In this book I have explored the relationship between feminism and visual art in Indonesia. Focusing on works by Indonesian women artists produced from the 1940s until the present day, the book provides a new understanding of the history of Indonesian modern and contemporary art from a feminist perspective.

My aims were to analyse the actual works of Indonesian women artists and to illuminate the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they worked, within a feminist framework. I set out to explore several key issues that arose from a 2007 curatorial project titled “Intimate Distance: Tracing Feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art” in the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta. While the exhibition and the complementary curatorial essay focused on creating a thematic survey in the works of Indonesian women artists, they did not address the question of how feminist readings can provide new understandings of the history of contemporary Indonesian art. In addition, the 2007 event also fell somewhat short in its attempt to establish a new perspective for analysing the works of Indonesian women artists, a perspective that is fluid and context-dependent and rooted in feminist ideas. This book has attempted to address these shortcomings, thereby filling an important gap in the literature on Indonesian contemporary art.

The book is not an attempt to define what Indonesian feminist art is and/or who a feminist artist is. Despite frequent use in texts written by Indonesian scholars and non-scholars alike, the definition of the concept and even the term “feminism/s” still lacks consistency in Indonesian art discourse. Indonesian scholars and writers have often dismissed feminism as something that is purely a Western import and therefore not relevant to the Indonesian context.

Feminists came to be caricatured as man-hating lesbians who refused family and Eastern/Indonesian values.