Line of Memory / Life and Death, (Diptych)

In Line of Memory/ Celebrating Life and Death, (2010), FX Harsono engages with the tumultuous history and politics of Indonesia through an investigation of the intersections between his own personal history and that of the wider Chinese-Indonesian community.  Throughout his artistic practice, Harsono also continually questions his role and agency as an artist within Indonesian society.

The painting fuses his own family pictures with documentary photographs taken by his father of the mass graves of victims of the Chinese massacre in 1948 and 1949 around their hometown of Blitar, East Java. The images of domestic felicity and harmony belie the enduring history of discrimination and oppression against the Chinese-Indonesian community that is rarely discussed in Indonesia. In this work, Harsono seeks to confront the violence suffered by the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia not only to recover these erased histories but also to initiate the dialogues that might bring about healing and acceptance.