The story of Semsar Siahaan's artistic emergence reads like the script of The Year of Living Dangerously, Peter Weir's depiction of the social upheaval in Jakarta before President Sukarno's fall in 1965. There were times when Siahaan's practice of his art endangered his life, and other times when it saved him. In profiling his career, there seems no way to divorce his art from his humanitarian convictions and political activism. There is nothing “virtual” about this painter.
Siahaan was born in Medan, North Sumatra, in 1952. His father was one of the founders of the North Sumatra People's Army, formed in the 1940s to resist Japanese and Dutch colonialism. The senior Siahaan was appointed by Sukarno as the first chief commander of Medan, charged with defending North Sumatra from Dutch troops in their second move to reoccupy and recolonize Indonesia.
Siahaan started making works of art very young. “The first time I got art lessons was in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, from 1965 to 1968, when my father was an Indonesian military attaché to Yugoslavia,” Siahaan recalled in my interview with him. In 1975, after graduating from high school, he studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. He moved back to Indonesia to study sculpture at the Institute of Technology in Bandung, West Java, from 1977 to 1981. There followed various brushes with cultural and political authorities; he moved to the Netherlands, where he was active with expatriot Indonesian political dissidents and published a bulletin called For the Sake of Democracy and Human Rights in Indonesia. After returning to Indonesia in 1984, he applied his talent to making graphic banners and posters for political demonstrations and spent most of the proceeds from his drawings and paintings on funding grassroots coalition movements. In 1990 he went to Australia for a six-city tour of his exhibition and lecture series, backed by the Democratic Socialist Party and Greenpeace.
In 1994 Siahaan received the Best in Show award at the Jakarta Biennale IX, an exhibition of contemporary indonesian art. The work that gained him this prize was an installation piece, Redigging the Mass Grave. In late June 1994, after the government had banned three magazines and a leading newspaper, Siahaan was involved in organizing an alliance of Indonesian NGOs into the Indonesian Pro-Democracy Action, which held three days of huge peace demonstrations. On the third day, Siahaan recalls, “hundreds of military reacted violently to the peaceful demonstrators.” He recounts his experience:
Twenty three were wounded. I was beaten up by seven soldiers. They knocked me down on the street, and broke my left leg into three pieces. They didn't stop kicking me in the stomach, legs and head with their boots, creating bruises all over my body. They threw me into the army truck, from which then they again threw me to the ground near the local police headquarters. My condition was such that my left leg was spinning around and in hellish pain. Two hours later an army ambulance came and took me, very roughly and by force, to the military hospital. There, they tortured me, bending my broken left leg like a V. They set the leg, improperly, in a thick plaster cast. Then they put me in an isolation room for two days, while the military colonel interrogated me.
In 1995 Siahaan's career, and possibly his life, was saved by an invitation to participate at an exhibition at the inauguration of the Singapore Art Museum. This was followed by shows in Australia and Japan. By 1997 he was an internationally recognized artistic voice. But this was also the year that military squads in Indonesia started kidnapping pro-democracy activists, including artists, students, professors, journalists and outspoken intellectuals. Dozens of youths were shot and killed in military operations against civilians across Indonesia that spring, and in May Jakarta exploded in riots that rapidly spiralled out of control.
Siahaan again escaped to Singapore, and later arranged his immigration to Canada. Since his arrival in 1999, he has achieved a visibility that even established Canadian artists have difficulty attaining. His third solo show in Victoria, presented at the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria Gallery last summer, featured 25 works painted in 2001 and 2002.
Siahaan paints in oil, using a muralist style that sometimes incorporates elements of graffiti art. His works are allegorical narratives that collapse temporal and spatial relationships between episodes and frequently appropriate motifs and characters from myth and current events to refer to, or satirize, Western cultural imperialism and Eurocentric values. His paintings contain diverse references, such as George W. Bush enthroned (wearing Presidential-Seal-encrusted cowboy-boots of office), the ghostly Twin Towers, the Summarian goddess Ereshkigal, Christ, and a transcendent bird-man figure. Despite these external allusions, these works also depict a personal journey.
Although his injured leg now prohibits Siahaan from marching in political demonstrations, his posters, banners and signs are carried by students in rallies in Canada and the US. His recent works are unsparing, depicting the emotional narratives of an immigrant from the warm-blooded societies of Indonesia in Anglophile Victoria. His political beliefs and faith in humankind are a blend of warning and of hopefulness. As he comments, “[There] is a global, young people's unity emerging to build a new, humanized life-vision through their activism and works of art.”
Yvonne Owens Ms. Owens is a Victoria-based art critic currently pursuing graduate studies at the University of York, England.
Figure. Semsar Siahaan, 2001. Double Self-Portrait. Oil on canvas, 76 cm х 76 cm Photo by: Semsar Siahaan
Figure. Semsar Siahaan, 2001. The Genoa Tragedy. Oil on canvas, 76 cm х 76 cm Photo by: Semsar Siahaan
Figure. Semsar Siahaan, 2001. The Global Trader. Oil on canvas, 76 cm х 76 cm Photo by: Semsar Siahaan