Agus Wijaya: Tata Reka

In the words of writer-curator Sebastian Henry Jones:

“The works reflect a complex, doubled feeling of comfort and uneasiness within the place he grew up in - Indonesia, where for a long time dating back to Dutch colonisation, there has been an open mistrust and normalised violence towards Chinese Indonesians. He refers to it as a political othering, resulting in an ever-changing sense of self in relation to the mainstream values held in broader Indonesian society.[...] each work exemplifying an internal play between noise, and then recognising patterns, discerning order from within that noise.

It takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the red and aqua patterns that define Agus Wijaya’s most recent body of work, for his exhibition Tata Reka.

There is an intriguing contrast to be observed between the undercurrent ‘glitching’ appearing to intrude upon the forms in many of these images, and the singular, well-defined forms of the characters who live in them, albeit some with limbs, legs or head missing.

There is something anachronistic about their presence in this strange landscape, that seems to be collapsing into atomised segments before our very eyes, much in the same way that pixels in a television screen work to display one tiny portion of a larger picture.

In my conversations with Agus, and beyond, in my research, I haven’t been able to find much information about these characters. After the initial panic of not knowing what to write about them, in returning to the works themselves, it’s clear that to simply know their histories, and to reproduce them here would be beside the point.

My initial eagerness to know them at their core is, in fact, at odds with the ways which these works ask to be engaged"