Haunted Images: Unsettling History and Traumatic Memory in Tintin Wulia's Artmaking

Abstract

Taking as a point of departure the practice of Chinese-Indonesian Australian artist Tintin Wulia (1972–), the article investigates possibilities for social critique offered by the photographic image as it is co-opted by artists working in post-Reformasi Indonesia. Building on scholarship that aspires toward a more historically informed understanding of contemporary Southeast Asian art, the article connects Wulia's reworkings of photographs to a longer history of image making. This focus on the entanglement of the contemporary and the historical is sustained throughout an analysis of three works by Wulia—Ketok (2002), Invasion (2012), and Great Wallpaper (2012). In highlighting the ways in which Wulia's artmaking responds to, mirrors, and troubles broader structures of seeing, documentation, and representation that have shaped national identity, the article suggests that the reanimation and reproduction of family and identification photographs unsettle forgotten and suppressed histories of trauma unique to the experience of the Chinese ethnic minority in Indonesia.