Art Fair PH Artist Highlight: Yunizar

Gajah Gallery is known for its impressive roster of Asian and international contemporary artists with a huge following. What is so special about Yunizar that you featured him again at the Art Fair Philippines?

Jasdeep Sandhu (JS): Yunizar is one of the few artists with excellent career longevity, which I attribute to his ability to reinvent his art and the fact that he continues to innovate yet still retains the essence that makes Yunizar's work, Yunizar's. Ranging from still life, portraits, scribbles, and flowers, to paper works, wood carving, and now bronze. His style in painting and sculpture continues to progress and break boundaries after more than 20 years of practice.

In recent years, Yunizar's art has been gaining more recognition, firstly, being chosen for the very tightly selected Frieze Sculpture 2021 at The Regent's Park, Art Basel OVR Pioneer with KSR Jendela, as well as some other institutional shows such as Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial in Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. This year we are launching his artist monograph edited by eminent art historian T K Sabapathy; the book contains essays by renowned scholars: T K Sabapathy, Aminudin T H Siregar, Ahmad Mashadi, and Katherine Bruhn. This comprehensive publication encompasses Yunizar's two decades of productive art practice. And that is why I chose to present Yunizar for the Art Fair Philipines.

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Tell us more about Yunizar's works for Art Fair Philippines 2023. Is there a theme enveloping the selected pieces? What aspects of the artist would you like to highlight this time?

JS: Aside from the formal technicality in the works, the themes Yunizar raises (complexities within the ordinary, sidelined figures, and familiar characters) are discourses that both Indonesians and Filipinos commonly relate to—a sort of cultural overlap, a shared sensibility. Yunizar talks a lot about 'Rasa' or 'Sensibility' in his art-making, thinking that the Filipino public can understand his work in a highly nuanced way because of our unique commonality.

We highlighted Yunizar's new sculptures, such as the Dinosaur, Tall Woman, and Ayam Mutiara (guinea fowl); those works, cast from 2022-2023, still feature the distinctive Yunizar aesthetic but with added wittiness and irony. The Ayam Mutiara (guinea fowl) features textures that also appear in his other sculptures, the flatness that is rebellious to the notion of sculpture that is supposed to be volumetric. The Tall Woman is one of the first large-scale female figures in his sculptural practice, modelled in 2016 and cast last year. There is also one more new form of Yunizar sculpture seen in Predator, a wall-mounted sculpture that can also convert into a free-standing one; this shows how Yunizar pushes the boundary of sculpture into painting and painting into sculpture in his practice.

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Yunizar is known for his "natural world." His distinctive artistic imagery has made us look closer at Indonesian traditional culture and folklore amid a dynamic world. But what do you think the art world does not know yet or realise, at least, in Yunizar's art?

JS: I want the art world to realise that Yunizar's seemingly naivete style is not about forgoing critical thinking. There are hidden meanings layered within the seemingly simplistic composition, critiques that are dished out subtly and nuancedly.

In many of the sculptures, you can see the scribbles on the surface that seem disjointed from the figure but are sarcastic commentaries on the condition of our society. Some of the figures look imposing, as well as the larger-than-life animal figures which require space. There is also a unique conceptual distance between the title of the works and its appearance; the sculpture work titled Monster or Predator pokes fun at our society's crude way of labelling and judging things.

Read also: 40 Other Important Filipino Visual Artists Who Are Not Yet National Artists

What is your outlook on today's art market? Is there an increase in interest towards Asian artists?

JS: The international art market has taken notice of the Southeast Asian art scene, and I am hopeful that they will continue to do so on an even bigger scale. In the past three years, we have loaned our collections of Bagyi Aung Soe to the Centre Pompidou, our Semsar Siahaan to Sharjah Biennale, and I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, one of the pioneer Southeast Asian feminist artists to the 58th Carnegie International. This is why we continue to do what we do, to present the best quality of artists so that the international market gains even more confidence in our regional scene.

Gajah Gallery has been one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Indonesia. How would you like to position yourself in the thriving art market on this side of the world? What are your objectives (or primary goal) and how are you planning to achieve them?

JS: We support our artists not only market-wise. Our foundry and art lab has been in operation since 2013, with a professional team of artisans trained under Master Patineur Patrick Kipper. We cast with high-quality silicon bronze and do not cut corners regarding the sculptural process. Besides bronze, we also branch out to stainless steel, glass, wood, lenses, and other media that our artist would like to explore.

So we are placing ourselves as an integral part of the ecosystem, not only at the end of the chain but offering holistic support, precisely striving for the longevity I have addressed earlier.

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