Mizuma Gallery is pleased to announce Beyond Painting a group exhibition curated by Hermanto Soerjanto featuring artworks by Alexander Sebastianus, Ari Bayuaji, Dawn Ng, Ezzam Rahman, Kanchana Gupta, and Widi Pangestu.
In Beyond Painting, the exhibition curator Hermanto Soerjanto sought to highlight the importance of media and technique in the art-making process, and how it has developed over time. Based on his observations, there has been no new developments in art after the emergence of pop art. But the contemporary era has brought a more liberal platform for the development of art, in terms of the use of media and technique in creating artworks, as well as the influence of diverse cultures and locality.
Empowered by the advancement of technology, our modern world has provided art with limitless possibilities to grow. We can witness this in the works of artists such as teamLab and Refik Anadol, who employed computer technology and big data science as their main media of art; or Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno who employed alternative materials, including life spiders and spider web in their artworks. In Southeast Asia, we see artists who have adopted technology as their main body of work, as well as the ones who revisit their traditional and cultural roots, bringing that knowledge and making it relevant in contemporary culture. These phenomena are clearly evident in the works of Alexander Sebastianus, who uses the traditional weaving technique to create artworks that are relevant to the contemporary art scene.