08.07.26 — 02.02.26

Tropical Aliens

Solo exhibition by Eko Nugroho

Portrait of Tropical Aliens
WAHYUDIN

Three days after Eko Nugroho completed his site-specific installation and displayed 34 artworks for his solo exhibition titled Tropical Aliens at Nadi Gallery—I paid a visit to the gallery, which is located on Jalan Kembang Indah III Block G3/4-5, Puri Indah, West Jakarta.

On Thursday morning, June 11th, I was honoured with a privilege to have a preview of the exhibition and had an online conversation with Eko Nugroho himself. While being personally accompanied by the founder, owner and director of Nadi Gallery—Biantoro Santoso and Dhira Dwinanda—I gratefully accepted the honour.

Tropical Aliens is Eko Nugrohos's second solo exhibition with Nadi Gallery while also being the 36th solo exhibition by him, a graduate of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta, presented in numerous galleries and museums in Indonesia and abroad over the past 26 years.

Previously, from July 29 - August 11, 2009, Eko Nugroho held his first solo exhibition with Nadi Gallery, titled In the Name of Pating Tlecek. At that moment, Dhira was a 13-years-old first-year junior high school student. Which is why, as he himself stated, he could not vividly recall his impression about that exhibition, which presented 13 artworks of various sizes, subject matters and medium—including paintings, drawings, graphic prints, sculptures, embroidery, mural and installation objects.

“However, since that exhibition, Eko Nugroho’s name has been etched in my memories specifically because of his highly characterized visual,” said Dhira.

“So every time I encountered his visual work, I instantly recognized them as Eko’s, even though back then I did not really know who Eko Nugroho was,” he added.

We know, and Dhira is no exception, Eko Nugroho is currently one of the few Indonesian artists who joined the rank of most recognized artist in the international art scene. On February 11th, 2016, Donald Frazier from New York Times, acknowledged him as an example of local artists who rose to become a global superstar as South-East Asia’s contemporary art attracting more attention all around the world. This fact can serve as an evidence: In 2013, ArtReview magazine named Eko Nugroho as “Power 100” or 100 most influential figures in the contemporary art world, and Art + Auction magazine placed him in their “Top 50 under 50” list, which highlights the top 50 leading individuals in international contemporary art scene under the age of 50.

As stated by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop in The New York Times (September 17th, 2013), his recognition and inclusion signalled the rapid rise of Eko Nugroho’s career, especially after his solo exhibition at Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Arario Gallery Seoul, participation in Venice Biennale, and collaboration with Louis Vuitton which not only enable him to create a new scarf design based on one his six large-scale oil paintings, but also placed him on the same rank as renowned international artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince, all of whom had previously collaborated with the luxury brand.

What has enabled this artist, born in Yogyakarta on July 4th, 1977, to gain recognition from the international art world is revealed in Rachel Vance’s opening statement (Ocula.com—October 8th, 2015) for his interview with Eko Nugroho:

“Nugroho’s ability to intertwine popular culture within the vernacular of contemporary art has elevated his practice to broad audience appeal and seen him undertake collaborations with brands such as Louis Vuitton and Ikea while also exhibiting in art museums such as: Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, The National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe; and at biennales such as the Biennale de Lyon, Busan Biennale Korea, Taipei Biennial Taiwan and the Asia Pacific Triennial.”

Based on these skills and recognition, as noted by Donald Frazier (2016), Eko Nugroho “offers a firm, unique yet brutal approach that is capable of delivering sharp commentaries on politics and pop culture.”

Nevertheless, as admitted by Dan Cameron, curator of Orange County Museum of Art California, through Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop (The New York Times, September 17th, 2013), “despite his potential for keen observation and critique, Eko Nugroho is a highly humorous and inventive artist, the form and character of his animation placed him somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Kenny Scharf and Takashi Murakami—with the additional dimension of a comical brutality that brings him into the visual idiom of contemporary zombie and apocalyptic fantasy.”

Rachel Vance (2015) highlighted Donald Frazier’s observation and Dan Cameron’s statement above by noting that Eko Nugroho’s contemporary art practice “is characterized by diversity and takes many forms, investigating macro-universal issues such as globalization, political turbulence, human existence, corruption, racial intolerance, and cultural value system through critical lens, while simultaneously being humorous and comical.”

With all of these, I have acquired a solid foundation and a comparative perspective that allows me to appreciate and understand Tropical Aliens.

***
"Every exhibition tells a story," said Boris Groys, a philosopher and art critic, in Art Power (2008: 44). Tropical Aliens is no exception. Through this exhibition, Eko Nugroho presents a narrative populated by magical creatures endowed with distinct forms, models and powers, similar to those characters in the movie Star Wars, Disney and Pixar animated films, Studio Ghibli productions, as well as Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.

One of them is a creature called Feeding to Silence (2026). Its appearance is unmistakably contemporary: black-and-white sneakers, black cargo pants and a black canvas jacket. It sits on a red plastic chair, both of its hands resting on its thighs and supporting a silver tray filled with a meal composed of a withered forest, barren hill and a pockmarked mountain. Most astonishingly, the creature wears silver food tray as a mask, covering its face and head and emblazoned with the words "corruption, corruption, corruption."

Perceptive viewers may well imagine the creature as a visual representation of the villainous figure who embezzles public funds from the Makan Bergizi Gratis (Free Nutritious Meal) program in a country led by a president whose intelligent quotient (IQ) is said to rival the IQ of the scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Einstein.

However, no matter how it is imagined, Feeding to Silence convinces me that a compelling work of art is concerned not only with aesthetic matter but also ethical ones. In this sense, Feeding to Silence, borrowing from cultural critic Susan Sontag's statement in 1964, serves as a "statement model"—a work of visual art as the artist's statement on socio-political reality. This has been Eko Nugroho's signature for almost three decades and enables him, as stated above, to cements his place in the history of art, both in Indonesia and internationally.

It is therefore understandable that e-flux journal (2013) observed, "Nugroho's arrival was a timely event that reflected this need."— namely, the need to question social norms that oppress individuals and the hypocritical conventions that perpetuate the cycle of collectivism during the New Order regime under Soeharto, as well in the aftermath of its fall, which left Indonesia facing economic, social and political crisis.

Unsurprisingly, Feeding to Silence is not alone in Tropical Aliens. There exist 33 other tropical magical creatures with myriad different forms, costumes, styles and media, including works on paper (drawings), canvas (paintings), embroidery, fiberglass (objects and sculptures), mural and site specific installation—which reminds me of this statement from Susan Sontag from 1965:

“A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit (…) What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize.”

Subsequently, Tropical Aliens transforms into a collection of Eko Nugroho's most recent works from these past three years (2024 - 2026), demonstrating the consistency and integrity of his artistic practice, sustained by a well-preserved creative vision.

I have said it before, by quoting sociologist Hannah Wohl in Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged (2021: 9), "Creative visions represent a bundle of meaningful consistencies within a body of work, which changes over time as the body of work evolves." Unsurprisingly, Eko Nugroho has fully embodied this wisdom in this past 26 years of his artistic career.

For that "creative vision", it should be noted, Tropical Aliens does not fully encompass the breadth of Eko Nugroho's artistic practice. Rather, it represents a fragment of his artistic activism, one that aptly embodies Hannah Wohl observation (2021: 24), "Contemporary artists now view their work as not only a calling, but also a career."

In Tropical Aliens, traces of both "the calling" and "the career" can be found throughout the embroidered paintings, sculptures, mural and installations. It is well known that Eko Nugroho produces his embroidered paintings in collaboration with a number of textile artisan from communities surrounding his home studio, including the villages of Nayu and Jeblog in Tirtonirmolo, Bantul, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

This collaboration not only allows him to connect his creative works with the communities around him, thereby giving both social and economic values to his embroidered paintings, but also allows him to gain critical acknowledgement from key stakeholders in the global contemporary art world. We may recall his embroidered painting, Mask 2 (2012), was chosen to be featured in Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art, edited by Louisa Elderton and Rebecca Morrill, published by Phaidon, London and New York, in 2019.

Meanwhile, the production of Eko Nugroho's sculptures, murals and installations involves close collaboration with a team of highly skilled assistants and fabricators.

"They are not just helpers, I train them too," Eko Nugroho remarked with a sincere smile to Michael Vatikiotis in 2008.

"I Like working as a team. I find painting is too solitary", Eko Nugroho added.

Through such collaboration and team work, Eko Nugroho embraces contemporary artistic practice as an "activity that can be practiced by everyone, an inclusive and truly egalitarian activity," to borrow Boris Groys's words from 2016. In doing so, he recognizes that a good artist is one who is sincere and self-aware enough to share artistic knowledge and practice with others, thereby enabling him to face whatever may come, whether expected or unforeseen—including the dismantling of installations and the erasure of murals in Tropical Aliens.

Base on that recognition, attentive viewers, after experiencing Tropical Aliens, may find themselves curious about the secret or mysteries concealed behind the figures in Eko Nugroho's works, which appear charming, whimsical, and engaging beneath their many different masks.

In fact, eleven years ago, on January 28th, 2025, Eko Nugroho had already revealed that secret, or mystery, to Sola Agustsson of Artsy.

" Many of the figures in my work … are masked in some way. By changing the heads of figures I convey my interpretation; this is the picture I end up with,” Eko Nugroho explained.

At that point, I felt that I had found the wisdom needed to appreciate and understand Tropical Aliens attentively and at the most unhurried pace possible.

Jakarta, July 8th, 2026