'Flower Among Debris'

Meliantha Muliawan’s work in this exhibition emerges from a journey into her past, revisiting seemingly fleeting experiences that have nevertheless shaped her way of thinking and perceiving space. As a child, she often accompanied her parents on work-related visits to construction sites. Exploring places filled with rubble and half-finished buildings became a familiar part of her childhood weekends.

​

Living in a ruko (a shophouse that combines a residence and a place of business) is a familiar feature of many Chinese-Indonesian merchant families. In South Jakarta, the building supply store Serba Lancar became a place where Meli encountered construction materials as an intimate part of her everyday childhood environment. She observed how these materials were arranged, processed, and put to use.

​

Now, through the perspective of adulthood and her practice as an artist, Meliantha sees rubble and construction materials as objects that carry histories of their own. She draws on the visual language of these fragments as the primary material for her work, assembling scattered pieces of memory into new images that reflect a transformed perspective.

​

Meliantha shapes these fragments of rubble into flower petals. For her, the idea of flowers is also part of revisiting those childhood experiences. Amid the rubble and unfinished structures, one of her fondest memories was walking among the flowers in a garden within a residential complex built by her father. The flowers offered a sense of beauty that contrasted with the scattered materials and disorder of the surrounding construction sites. Meliantha preserves these encounters as vivid visual memories, recalling even their intricate details.

​

Her artistic practice does more than articulate memory and transform it into unexpected forms. It also creates a space where seemingly opposing elements intersect: the masculine and the feminine, hard materials and delicate forms, fine art and everyday craft, materiality and the dialectics of objects. Through these encounters, Meliantha reconsiders how meaning can emerge from ordinary materials and overlooked experiences, allowing beauty to take shape amid debris.