Jayanto Tan at Verge Gallery, March 2021
Part I
Despite the encroachments of globalisation, the idea that one’s identity might be contingent upon an ongoing connection to a certain place remains strong across many cultures. A great deal of history continues to be written to legitimise (or sometimes de-legitimise) the natural possession of particular lands by certain groups. However, our larger human history has always been one, for better or worse, of movement. Throughout the constant ebb and flow of humanity across the globe, more readily mobile people have at times prospered but also suffered as they sought to make their lives in the ‘homelands’ of more fixed populations. History sometimes records these movements as mutually beneficial and part of the general advancement of humanity. Sometimes it sees them as the wellspring of endless tragedy.
Generally, history flattens and obscures the very real human implications of these shifts and movements in populations. By abstracting the fundamental human experience of change towards an essentialised description of whole peoples, history written at a distance frequently ignores the much more granular emotional and spiritual content driving or disrupting human attachments in changing times. Consequently, although art is never a substitute for well-assembled facts and reasoned argument, it often benefits us by colouring in the private and the personal dimensions of larger changes in the way different people experience their lives.
The story of Tionghoa Indonesians is an example of where straightforward academic exegesis never seems able to quite do justice to the magnitude of what these people have experienced over centuries in the archipelago.[1] This is understandable, in part, because of the sheer diversity of that population. Arriving in waves across centuries, speaking diverse dialects, sometimes already wealthy, sometimes incredibly poor, sometimes only staying temporarily, often wishing to turn their back on their homeland entirely, ethnic Chinese people have engaged with every level and sphere of life in pre-modern, modern, and now contemporary Indonesia.
Thanks in part to the role ethnic Chinese intermediaries played in the extractive economics of the United East India Company, the Dutch colonial state, and Suharto’s New Order regime, the relative wealth and success of some Tionghoa people has often been used to create and sustain a widespread trope casting ‘Orang Cina’ as being loyal only to material success in contrast to pribumi or ‘indigenous Indonesians’ loyalty to each other and to the very soil of their Tanah Air or homeland.[2] As has happened in many times and many places throughout history, this othering of one ethnic group has been politically expedient in Indonesia to those willing to make race and indigeneity the core of national identity.
Part II
In some ways the artist Jayanto Tan is an exemplary representative of a ‘Chinese Indonesian’, although he would certainly not wish to be cast in such a stereotyped role. Emerging from both humble and tragic beginnings, he has through both effort and opportunity managed to transcend the physically, structurally, and symbolically violent circumstances that continually haunt Tionghoa Indonesians while nonetheless acknowledging their role in shaping his life to this day. Like many, he fled Indonesia following the political turmoil and race riots that followed the fall of Suharto in 1998. In doing so he found himself relocated to Australia within a diaspora in which he was neither fully Chinese nor completely Indonesian.
In his exhibition Ritual: My Beautiful Curse (Cap Go Meh) Jayanto uses the beauty and potential of food to pull together the disparate strings of his unsettled life and reflect optimistically on how they have shaped the person he has become in Australia. Tinkering with the much-reproduced Chinese ornamental design ‘double happiness’ (囍), Jayanto re-frames a common sentiment with gentle irony to consider his ‘double dislocation’ as a twice-over member of a migrant family. First, as part of a very mixed-ancestry Chinese family in Indonesia and then solo in Australia as part of a diasporic family spread from Germany to Taiwan.
Having travelled to Australia alone and in pursuit of love and safety, Jayanto’s artistic practice has always drawn on themes related to familiarity and hospitality. Initially exposed to art while working in the café of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he was encouraged by new Australian friends to give expression to what they saw as his innate creativity through study at the National Art School where he completed both a Bachelor (2017) and Master (2019) degree. Working primarily as a ceramicist and producing highly formalistic works in multiple series, Jayanto sees art and food as indivisible in that they are both central to reproducing the only partially remembered familial sociality that was torn from him in his early life.
Influenced aesthetically by the queer Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, though eschewing his kind of cultural activism, Jayanto’s work is highly autobiographical. He describes it as cathartic in both its production and its representation in the gallery. Jayanto lays out a personal journey of loss, longing, and recovery that pays homage to the essential welcoming and accepting culture of Sydney. In doing so he celebrates his artistic practice, and art more generally, as an optimistic opportunity to create new kinds of sociality capable of ameliorating the fracturing of many social bonds he endured during his youth in Sumatra. Relentlessly positive and always hopeful, Jayanto takes a clear-eyed look at the way the fragmentation of his family over many years shaped his understanding of his own dispositions, inclinations, and potentialities as a social person.
Jayanto’s exhibition is best appreciated in a linear way and in two parts. It represents his journey from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, from confusion to resilience, from fear to optimism, and from Sumatra to Sydney. Beginning in Sumatra, where he was born the youngest child of 13 (one of whom died) in a family merging new anti-communist arrivals from China on his father’s side with generations of Peranakan syncretism with Malay, Batak and Minang cultures on his mother’s side, Jayanto reveals how the mysterious and never discussed death of his father and the subsequent loss of his many elder siblings into the Indonesian and global Chinese diaspora left his 5-year-old self increasingly cut off from the warmth of a large and loving family.
Equating familiarity with the ritualistic consumption of food in a way that Indonesians of all ethnic backgrounds would understand, the young Jayanto sees his future fortunes obscured by the weight of paternal loss and the narrowing of his larger supporting structures of kinship to that of his smallholder mother eking out a living selling produce in the local market. As his family splintered at such a young age and as he was forced to move from place to place without explanation, Jayanto’s family members began to take on the character of ghosts. Always present in both Chinese and Indonesian cultures these spectral figures never made themselves fully known to him and intensified his feelings of dislocation and being caught between different worlds.
As Jayanto tells the story, being a Peranakan child in the Suharto era he was comforted by his mother’s preparation of food and the low-key celebration of Chinese festivals. The most memorable of this for him has always been that of Cap Go Meh, the Spring Lantern Festival held on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year. However, at the same time he was aware of social and cultural constraints that prevented him from fully embracing the kind of all-encompassing ethnic identities that are everywhere evident across Indonesia in the celebration of rituals that invariably focus on the preparation and consumption of food. In Suharto’s Indonesia, to be Chinese was always to be contingent and questioned.
In his mid-teens Jayanto was old enough to follow the diasporic paths of his elder siblings. This path took him through multiple careers in Jakarta and Bali where he sought both sustenance and love in ultimately unsatisfactory ways before making his circuitous way to Sydney. It was only in Sydney that he found the kinds of freedom he had suspected were possible. The most important of these were the freedom to explore, shape, and present his sexual, creative, and intellectual identities in a manner still unthinkable in much of Indonesia.
However, it would be wrong to imagine that Sydney in the early 21st century offered an endless Mardi Gras-like context for a young gay migrant to find his footings. For his first decade Jayanto’s experience was one of survival and merely scraping by. In those days, as is still the case, he did not find particular support in either the queer or Indonesian communities in Sydney. Rather he began to increasingly find respect in the city’s larger multi-ethnic artistic community where he was inspired by the experience of other Indonesians who had successfully become Australian-Indonesian artists including Jumaadi and Leyla Stevens.
Asked what he has learned from this journey, Jayanto is adamant that seeking solace in one-dimensional identities, whether they be sexual or racial, is a fraught endeavour for the dislocated individual. To be wholly one thing only is to potentially deny oneself meaningful connections into larger and richer worlds. For Jayanto, the beauty of art and food is that they both have the potential to create social contexts that bridge differences that in other situations might force people apart or condemn individuals to solitude. Participating in art brings us together as much as breaking bread, sharing salt, eating rice, opening a cask, raising glasses, or any of the multitudinous rituals in which different cultures use food to connect people to one another.
[1] Indonesians of Chinese descent have been labelled in many ways during the colonial and postcolonial periods in the archipelago. Currently, the most politically correct terms seems to be Tionghoa in preference to the literal and still quite widely used Orang Cina (Chinese Person) which has clear connotations of otherness and being non-legitimate as an Indonesian.
[2] The VOC, or United East India Company (1602-1800) was the entity through which nascent European transglobal capitalism first developed. A state-sanctioned private trading enterprise, it relied on licences, force of arms, and local collaborations with indigenous leaders to extract resources across India and Asia. The Dutch government took control of the then East Indies in 1800 and replaced a trade orientation with direct political and military subjugation of the region.