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Mixed Blessings

From Jakarta to Yogyakarta, contemporary galleries are selling their inventories faster than they can restock them. But will collectors’ newfound infatuation for Indonesian art last?

Earlier this year, Tembi, a sleepy village in central Java, made its debut on Indonesia’s contemporary arts scene. Located on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, the ancient royal city that is home to some of the country’s finest traditional arts, Tembi Contemporary gallery opened its doors with an inaugural exhibition featuring five of the hottest young talents in the local art world. Within hours, the show had nearly sold out.

If “irrational exuberance” once described an unhinged stock market in the United States in the 1990s, the same could be said of the Indonesian art market circa 2008. That Tembi, a community of several hundred villagers engaged mostly in making Javanese handicrafts and knickknacks for export, could become the base for a progressive gallery says a lot about the lengths art collectors will go to seek out fresh talent—and the allure of picking up their works at a fraction of the price they might fetch in a big city. Call it bargain hunting or just savvy business. Either way, Valentine Willie, one of Tembi’s founders, has made it clear that he’s striking while the iron’s hot. “We’re not really cashing in,” the renowned Malaysian gallerist explains. “But the time is right.”

Indeed it is. At nearly every major Asian art auction since early 2007, a new record has been set for thirtysomething Indonesian artists like Rudi Mantofani and the prolific, ponytailed I Nyoman Masriadi. And the trend doesn’t show any sign of slowing. At Christie’s Hong Kong in May, a Masriadi painting—Sudah Biasa Ditelanjangi (Used to Being Stripped), which depicts an overweight man with a pair of pink panties around his ankles—sold for nearly US$540,000; not bad for a work completed just a few months earlier by an art-school dropout. Agus Baqul Purnomo, one of five artists exhibited at Tembi Contemporary’s opening, sold 10 of his 12 paintings the first night, and would go on to sell 17 more at a solo show there a few months later. And in August, Sotheby’s held its first exhibition in Indonesia, an event that also marked the opening of the auction house’s Jakarta office. Deborah Iskandar, Sotheby’s local consultant, says the prices fetched by Indonesian art are ideal at the moment, “high enough to keep things interesting, but still relatively cheap compared to Indian and Chinese art.”

Story by Jason Tedjasukmana Photographs by Martin Westlake