Tintin Wulia
Deze zomer kreeg ik vanuit Jakarta het verzoek van Carla Bianpoen om een bespreking te schrijven over de expositie van de Balinese kunstenares Tintin Wulia, in de Motive Gallery, aan de Elandsgracht in Amsterdam. Laat ik het hier opbiechten: tegen Carla heb ik nog nimmer nee gezegd. Ook dit keer niet.
De bespreking is inmiddels geschreven en verschenen in C-Arts, een schitterend uitgevoerd, in het Engels gesteld Indonesisch tijdschrift gewijd aan 'Asian Contemporary Art and Culture'. Carla Bianpoen is van dat tijdschrift een van de twee 'senior editors'. Begrijpelijk, want van weinigen, wellicht niemand, kan worden gezegd evenzeer als zij kennis te hebben van Aziatische en speciaal Indonesische hedendaagse beeldende kunst. Haar inzet, al vele jaren, om bekendheid te geven aan wat er op dit gebied in Indonesië en elders gebeurt kent geen grenzen. Kunstliefhebbers en verzamelaars hebben er belang bij om kennis te nemen van wat zij over beeldende kunst te vertelen heeft, want Azië is niet alleen booming op het economische vlak - de cultuur en in het bijzonder de beeldende kunst, die een eeuwenoude traditie kent, slaat in onze eeuw grote nieuwe vleugels uit.
Hier is, ter kennismaking, de tekst die ik voor C-Art schreef.
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TINTIN WULIA, A CITIZAN OF THE WORLD
In the center of Amsterdam, in Motive Gallery, Tintin Wulia had a solo exhibition in the summer of 2008 which offered an opportunity to meet her, in her creations, as an extremely interesting artist.
There are artists who speak, so to say, for themselves, about themselves. Others, on the contrary, have a message for their fellow men, put into an appropriate, self chosen, artistic form. Tintin Wulia is of the second type, but it is specific to her work that she combines the topics of her reflection and her general social positioning with personal circumstances. She is of Chinese origin, born in Bali, Indonesia, 1972, has travelled around the world and is now living and working in Australia.
Tintin Wulia came to fine art after studying architecture and music. She must have felt that in doing so she found appropriate means to express what she wants to express. She combines in a very original way a view on what is globally one of the most burning general issues of our time, migration and its socio-cultural consequences, with feelings about personal questions of identity.
Being of Chinese origin, being born in Bali, gives you a start in life that brings about confrontations with questions of officially established identity. As Tintin noted it herself, talking about the presence of her installation, 129 passports of different nations, at another exhibition in the Netherlands (Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven): ‘I was born about 4.400 kilometers away from the place I currently live. If I had been born at that very spot 100 years ago the people would have called me a Dutch East Indian of Chinese abstraction. If I had been born there 30 years ago, then my birth certificate would have been issued with the Japanese year 2606.’ This consideration explains her fascination with official documents like passports in which your personality is, shortly and imperfectly, laid down .
One can see a biographic logic in Tintin’s actual academic research ‘Border Security, Human Connectivity’, exploring the tension between the political and the personal. The Amsterdam exhibition offered a prefiguration of what this research is to be, by its topics as well as by its realizations.
There were four different images to see in Motive Gallery. The one called ‘Invasion’ gave its overall-name to the exhibition. It is an installation, showing official documents, of which kites are made, that are connected to white pots with red sand in them. It is clear that this is to be understood as a metaphor. If the pots with their red contents represent the human world, on the floor, the kites, in the air, are representations of legal power, that makes itself visible in bureaucratic simplification. An essential symbolic element in the installation is the wall that divides the space into two rooms, separating the room where the pots stand from the room where the kites hang. There is of course an opening in the wall; it looks like a rectangular window, but it is too small to enable serious looking from one room to another. This correctly constructed look-alike of a window just enables the passage of the threads connecting the kites and the pots. Close this opening in the wall, that can make you think of a checkpoint, hang razor blades. They may, literally, refer to a habit of youngsters in Asia to use razor blades in a play with kites (think of Khaled Hosseini’s book The Kite Runner). But, as a metaphor, they refer to the risks of brutal disconnection between the individual and the powers he has to deal with. Pure metaphor, this installation? No. It is specific for Tintin’s art that she uses realistic elements. The kites in this installation are made of legal-personal documents of her family.
From one of these legal-personal documents she made the second image in the exhibition, a gigantic aquarelle on one of the white walls in the gallery. Enlarging the document many times, it became a kind of wall-paper. Thus it gives an example of her project of making a series of Great Wallpapers, enlarged reproductions of her family’s personal-legal certificates. The result is amazing. She used light-blue watercolour to show, as she declares, the vagueness and impermanence of power and bureaucracy. And this is exactly how it works: when you look at such a representation of an official document on the wall you get the feeling of being confronted with some inexpugnable, soft-spoken, sneeky force that may eventually strangle you if it likes to do so. On the other hand it is possible that this document has the power to protect you or give you a permission to make a dream come true. Tintin has herself drawn attention to ambiguities and openness of interpretation in her work.
A third image in the exhibition was that of two small videoscreens with loud stereo sound. They show flying mosquitos making their awful irritating noise and entering into opened passports. These passports close with a knock as loud as a shooting pistol. For a moment the noise stops and we see the tiny spot of blood that stays on the white paper – that is all there remains from the small intruder. But immediately another mosquito shows up. To undergo the same fate in another closing passport.
What is that to express? May-be Tintin has been inspired by words of Landung Simatupang who compared migrating people with mosquitos. Mosquitos are considered to be a plague; they suck blood from animals and humans. Tintin shows, metaphorically again, that passports may serve as a means to get rid of them. The stunning fact is that a metaphor of this kind asks for breaking with usual habits of interpretation: the negative reputation of the mosquito has to be reconsidered. The little insect can teach us a lesson. Openness of mind, flexibility of judgment, isn’t that one of the goals of art?
The fourth image of the exhibition was a nearly six minutes video stop-motion animation with drawings and photographs from the past; they illustrate indirectly what we hear: a conversation between Tintin’s mother and father. They talk about a moment in 1965, when they mistook the noise of a gecko (‘tokeh’) for someone knocking on the door. The title is ‘Ketok’, which is an efficient onomatopeia for a knock on the door. We hear a good-humoured conversation about what could easily be taken for an insignificant funny incident. But it has an important historical meaning. The mistake, to take the noise of the gecko for a knock on the door, refers, psychologically speaking, to the fear people went through in those days: 1965 was the year General Soeharto, the latter president, took over power in Indonesia after a right wing military coup that led to violence (deportations, murders) against political opponents, communists, left wing people. Tintin’s grandfather, for instance, was arrested and was never seen again. A knock on the door was feared; it could be one of Soeharto’s men coming to arrest you. It could be a sign for the intervention of political reality in personal life, and turn this peaceful life into catastrophy.
The parents, in ‘Ketok’ do not refer to what may have caused their mistake. This silence is of course also significant. Catherine Somzé was very right in pointing out that the film gives ‘body to a reality that remains invisible and repressed’ and in speaking of ‘a traumatic silence’. That makes this little film precious and moving, under its humorous lightness. It reminded me of the way Bertolt Brecht showed the impact of totalitarian repression on personal life in his play ‘Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches’ (Fear and misery in the Third Reich’).
Tintin Wulia’s work has been internationally exhibited, awarded and collected. In the Netherlands, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Turkey, England. It shows that her art and her commitment has found recognition. She has become what she dreamt of to be when a young girl: a citizen of the world.