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Indonesian art entered the global contemporary art world of independent curators, art fairs, and biennales in the 1990s. By the mid-2000s, Indonesian works were well-established on the Asian secondary art market, achieving record-breaking prices at auction houses in Singapore and Hong Kong. This comprehensive overview introduces Indonesian contemporary art in a fresh and stimulating manner, demonstrating how contemporary art breaks from colonial and post-colonial power structures, and grapples with issues of identity and nation-building in Indonesia. Across different media, in performance and installation, it amalgamates ethnic, cultural, and religious references in its visuals, and confidently brings together the traditional (batik, woodcut, dance, Javanese shadow puppet theater) with the contemporary (comics and manga, graffiti, advertising, pop culture).

Spielmann's Contemporary Indonesian Art surveys the key artists, curators, institutions, and collectors in the local art scene and looks at the significance of Indonesian art in the Asian context. Through this book, originally published in German, Spielmann stakes a claim for the global relevance of Indonesian art.
"Yvonne Spielmann makes it clear that Indonesian contemporary art must be seen in a different light from a Western understanding of the contemporary. The book is an illuminating introduction to the Indonesian art world."
— Carla Bianpoen, arts journalist and writer, Artistic Director and Co-Curator for the Indonesia Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2013 and 2015
Until recently Yvonne Spielmann was Dean of Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, and Visiting Research Fellow at NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore. Previously she was Research Professor of New Media at the University of the West of Scotland, and Professor of Visual Media at Braunschweig University of Art. She holds the 2009 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and the 2011 Swedish Prize for Swedish-German scientific cooperation.

Authors

Contemporary Indonesian Art