(b. 1988, Bantul, Yogyakarta)
Rosit Mulyadi or more familiarly referred to as Ocid, was born into a conservative family of farmers in the southern coastal area of Bantul, Java. Before venturing into fine arts, he was sent to study in an Islamic boarding school, with his first encounter with art through Arabic calligraphy. While most of his peers chose to pursue further religious study, he chose to leave for Indonesian Institute of Arts Yogyakarta where he majored in painting.
Mulyadi employs figuration, appropriation, and classical painting techniques to examine distinctly contemporary and sometimes ironic social realities in the context of his locale. Moreover, by distorting and obscuring Old Master’s works in art history with paint and text, he references the internet ‘remix culture’ ubiquitous in our everyday virtual communication. His work has been exhibited across Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
“His action of incorporating colloquial and vernacular quips, including brash curse words, poisons the pompous nature of the original masterpieces, blurring the distinction between the highbrow and the lowbrow.”
— Anti-Canon
Liza Markus (Gajah Gallery)
Mr. Anonymous and His Vigilante #2
2025
Oil on Canvas
150 x 150 cm
In Mr. Anonymous and His Vigilante #2, Rosit Mulyadi appropriates Jan Adam Kruseman’s Portrait of William II and perforates its grandeur with the phrase: “nobody can tell story better than buzzerp.” This rhetorical glitch––a deliberate misspelling––folds in a commentary on Indonesia’s paid buzzers, whose roles in shaping political narratives hinge not on truth but transaction. The final “p,” shorthand for “rupiah,” signals the cynicism beneath the surface: power is no longer wielded but subcontracted, aestheticized, and sold.
The regal subject, once a signifier of sovereign authority, is rendered suspect––anonymous, duplicated, destabilized. By weaponizing irony and historical reference, Mulyadi exposes the hollow machinery of influence in the digital age: where fidelity to truth is less urgent than the virality of the sign. In this re-scripted tableau, authority flickers––not as presence, but as performance.
Poem of Tragedy
2025
Oil on Canvas
70 cm (d)
A vivid still life of watermelon and grapes becomes, in Poem of Tragedy, a charged symbol of survival under occupation. Overlaid with chaotic pink splashes and etched text, the painting recites a widely circulated poem: “we need no weapons / we have children who learn to read between bullets / fragments / we have wombs more fertile than the land you poisoned.” The watermelon, long a surrogate emblem for Palestine, becomes an unlikely bearer of insurgent tenderness—a fruit, a wound, a resistance.
In his characteristic détournement of classical genres, Mulyadi reframes still life as a site of postcolonial defiance. Here, resistance emerges not in spectacle but in survival: in literacy amidst erasure, fertility amidst devastation, and narrative amidst propaganda. The poem serves not as protest but as a reclamation of authorship—of life defined not by subjugation, but by the insistence to live, to remember, and to rewrite.
Mirroring Behavior
2025
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
200 x 150 cm, Framed: 205 x 155 x 7 cm
In Mirroring Behavior, Mulyadi divides the canvas into two charged zones: a snarling dog rendered in cyan hues above, and a blurred image of a human grip below—ambiguous, possibly violent, possibly tender. Overlaid with the phrase “LIKE DOG, LIKE MASTER,” the work explores how power’s logic reproduces itself across bodies and behaviors. The aggressive dog does not act independently; it merely echoes the temperament of its owner.
Through this visual proverb, Mulyadi casts a scathing eye on authoritarian regimes and their security apparatuses. The work suggests that violence is not an isolated outburst but a trained instinct—an institutional performance of loyalty, shaped by the will of those in power. In collapsing animal and human, symbol and spectacle, Mirroring Behavior implicates both the command and its executioner in the same spiral of brutality.
Tutorial Cara Cepat Mengatasi Problem
2025
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
200 x 150 cm, Framed: 205 x 155 x 7 cm
Rendered in the familiar interface of a TikTok screen, Tutorial Cara Cepat Mengatasi Problem collapses humor and horror into a sharp indictment of institutional violence. The pastel-colored blur of a raised gun, layered with ironic text—“I’d rather finish my homework as soon as possible before my boss interrupts my lunch”—translates brutality into banality. Violence becomes an algorithmic shortcut: fast, repeatable, and dangerously normalized.
Mulyadi draws attention to how violence, when wrapped in the aesthetics of entertainment and the language of efficiency, risks losing its moral weight. The work parodies the rise of “life hack” culture, suggesting that if killing becomes a tutorial, what follows is not justice but desensitization. In the logic of this digital simulacrum, terror becomes teachable, reproducible—just another trending solution.
“Rosit’s rebellious remixes and intentional misunderstandings of these works become his methods to subvert the Western art canon.”
— Anti-Canon
Liza Markus (Gajah Gallery)
The River Runs Red (But The Cartoon Stays Cheerfull)
2025
Acrylic on Canvas
120 x 85 cm, Framed: 125 x 90 x 7cm
In this stark reworking of Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey (1961), Rosit Mulyadi twists the origins of Pop Art to deliver a pointed critique of passive spectatorship in the face of violence. The original, a cheeky riff on American consumer culture, becomes a haunting allegory for the global response to the Palestinian conflict. “Two fish are fighting in the river!!” replaces the original caption—flattening warfare into cartoonish mischief—while Mickey grins on, unmoved.
A faux media player interface frames the scene, with play and pause icons underscoring the illusion that the viewer can intervene. Like Lichtenstein’s appropriation of mass media, Mulyadi uses visual language once deemed banal to highlight how repetition and detachment anesthetize empathy. In this layered remix, history loops: the cartoon remains cheerful, even as the river runs red.
Too Bad to be True #1
2025
Oil on Canvas
90 x 70 cm, Framed: 95 x 75 x 7 cm
Appropriating The Black Brunswicker (1860) by John Everett Millais, Rosit Mulyadi dissects its sentimental wartime farewell into a dissonant word search grid. The romantic scene—composed of a couple, a dog, and an interior domestic setting—is reassembled to host a new narrative rooted in a local tale: that of a failed husband, so ineffectual that his family’s dog was considered more useful. The word “CLEAVER,” a domestic pun on “clever,” underlines this emasculation with biting irony.
True to the logic of remix culture, Mulyadi’s grid doesn’t offer answers, only fragments—crossed-out words, half-legible phrases, and bilingual slippages that vary in meaning based on the viewer’s cultural lens. “MY DOG IS CLEAVER THAN YOU,” with its deliberate spelling quirks and semantic glitches, becomes both punchline and provocation. In Mulyadi’s hands, the act of viewing becomes a participatory puzzle, where surface naïveté veils deeper critiques of masculinity, failure, and social perception.
Useless Negotiation (UN)
2025
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
120 x 80 cm, Framed: 125 x 85 x 7 cm
In Useless Negotiation (UN), Rosit Mulyadi juxtaposes a dainty 19th-century portrait of femininity with the acerbic phrase “MY LIPSTICK NEGOTIATES BETTER THAN THE UN”, painted in bold, commercial red. The image—a woman paused mid-pose with a cosmetic tool in hand—becomes a vessel for geopolitical commentary, targeting the perceived impotence of international diplomacy. The irony is sharp: beauty as leverage, lipstick as a more effective diplomat than institutions ostensibly built for justice.
Referencing the UN’s inertia in the face of ongoing atrocities—particularly in Gaza—Mulyadi’s satire sears with frustration. The surface may be elegant, but the message is blunt: institutional mechanisms, rendered inert by political bias and procedural theatre, have failed those most in need of protection. In this work, aesthetic charm and institutional critique collide, leaving viewers to question which performances are more sincere—the rituals of beauty, or the rituals of peacekeeping.