Eddy Susanto

Eddy Susanto was born in Jakarta. He graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in 1996 with a degree in graphic design. Rows of Javanese script taken from the text of Babad Tanah Jawi (The Chronicles of Java) define the figures in Susanto’s remakes of Albrecht Dürer’s etchings. This constitutes a juxtaposition of roughly contemporaneous shifts in the zeitgeist of the 14th-15th centuries – a move towards humanistic Renaissance values in the West, and trade-focused Islamic values in the Indonesian archipelago. The work also exposes the human tendency to exoticize the “other” – traditionally it has been the West who has exoticized the East, but now it is the West that has been exoticized by an Indonesian artist.