, Vol. 2, No. 2 (April 1995), pp. 32-35. NOTE: This essay was republished in Asian Women Artists, Roseville, NSW/Singapore: Fine Arts Press and IPD, 1995.

_____. 1998. "Resistance in the Visual Field: Activist Artists in Indonesia in the 1990s," in Ing-Britt Trankell and Laura J. Summers, Eds, Facets of Power and Its Limitations: Political Culture in Southeast Asia. Uppsala: University of Uppsala, Anthropological Studies Research Series. 

_____. Forthcoming: "Lucia Hartini, Javanese Painter: Against the Grain, Towards Herself," in Nora Taylor, Ed. , Festschrift to Professor Stanley J. O'Connor [working title]. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, South East Asia Program Publications.

IMAGES REPRODUCED IN ARTICLE:

Reproduction 1: Kartika, "Potret Diri (Selfportrait)" (1993), acrylic on canvas, 98 x 79.5cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 2: Lucia Hartini, "Merenung (), (1996), 90 x 140 cm, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 3: Nunung W.S.,"Wanita (Woman)" (1990), mixed media, 35 X 45 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 CUT: Reproduction 4: Kartika Affandi, "Study for the Beginning", (1981?), Lithography, 50 x 70cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 Reproduction 5: Gusti Ayu Kadek Murni, "Mimpi Bercinta dengan Ular (Dreaming about Falling in Love with a Snake)" (1992), tempera on cloth, 32 x 40 cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 CUT: Reproduction 6: Lucia Hartini, Jendela Langit (Sky Window), 1990, 90 x 140 cm, Oil on canvas. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 7: Ivan Sagito, no title, carved wood, 1994. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 8: Lucia Hartini, "Dunia Harapan (World of Hope)" (1980), 150 x 140 cm, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 9: Lucia Hartini, "Srikandi" (1993), oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 10: Lucia Hartini, "Menimbang Perdamaian [Considering Peace/Reconciliation]", 1996, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 11: Lucia Hartini, "Ju Lai of the MacroCosmos", (1997), 200 x 220 cm, oil on canvas. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 12: Lucia Hartini, "Warta Payung Dua Ribu (Message of the Umbrella Two Thousand," (1996), oil on canvas. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 CUT: Reproduction 13: Kartika Affandi, "Selfportrait with Mami and Papi," (1989), oil on canvas, 130 x 110 cm. Photograph: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 14: Kartika Affandi, "Kepalaku Pecah (My Head Split Open)" (1995), 190 x 190 cm, oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 Reproduction 15: Kartika Affandi, "Keluarga Aborigin (Aboriginal Family"), (1993), acrylic on canvas, 121,5 x 152 cm. Photo: Astri Wright.

 Reproduction 16: Kartika Affandi painting in China, 1994. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 Reproduction 17: Kartika Affandi, "Penjual Gula-gula (Sweets Vendor)" (1994), acrylic on canvas, 100 x 120 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 Reproduction 18: Kartika Affandi, "Potret Diri di Tian An Men (Selfportrait at Tian An Men)," (1994), 120 x 150 cm acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

-- End of Part 2 of 2 --

Copyright 1999 Astri Wright

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