Entang Wiharso "Remote Control" (Indonesia)

Article 11: The Right to Considered Innocent Until Proven Guilty

420 x 200mm woodcut 607 x 428mm paper size

Artist statement: Entang Wiharso

People have the same rights. In order to obtain real (basic) truth and justness, we have to be honest with God, with ourselves, and with the community.

When we are in search of the truth, we must rely on authentic facts without manipulating the situation in order to feel right. My work often explores the tension between the traditional and modern world. I straddle the boarder between the two and am seduced and repelled by what each has to offer. Because I am uniquely situated on the cusp of old and new, east and west, I try to pull from my experiences universal moral messages. My work is the manifestation of contact with the outer world, characterized by despair, hypocrisy, violence, complexity and compromise, as well as by my inner spiritual world, characterized by hope, conflict, dreams, and anxiety.

My work is not about aesthetic choices – not about the physical nature of painting or good composition. The original idea that inspires a work controls all my aesthetic choices. I would not paint were I not obsessed with expressing a powerful and consuming vision, a vision that I feel I have a responsibility to show to society. I am not in the habit of rejecting old traditions in favor of new ones. I do not shatter old tradition, nor do I substitute the avante garde practices of a new culture for the old. I accept and acknowledge that I live in a world that has seen and valued both.As a result, I have undertaken an ideology of idealism that is between shape and abstraction. My art is between dreams and existence, between illusion and the tangible, between confusion and order, between that which is clear and that which is hidden.

In my work of the last three years, I have been creating a visual language that is partly inspired by traditional Indonesian images, contemporary culture, and world pop images. I am not concerned with perpetuating or reinterpreting traditional images from Indonesian folk traditions or recycling pop symbols.I am instead in the process of manipulating these images so that I can use them as symbols. I have developed a visual language that relies on emotion, color, reference, and inference so that I may I discuss sensitive and dangerous issues. My work represents events in my life that I use to explore the larger and more encompassing universal situations of people around the world. I use my art to discuss political, social or economic concerns.