I Nyoman Masriadi

(b. 1973)

I Nyoman Masriadi is a leading artist of the post-Suharto era and his works have gained a select collectors base, which includes prominent collectors in and around the region.

Masriadi received his training in art at the Institute Seni Indonesia (ISI) Yogyakarta. From the time he was an art student, he had already been recognized by peers as one of the very first contemporary Balinese artists who eased himself away from an encompassing concern with Balinese life, culture and traditions in his works. The visual imagery and narratives in his paintings are derived from keen and intelligent observations of social life and behavioural traits. His visual vocabulary is striking, continuously refreshing and contemporaneously relevant.

In Bali, where he was born, there were two traditions of painting – a sacred one and one of words for a Western audience – but his relationship to these is indirect. Indeed, in an attempt to escape the dance ethos of Balinese painting and concentrate on detail, he is reputed to have stood on a cardboard box as he painted, to prevent taking any steps. He also reacted to the socio-political bent of the art school he attended in Yogyakarta. Early works show him sparring with Western modernism in the guise of cubism but meshing it with caricature, the language of street advertising and graffiti. The way he has overdrawn his finished paintings with a marker can best be seen as a means of inscribing himself in or against that tradition.

“Masriadi: Black Is My Last Weapon,” was the artist’s maiden solo show at the Singapore Art Museum in 2008. The exhibit spanned Masriadi’s 10-year career and explored the evolution of his signature black-skinned figures, a motif now widely copied by other Indonesian painters. His ambivalence toward the art world shines through in works like “Dikacangin” which depicts an artist and an art dealer arm-wrestling. “Karya Besar Kolektor” features collectors (in the form of rats wearing business suits) painting a black-skinned figure: a reference to the pressure Masriadi feels to reproduce his popular style. And “No More Game” shows the artist himself looking exhausted as he slumps in a chair in his study, while in the background, books bearing titles of his previous works, overflows the shelves.

Masriadi’s works are marked by consistently high quality — thoughtful in the messages that transmit from scenes and figures in his pictorial world, and painstakingly detailed in execution and finish. These qualities have led him to receive positive reception of the art collecting world at large. He is presently Southeast Asia’s most well-received contemporary artist at auctions; the appreciation of his works is a testimony to his forte and talent as a painter as well as a barometer of the ascendency of Southeast Asian contemporary art.