Indonesia's high society donned their best batiks on Friday, 5 August for the opening of the inaugural Art Stage Jakarta, a new sister fair to Art Stage Singapore. Of its 49 galleries, 16 hail from Indonesia, with Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries strongly represented. Most of the 3,000 sq. m of exhibition space at the fair's venue, the Sheraton Grand Jakarta Gandaria City Hotel, is dedicated to gallery booths, with the rest used for special exhibitions profiling he Indonesian Impressionist Affandi and picks from the collections of prominent local collectors, including Deddy Kusuma, Rudy Alili and Alex Dedja, who have also opened their homes to collection tours this weekend. Art Stage founder and director Lorenzo Rudolf described Indonesia’s art scene and market as Asia’s largest after China, with “real standing in society”, but with weak infrastructure. “We are here to help,” he added.
Large metallic prints by the Indonesian artist Handiwirman Saputra, born in 1975 and based in Yogyarkarta, can be seen in the collectors' exhibition as well as at the booth of Jakarta’s Nadi Gallery. “He likes to make objects, then digitally scan them, or take waste”, like hair or plastic, and reconfigure it, says the gallerist Meli Angkapradipta. His 2012 paper pulp circles Ujung Sangkut Sisi Sentuh are a highlight of the fair’s Public Artwork portion.
Roh Projects, also from Jakarta, has a temptingly tactile booth of work by young Indonesian artists, including Syagini Ratna Wulan, Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo and Faisal Habibi. With Cute and Paste #2, Habibi mimics both letters and knives with his wood and stainless steel sculptures mounted on a painted wall. The 32-year-old artist plays on form, utility and perception with a streamlined aesthetic. “People often think he is Swedish”, says the assistant director Arati Sirman.
Amidst a fair thick with muddy abstracts, the bold and almost calligraphic strokes of Xue Mu’s two large charcoal drawings stood out at Singapore’s Yeo Workshop. Born 1979 in China and based in Amsterdam, Mu modeled the images in the 2016 works, part of her Black Diamond series, upon patterns of human movement, says the gallery's owner Audrey Yeo.