THE NAME GAME

The discrepancies between the personal and the political have been central to my practice as an artist. I think this is because I was born and bred in a Chinese-Balinese family that survived 1965. Recounting the past ten years of my artistic research, in this essay I will illustrate how I have found the experiences which accompanied the regime change of 1998 to be complementary to the traumatic events and mass killings of alleged communists in 1965. I have also found that reflecting on 1965 can help us re-contextualise the newly revived ‘Chinese-Indonesian’ identity within ‘Indonesian’ identity. This is because we can see the experiences of 1965 as a common ground shared by many ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’ Indonesians.