Retracing and recovering their lost stories can be a difficult process. Very few women of Chinese descent are recorded in historical accounts of Indonesian modern art or in the collections and archives of Indonesian cultural institutions. Despite such obstacles, the importance of bringing to attention the forgotten stories and transnational experiences of women who held fluid cultural identities, however fragmentary, should not be overlooked. Not only are transnational women’s histories human histories after all, but their retelling also unveils the intersecting structures of patriarchy and nationalism that have for so long limited historical perspectives.
(Portrait of Oei Sian Yok, photograph taken in 1953.)
The difficulty of the process, and the elusiveness of women’s stories, means that it can feel remarkably fortuitous to come across their names in scholarship. My first encounter emerged from conversations with an academic mentor, who directed me toward the recently translated writings of a Chinese-Indonesian art critic, Oei Sian Yok (1926-2002). Between 1956 to 1961, Oei wrote hundreds of articles reviewing both international and Indonesian exhibitions for the Jakarta-based Star Weekly magazine, under the pseudonym Pembantu Seni Lukis Kita (Our Art Servant). At the time of publishing, the Chinese community in Indonesia faced discriminatory legislation that sought to address their ambiguous nationality status. Notably, the signing of the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty between China and Indonesia in 1955 forced Chinese Indonesians to choose to remain as citizens of just one country. In following years, the Chinese minority in Indonesia continued to suffer from repression and violence during the New Order era, which sought to efface all aspects of Chinese culture and language. Such a position of precarity can be discerned in Oei’s articles, which appeared to pave an alternative way of appraising art that overturned the binary antagonism between colonial and anti-colonial viewpoints. Contrary to the incendiary rhetoric of an Indonesia-centric, nationalist historiography of art, Oei wrote:
“When we listen to foreigners talking about our own country, sometimes we don’t recognize what they say as something of our own anymore. They often hear or see something that we couldn’t perceive, because we have taken things around us for granted, as being ordinary; foreigners might rediscover things for us because they see with the “other eyes”.”
Here in Oei’s writings, in which she acknowledges and affirms the contributions of “foreign eyes” to the Indonesian artistic imaginary, we glimpse a genealogy of transnational thinking in Indonesian art criticism. Implicit in her writings, is the provocation that the very idea of Indonesia as a modern nation has, and may very well continue to be, shaped by those who occupy ambiguous, transnational positions in the country—the internal “other”.