Yvonne Low / Powerful Images for a New Nation: Sukarno’s Grand Monuments and Pretty Nudes

This event took place as part of the Art, Power, Inequality conference, held at Western Sydney University on 9 April 2024.
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This paper explores how Presidential Sukarno, known for being a great patron of the arts, had used modern art to galvanise nationalist spirits and to imbue collective solidarity among the disparate Indonesian peoples. Sukarno’s “aestheticizing of politics”, I argue, is underpinned by nationalist paternalism and male superiority, whereby his collection and patronage of the arts, from grand public monuments to female nudes, succeeds in legitimizing male authority in creative production and positioning women as the biological reproducers of a nation. Although the entire nationalist movement drew upon elements of a generally egalitarian vision of a future Indonesia where women were viewed as the female wing of Garuda, it was conducted on particular gendered and patriarchal terms. “Art” played a critical role in Sukarno’s reign at the height of decolonisation; the female nude, as a visible form to a new order, has been deployed and domesticated in service of the larger modernizing project. In response to the symposium’s objectives, however, this paper aims to further consider Ashley Thompson’s feminist approach to interpreting iconographies of the Historical Buddha, drawing a parallel between the way in which both the Buddha and the Nation were figured by the female enabler, thus reconfiguring the position of power.
About the speaker:
Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. As a member of the editorial committee to Southeast of Now Journal (NUS Press), Yvonne is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member forThe Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive),The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.