'Is Ignorance Really Bliss?'

This work appears to depict the artist’s memories of 1998. At the time, as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, the artist’s parents concealed the fact that the May 1998 Tragedy was taking place in Indonesia, as she was only six years old.

Because the family was taking refuge in another country, television became one of their primary sources of news about Indonesia. To protect their children, her parents explained that the scenes of riots and fires broadcast on television were action films and that they were not happening in the real world—especially not in Indonesia.

Cartoons also became a way for the artist’s parents to divert her attention. This lack of knowledge continued into her adulthood. It was not until high school that the artist began to struggle with processing the accounts of the 1998 Tragedy.

The artist’s memory of a cartoon character introduced that same year contrasts sharply with the stories she later gathered about the tragedy.

In this work, these two visuals are presented indistinctly, resembling the image on a malfunctioning television. They can be viewed from two sides—left and right—from a sufficient distance. The first image represents the way the artist reconstructed her memory based on stories she encountered online, while the second reflects the memory formed through her own experience.