Making Work Visible

Growing up in Indonesia, I remember as a child my mother would take me to the local market right after school. I remember the outdoor bazaar being hot, smelly, and noisy. I disliked it. In retrospective, however, the entire thing seems extraordinary. Most of the merchants are women, young and old, working outdoors from dawn till dusk everyday. It was common for them to build their own stands, often out of sticks and cloth. for this reason, I believe those women truly embody the labor spirit. This painting is my attempt to create a genre scene, where mundane activities are depicted expressively and symbolically, but I also wanted to show absurdity and strangeness by flattening up the figures and breaking the constraints of perspective. I wanted to depict a distant memory of one of my visits to the bazaar. I remember big, tall buildings left half finished, due to some corruption scandal or something like that. After a while people started coming to those buildings to build stands in and around the properties to sell their goods. Suddenly the entire area was transformed into one big market. It was such a weird experience, looking at those people among what seemed to be ruins. So I wanted to depict this by making the upper structure nonsensical, yet underneath the drama of daily life continues obliviously (except the child). Moreover, people would walk around in their helmets because helmet theft was so prevalent, so I added helmeted figures for emphasis of absurdity.