Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu’s Artificial Green By Nature Green 4.0, 2024
DURING THE FOUR-MONTH RUN of the 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale, Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu’s 2024 installation Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.0 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre cyclically generated and erased images of a lush Indonesian rainforest, like Penelope repeatedly weaving and unraveling her shroud. Atop a large green canvas painted by Imazu and based on a 1905 lithograph of the rainforest floor, a mechanical arm produced a sequence of line drawings depicting the contours of animals and plants. The drawing machine was programmed to render one of five images each day, in water-soluble ink. At the end of the week, the silhouettes were methodically erased by a second machine, which dripped water onto the canvas’s surface and wiped it away with a brush. The process of erasure is driven by the biofeedback data produced by a living palm oil tree that took center stage in the installation, its condition determining the volume of water and the speed and direction of the brush. The drawing machine then takes over again, repeating the process anew.
As a result, the Biennale’s visitors all would have seen a very different painting depending on what point in the cycle of the image’s creation and destruction they visited. The slowness of the process is crucial: Because the work evolves and changes incrementally over an extended period of time, the piece was impossible to grasp in its totality, much as the forces contributing to the deterioration of the environment are difficult for us as humans to apprehend, which pushes us toward inaction or neglect.The installation is the fourth iteration of Imazu and Pandega’s collaborative project “Artificial Green by Nature Green,” which debuted in 2019 and focuses on the palm oil industry in Indonesia. Between 2011 and 2016, palm oil production was responsible for the deforestation of more than two million hectares, accounting for nearly a quarter of the nation’s forest loss. This rapid depletion, particularly prevalent in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua, is leading to biodiversity collapse, habitat destruction, soil erosion, flooding, and compromised water systems.
water-based paint on linen canvas, modular synthesizer, LED screen, PC, palm oil,
dimensions variable.
In dialogue with this climate crisis, Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.0 reimagines the act of plein air painting. We no longer have a human artist directly observing and capturing their immediate sensations and perceptions of the natural environment, mediated by their individual feelings, emotions, and imperfections. What we see instead is a landscape painting produced through a negotiation of inputs from humans, machines, and plants themselves: The impersonal hand of the machine is programmed to render nature drawings by Imazu, the rainforest scene’s erasure directly tied to the health of the plant that serves as its living stand-in.
The piece was impossible to grasp in its totality, much as the forces contributing to the deterioration of the environment are difficult for us as humans to apprehend, which pushes us toward inaction or neglect.
The ideology underlying Western landscape painting is one in which humans are stewards and masters of the natural realm, a view of nature as a resource to be exploited, first by colonial empires and now by extractive industry. In formerly colonized countries of the Global South like Indonesia, the genre of landscape painting and its politics of representation are even more fraught. In the 1940s, the Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono popularized the term Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indies) to describe the exoticist style of painting that developed in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, made primarily by Western artists for tourist audiences, but also by local artists themselves. Sudjojono, a profoundly political artist, criticized the romanticized, Orientalist representation of the Indonesian landscape as lush and peaceful, the misery of its population edited out.
Based in the Javanese city of Bandung, Imazu and Pandega began focusing on the subject of deforestation after Imazu moved to Indonesia in 2017, inspired by her surprise, as a native of Japan, at the Indonesian government’s comparative indifference toward its own natural environment. In taking up this subject, their work resonates with an important current in contemporary Indonesian art exploring the intersection of nature and human intervention. Figures like the pioneering performance artist Arahmaiani have emphasized the ethical dimensions of our relationship with the environment, reminding us that without respect and stewardship, nature is reduced to mere resource exploitation. Others, such as painter Jumaldi Alfi, have interrogated historical representations of the Indonesian landscape, revealing how colonial imaginaries shaped perceptions of an untouched paradise.
Ultimately, Imazu and Pandega don’t advocate a return to a mythical preindustrial Eden, nor do they posit technology as inherently antagonistic to nature. Instead, with Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.0, they highlight this wrestling match between humans and nature, the former constantly trying to conquer its surroundings, the latter reclaiming humans for itself in turn, in a never-ending cycle of reconstruction and loss.
Naima Morelli is a Rome-based writer specializing in art in the Asia-Pacific region. She is the author of Arte Contemporanea in Indonesia: Un’introduzione (2015).
