Portrait Of Javanese Men (Hong Kong Series)

Nindityo Adipurnomo (1961) was born in Semarang, central Java. He studied art at the Institut Seni Indonesia and the Rijks Akademi van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands where he was an exchange student between 1986 and 1987. A multidisciplinary artist, Nindityo is also the founder of Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and has been actively promoting and developing contemporary art practices in Indonesia. Nindityo's art has revolved around the 'konde' (Javanese woman'�s ceremonial hairpiece), which has strong associations with the formalized and rigid social hierarchy in traditional Javanese society. This work is part of the series, Portrait of Javanese Men, where Nindityo addresses the issue of gender. Here, the faces of men, often stereotyped as dominant gender, are obscured by the konde, a symbol of the refined women, subtly suggesting the soft power of the women and a reversing gender role of the society back to pre-modern times.