EXHIBITION ESSAY
Tiba Anak Cucu
A solo exhibition by Budi Agung Kuswara
3 — 25 August 2024
Wajahmu Keluar Dari Jidatku: Sunlit legacies and the cyanotypes of Budi Agung Kuswara
by Ong Kar Jin
“It’s not really about the colours, it’s the sun.”
Budi Agung Kuswara, otherwise known as Kabul, is pulling out his latest work, a large cyanotype. The cyanotype is a technique where exposure to sunlight turns photo negatives a distinct white and blue, suggestive of fine Ming vases. It has been a recurring feature of Kabul’s work for nearly a decade now.
“It’s about the sun. With it, there is a certain sense of sensitivity towards time, towards the past, towards memory. This sun is the same sun which shaped the lives of those who are in the archives.”
The archive sits at the heart of Kabul’s recent works. Initially focusing on his birthplace of Bali, he now pulls from a wider body that reflects the fluid cultural currents of Southeast Asia. “When you look at archives, they come from a time before Malaysia, before Indonesia was even an idea.” Kabul is drawn to the ebbs and flows of the nusantara, a time before nationalism. “I want to get out of this perspective of nationalism, away from these so-called cultural debates over who owns what, because everything is constantly in flux and always being exchanged.”
Such a view is perhaps reflective of Kabul’s own upbringing: he grew up on the beaches of Sanur, Bali, to a home of mixed Javanese and Balinese parentage. His background and Bali’s strict caste system meant that from an early age, he had to navigate life as a sort of insider-outsider. In one interview, Kabul recalls not being able to share a cup with his family as a child. Part of his childhood was spent selling souvenirs to tourists.
Kabul’s own attraction to the past is underpinned by a deep fixation with the melting pot that is culture: its accretion, its complexities, its ever-shifting nature. He embraces not only the dynamism, but also its murkiness: “I feel like we are constantly asked to choose our roots. In Jogja, I use my identity as a Balinese. In Singapore, I am Indonesian. Yes, I am Balinese, I am Indonesian, but identity is more than that, it is layered, it is shifting, it is responsive. Identity simply floats to the surface because it is an answer to that conversation. So I always think about why people obsess over this idea of roots.” In other words, Kabul’s practice is one of rejecting monolithic narratives.
Yet archives, by their nature, are vulnerable to such impositions. Archives often heavily rely on written documents, which privilege meticulous colonial bureaucracies while sidelining traditional native traditions such as oral histories or the perishable lontar leaves that were the preferred medium of Balinese manuscripts. In the logic of the colonial archive, the white governor is “Sir Stamford Raffles” with full lists of their achievements or affairs while the native is rendered incognito, simply “Balinese Woman,” through the lens of the ethnic.
Kabul found a way to enact his own kind of justice on these sources. In his series Anonymous Ancestors (2019), he wanted to return an individualised narrative back to these unidentified women, who in Balinese households are very much the lifeblood of tradition. Taking these photographs of naked Balinese women, photographed and ogled at by the colonial gaze, Kabul dressed them in European gown and high society wear. In one, an imperious Balinese woman in elegant regalia wields a leash, binding two lions with cherubs riding them to her.
Kabul is acutely aware of the spectre of orientalism and, with it, its sibling neocolonialism, but he views his own act not as imposing modern sensibilities to “cover up” the tradition but rather as a form of reclamation. It’s akin to Bridgerton with its people of colour, casting a Black woman as the Queen of England, unapologetic and placed as if it were the natural order.
Kabul envisions himself as a storyteller—a writer of historical fiction. In this latest series, he is branching out from his usual blues and more subdued palette to go all out. His process begins with a chosen subject pulled from the archives, such as a Javanese water-seller. He then employs Midjourney AI, prompting it to imagine a third or fourth-generation descendant of that subject. Midjourney is a tool, not praxis, for him, pulling across the vast faces of Indonesia from the sea of internet images to form an amalgamation of what a young Balinese might look like. That face is then integrated into his world. In this way, it’s a genealogy of sorts, conceiving these figures as having a family tree, a deep history, worthy of being memorialised in ornate frames and placed in a family place of honour, as the founding members of a sort of dynasty. Thus, he imagines the water-seller’s descendant as an ice cream mogul, an evolution of the most basic element of water into its composite of ice cream.
As opposed to his earlier works, you can see Kabul embracing his playfulness. Water-seller turned ice cream tycoon—a delicious tale. The excess is intentional, to portray abundance and extravagance. Fine china, fancy tablecloths printed with a colonial map of the Far East, a shining giant carp favoured by wealthy Chinese businessmen: it is his childhood spent selling kitsch melded into a landscape of lavishness. The lush backgrounds of his pieces bring to mind traditional Balinese paintings, a nod to his upbringing in a family that practised kamasan painting, while the sky’s palette evokes the work of Walter Spies. His subjects are imagined not as loincloth-clad figures seen through the white colonial eye, but as prosperous tycoons. It is a kind of Great Gatsby-fication of these people.
There is a tongue-in-cheek nature to reclaiming these motifs—of the Renaissance, Western images of ingenuity and prosperity, and the commodification of the Orient—and flipping them around. Kabul approaches these themes with a sense of gleefulness, evident when he talks about the elements (“THERE IS SO MUCH!”, he exclaims) of his new works and their irresistible more-ness—more colours, more elements, more story, more everything.
“Sometimes history can feel too heavy. I wanted to play with it more,” he says. Kabul’s intent was to widen the idea from an Anonymous Ancestor to this full fledged tribute, to make an imaginative statement that could embrace multitudes.
The approach is somewhat reminiscent of Southeast Asianist James Warren and his own quest to reclaim histories of the marginalised. Warren often delved into literal marginalia to reconstruct the stories of ordinary folk such as rickshaw pullers, hawkers, and sex workers in British colonies, creatively piecing together seemingly disparate breadcrumbs to construct new narratives. Similarly, Kabul’s own work involves melding fragments from the archives to re-contextualise the identities and potentialities of the individuals he portrays.
This solo exhibition is perhaps an evolution of Kabul’s own journey, where he has often viewed himself as both an outsider and insider to Balinese culture. Having spent 13 years in Jogja and then Singapore before returning to Bali, it is in some way a homecoming, but without accepting the static nature of cultural roots. While it might seem like too neat a narrative, one cannot help but see in it a kind of acceptance of the concept of merantau—that to wander is to embrace fluidity—and a rejection of rigid boundaries. And yet, some things, like the sun, remain.
Matahari bangkit dari sanubariku.
Menyentuh permukaan samodra raya.
Matahari keluar dari mulutku,
menjadi pelangi di cakrawala.
Wajahmu keluar dari jidatku,
wahai kamu, wanita miskin!
kakimu terbenam di dalam lumpur.
Kamu harapkan beras seperempat gantang,
dan di tengah sawah tuan tanah menanammu!
— W. S. Rendra,
excerpt from Sajak Matahari
The sun rises from my heart.
Touching the surface of the vast sea.
The sun emerges from my mouth,
Becoming a rainbow on the horizon.
Your face emerges from my forehead,
Oh you, poor woman!
Your feet are sunken in the mud.
You hope for but a quarter gantang of rice,
And in the midst of the landlord’s field, you are planted!
— W. S. Rendra,
excerpt from Poem of the Sun
It is the sun. The same sun touches the boundless ocean and the mud-buried feet of the toiling nameless, the same sun births Kabul’s cyanotypes. From his headspace, the ancestors’ faces emerge and their imaginary descendants’ lives echo through new fantastical legacies.
— ONG KAR JIN, July 2024
WRITER BIO
Kar Jin is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer at the intersections of history and technology. He is also co-founder of cloud projects, a maker and publisher of critical, intimate, and beautiful books.