This week we welcome Winnie Sidharta, an Indonesian-born Chinese artist based in Queens. Sidharta’s collages, paintings, drawings, and site-specific installations consider themes of assimilation, immigration, and how those experiences inform each other.
Sidharta has exhibited in galleries and museums in Indonesia, Beijing, California, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York City. She studied visual communication design in Indonesia and painting in Beijing. In 2010, she received her MFA in painting and drawing from The Ohio State University, where she also taught classes before settling in New York City in 2014.
Sidharta accesses personal history and cultural consciousness to construct hybrid images. The resulting body of work raises questions around the intersection of individual experience versus the record of history, and how these intersections are subsequently understood across cultures. Focusing on the distinct elements of buff white ceramics and cobalt blue glazes from Chinese Wanli pottery (of the Ming Dynasty), Sidharta could see that the tiles, much like Javanese batiks, had become a subject of convoluted artistic and stylistic ownership, marked by a dark history of colonization, the spice trade, and the expansion of global powers. With a format similar to the Dutch “Delft” tiles and “Wan Shou Wu Jiang” longevity porcelain, Sidharta strives to reclaim a kind of stylistic ownership of the materials by imbuing them with lost narratives, family archives, and oral histories stored within her memory.
The emotive and sometimes haunting depictions reveal scenes of grief, conflict, fever dreams, and the rippling effects of post-colonial trauma being passed from one generation to the next.
Through her tile series, Sidharta creates a fragmented film-strip of collective memory through the lost narratives and family archives imbued in her work. Her tiles allow the living, mutable quality of the painted image to carry emotive scenes of grief and conflict, revealing the realities of post-colonial trauma and the intrinsic human universalities that flash below the surface of her own cobalt and blackened green vignettes.
Complementing the figurative imagery in her tile work, Sidharta’s abstract paintings are a similar exercise in extracting and memorializing her fleeting memories and family oral histories. Altogether, Sidharta’s work considers assimilation, immigration, and how one informs the other.
