The musician-turned conceptual artist talks to Anna Calinawan about Indonesia as a nation that absorbs rather than fights its enemies.

How do you arm invisible soldiers? With this question in mind, Indonesian artist Augustinus Kuswidananto a.k.a. Jompet explores the cultural power dynamics of his home island of Java in his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. In the 2009 installation piece, Java, the War of Ghosts, a line of soldiers face forward, with their guns held high and their drums beating hard. They are all, however, bodiless. Their suspended uniforms, a blend of Dutch and Javanese garb, are the only markers of their presence. For Jompet, Javanese power lies in this symbolic presence – the island’s historic ability to negotiate its cultural identity by appropriating the symbols of its colonisers.

Your background was in politics and music. What led you to become an artist?
I was bored with the traditional way of music. So I started to make more experimental music; I used my body movement to generate music. Then one day, a visual arts curator invited me to perform in Singapore. I didn’t study in an art school. In Indonesia, it’s almost impossible for you to rely on the university. So I learned from the community. I become an assistant for some established artists at the time. I tried to read what they read, and I tried to copy a little bit from what they do. That is the way I learned to be an artist.

Can you tell us a little about your exhibition?
This exhibition is inspired by the history of Indonesia, in terms of having contact with different cultures in the past. Java culture has found a way to negotiate the incoming culture. They’ve found a strategy called syncretism. [Java’s religion] is the basic form of this syncretism. Islam in Java is very different. It has more influence from Hinduism, from Buddhism – it’s really not Arabic Islam. Christianity in Java is also syncretised with the local wisdom and local religion. It’s something happening everywhere in the world; for Java, the way they negotiate the incoming cultures has become the core of their own culture.

Why the exhibition title, ‘Phantasmagoria’?
Phantasmagoria is a magic lantern. It’s like a series of images, a show of images. In this work, I use the term to point out that the identity of a culture is like a series of symbols, like a show of symbols. How they present these symbols is the basis of their culture.

Can you talk about the single-channel video piece, War of Java, Do You Remember #2?
This was shot in an old sugar cane factory. It’s a Dutch-built factory in Java. There’s a scene of a man traditional street-dancing between machinery. The sugar cane factory is the first machinery that came to Java. It’s a symbol of the first modernism and industrialism in Java. This man’s street-dancing is a performance to invite the spirit of the ancestors. So the idea is how Javanese culture negotiates the industrialisation at the time. What they did was put the incoming machinery together with the mythology of the ancestors. This is the way Javanese culture accepts the change of time: by putting the future and the past together.

Why are you especially interested in this phenomenon?
I like the state of transitions, looking back to the history of Indonesia. There are transitions from enemies to religion, from Hindu to Islam, from agriculture to industrialisation, from colonial to post-colonial. It’s still going on now. Indonesia is always in transition.

In your work, the body seems to be always absent.
The idea is that [the] identification of an identity depends on your imagination, or the construction of it. The presence of the body always changes. Like liquid things, it changes any time. So this [exhibition] is a space for people to imagine.

Java’s Machine: Phantasmagoria by Jompet is at Osage Kwun Tong until September 12.