Agus Suwage: Room of Mine

cover of Agus Suwage: Room of Mine

The exhibition’s title, Room of Mine, suggests that the new works have a highly personal focus, offering a glimpse into the artist’s own studio, and by extension into his own inner world. The exhibition concentrates on only one medium –  paper – which Suwage describes as “still the most intimate material” for him. With a series of large-scale watercolors and an extraordinary group of paper mâché sculptural works, he reveals aspects of his studio space – his work table, library, and bedroom – as well as a wide array of images that continue to haunt him, whether taken from the works of renowned Indonesian painters of the past, from contemporary mass media, or from his own earlier work. Appropriation, particularly of his own work, is a central, ongoing strategy for Suwage, a process of recycling and recontextualizing that parallels the cycle of life and death that has been an underlying theme throughout his career, and which is grounded in the spiritual traditions of Java’s ancient Hindu-Buddhist culture. Suwage’s mixed Chinese Javanese heritage, and his experience as a Christian convert to Islam, have informed his approach to cultural pluralism and religious syncretism.