The ethnographic impulse in Anusapati’s practice: internalizing the object

Anusapati is an Indonesian artist who has been active in the contemporary art world since the 1990s. His body of work employs wood as a medium to represent the identities of traditional and communal societies within the context of Southeast Asian modernity. He belongs to a generation of Indonesian artists who experienced what came to be described as the internationalisation of contemporary art. This article examines how Anusapati’s artistic practice embodies an ethnographic impulse that lends his works their representational strength. This impulse can be seen in his methods, which involve direct engagement with object-making techniques in the rural communities. For Anusapati, there is an intrinsic relationship between the process of making and the aesthetic qualities that articulate the identity of a communal society. His practice suggests that the ethnographic component in art need not be limited to the adoption of fieldwork or anthropological participation by artists. Instead, through the activity of making, Anusapati demonstrates that artistic creation itself may serve as an ethnographic mode of understanding culture and specific social contexts. Accordingly, this essay extends existing readings of Indonesian artistic practices of the 1990s by foregrounding an aesthetic approach grounded in sensory experience.