On December 11 – 13, 1999, a remarkable millennial event — an exorcism of sorts — was held in the old court city of Yogyakarta in south-central Java. This three-day event featured an exhibition of modern paintings, the launching of a postmodern novel, and a traditional wayang shadow play performance. Named Leng Ji, Leng Beh (If One’s a Pig, We’re All Pigs), the event was animated by the monstrous figure of the celeng, the wild boar. Its host, the prominent contemporary painter Djokopekik, staged this event to ward off the disaster that loomed with the approach of the millennium. At the heart of this event was an exhibition of three of Pekik’s paintings, each of which is centered on a haunting representation of a wild boar.

Painted over a three-year period, from late 1996 to late 1999, that spanned the final years of President Soeharto’s so-called New Order regime, its ignominious collapse, and the exuberant period of Reformasi (Reformation) Indonesia that followed, the three canvases present the artist’s self-conscious meditations on power and corruption, spirit possession, and the revolutionary potential of the people (the rakyat). The first painting, The Boar King’s Breasts (Susu raja celeng), was completed in 1996 not long after the Soeharto regime’s brutal July 27 massacre of Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democratic Party supporters in Jakarta. The second, bilingually titled Indonesia 1998, Berburu Celeng/Indonesia 1998: Hunting a Boar, was painted in the summer of 1998 shortly after Soeharto’s May fall or, as he would have it, “abdication of the throne to reign as sage” (lèngsèr keprabon madeg pandhita). The final canvas, the grotesque Without Flowers and Letters of Condolence: The Year 2000 (Tanpa bunga dan telegram duka: Tahun 2000), was painted in late 1999 for the anticipated millennium.

Bringing these three paintings together as the focus of this talismanic event, Pekik offered a visual retrospective of recent Indonesian history and a visual anticipation of its potential futures. For Pekik, the relationship between the documentation of the past in visual art and the animation of historical memory in the present is an organic one. Explicitly calling attention to that relationship, he commented in 2002: “If history is not recorded, not painted, then that history will never rise to the surface.” The three wild boar paintings bring the repressed underside of history to the surface by implicitly recalling the thirty-two years of fear and oppression under Soeharto’s New Order and by explicitly documenting its end. Soeharto rose to power through cunning that resulted in the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party and its sympathizers by massacre and mass arrest in 1965 and 1966. He ruled for three decades through intimidation and through a curious “reign of culture” haunted by the ghosts of the Left, and he oversaw Indonesia’s ostensible development with the economic and military support of the so-called Free World. The 1997 Asian financial crisis shook the foundations of the New Order’s apparent prosperity and, with it, its apparent order. The Free World pulled out its props, and the Indonesian people, in their sudden dire economic distress, remembered their oppression. Following several months of mass demonstrations led by an Indonesian student movement and several days of mob violence, no doubt incited by elements of the Indonesian army, Soeharto was forced to resign on May 21, 1998. Out of the ashes there appeared a moment of popular exhilaration and hope: the time of Reformasi. In June 1999 Indonesia held its first free elections in forty-four years. But along with this rebirth of popular democracy, an extraordinary resurgence of violence cast its shadow across Indonesia. Warfare sharply escalated in Aceh; serious communal violence broke out in Ambon; East Timor was laid to waste both before and after voting for independence in August 1999; hundreds of so-called witches were slaughtered across Java; churches were torched; and petty thieves were routinely burned alive. Soeharto had fallen, but he had not disappeared — nor had the forces his regime had set in motion.

In December 1999, then, Djokopekik brought together three paintings that commemorated this history, and he did so with the hope of moving beyond it. Bringing the violent underside of history to the surface in art could provide a means to exorcise its destructive potentials. But that creative act could generate other effects as well: this recording of the past in painting could instead release its negative effects into the present and thereby quicken the potential monstrosity characterized by the pig that lies within us all. Art for Djokopekik forms an invitation: “When a work of art is successful, it is as sharp as the surgeon’s scalpel. It can be an extraordinarily powerful invitation — an invitation that can dispel vengeance, but one that can also intensify it.” These three paintings form such an invitation, powerful and ambiguous.