Lucky Country series #2

Uji "Hahan" Handoko Eko Saputro is one of the most prominent Indonesian artists of his generation. Like many of his contemporaries in Yogyakarta he draws on imagery from cartoons, anime and popular culture that are synthesized with references to Javanese tradition and the politics of the day.

This work is part of a series that the artist developed in 2012 during a three-month residency program with community welfare organisation, Contact Inc., Brisbane, Australia. While in Brisbane, the artist worked with the Indonesian diaspora community and discovered the book, The Lucky Country by Donald Horne. Published in 1964, the book popularised the term ‘The Lucky Country’ which became synonymous with an understanding of Australia as a land of opportunity, where one could make fortune without much need of talent or hard work. However, while working with the diaspora community, the artist became aware of apparent contradictions between the dreams of the diaspora, the mythology of Australia as the lucky country, and the reality of their lives in Australia.

This disparity, between the imagined and lived reality of the diaspora in Brisbane, led the artist to think more profoundly about the reasons for their migration from Indonesia, and observed that while sometimes the new migrants thrived, sometimes, in the artist’s words ‘they simply survived’. These observations formed the basis for a new body of drawings that illustrated the contradictions of the Indonesian migrant experience and explored the different cultural symbols and expressions of luck. The drawings were developed further into this three-dimensional form that offers a totem and a talisman for all those migrants who decide to take up a new life in Australia.