Art Basel Hong Kong | 24 - 26 March 2016

Yeo Workshop at the Discoveries section, Art Basel Hong Kong presents the work of Maryanto. The work depicts a landscape environment of some sort, with minerals on the ground and mining activity that had occurred in its recent past. The presentation is a theatrical installation comprising of an epic landscape painting in photo-realistic style, as well as several cabinets and tables of objects and sculptures on the walls and floors. The largest singular work is a painting entitled “Mineral Desire” that forms the background of the booth as installation. The painting portrays a black-and-white photo-realist landscape in acrylic on canvas. The narrative of this landscape painting is a post-apocalyptic environment that is at once arresting and shocking, and at the same time romantic and tragic. The background is an epic landscape that stretches on for what seems like miles of stone, resources and minerals layered together to form the land. In the foreground in high relief is what the artist describes as “nightmare and poverty”, drilling equipment and flagpoles of protesters. The composition of the rest of the booth are cabinets of curiosities with mysterious objects: mined stones and strange forms as if coveted minerals excavated and archived by explorers. The cabinets are made from materials sourced from local Indonesian resources: antique wood from rice milling buckets. The viewer enters in the booth, seduced by the textures, the depth and length of the landscape. Through entrance, the viewer is at once implicit, and an actor, in the narrative and plot of mining, its desire, and the motivations of the who what where how of resource mining.