ROH and The Back Room proudly present The Garden Bites Back, a solo exhibition by Indonesian artist Banny Jayanata (b. 1983, Surabaya, Indonesia), whose works linger in the uneasy space between ruin and tenderness, the result of his reflections in nature during his month-long residency at Rimbun Dahan. The solo exhibition is a first in many ways: it is Banny’s first solo exhibition in Malaysia, his first time at an artist’s residency, and it is our first time collaborating with our friends ROH, who are based in Jakarta.
Influenced by poet-critics from Baudelaire to Goenawan Mohamad, Jayanata treats nature as a mirror already fractured by human fault. Raised near the ongoing Lapindo mud volcano disaster, Jayanata’s life was shaped by highways turned to sludge and levees that kept collapsing. Verdant swamps, ghostly trees, and delicate blossoms populate his canvases like actors on a moral stage.
Anchoring the exhibition are two large canvases—each stretching 2 metres high and over 3 metres wide. The two works are less tableau than terrain; there are surfaces to wander, textures to reckon with. In one, a barefoot painter strides through a pale turquoise pond, mangrove roots claw overhead, otters circle his drenched feet, palette clutched to his chest. In the other, five sinewed figures bend under a felled tree; their mudstreaked limbs fuse into one heaving mass as the trunk pins a prone body beneath. His thick impasto technique lays pigment on like bark.
While inspired by Romantic ideals of nature, Banny’s work must nevertheless entreat with the contradictions of the Anthropocene. Elegance is shadowed by dread: soft palettes conceal desperate grimaces, half sunk creatures, faceless screams. The Garden Bites Back dwells in these tensions, each stroke a gesture of tenderness amid a fractured ecology.
Exhibition dates
16 May – 1 June 2025
Credits
Texts by Ong Kar Jin
Exhibition identity and installation shots by Kenta.Works
With thanks to ROH and Rimbun Dahan
About the Artist
Banny Jayanata (b. 1983, Surabaya, Indonesia; based in Sidoarjo, Indonesia) received his Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Communication and Design from the Petra Christian University, Surabaya, Indonesia in 2007 and his Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta in 2014. Working predominantly in the margins of Indonesia’s contemporary art circles—Sidoarjo, Bali, then returning to Sidoarjo—Jayanata’s canvases enclose distorted characters in a melancholic tableau of rough, impasto brushstrokes, foreshadowing the existential human condition that he is so fascinated by. His subjects grapple with the weight of life’s transience, often appearing to be caught in moments of profound inner turmoil. And yet, amidst this struggle, there is a vividness to their presence, a living quality that makes each figure seem as though they are on the cusp of breaking free from their torment. Movement forms the primary engine of these ideas in Jayanata’s practice, holding in store an interest in both violent collisions between bodies as well as the pleasure of their entwinement. This is a formula towards achieving what the artist describes as a “living image”.
Jayanata’s overarching interest in the interplay between beauty and decay finds his paintings infused with a sense of inevitable decay, where beauty is juxtaposed with the harsh reality of its fragility. His subjects undergo a certain abstraction, not to further their artificiality, but rather to accentuate their states as living organisms that cannot resist the fate of decay and disappearance. In this decay, Jayanata finds deeper meaning, reaching for beauty as a kind of redemption and purpose in the face of life’s inevitable transience. In his paintings, Jayanata captures the essence of what it means to be human—fragile, beautiful, and inexorably bound to the passage of time.
Jayanata has participated in a number of exhibitions throughout his artistic career. His solo exhibitions are Black and Blue Mood at Museum dan Tanah Liat, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2018) and LUKA at Independent Art Management, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Onsen Confidential: The Final!! at Mujin-to Production, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Basel Social Club in Basel, Switzerland (2023); murmur at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2023);
Identitas yang Hidup at Museum dan Tanah Liat, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2021); Pan-Asian Cultural Connections at Capulet Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2020); Merayakan Optimisme, Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019); Virtual Territories at Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2013); Works on Paper #2 at Aswara Heritage Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2013); DEKA – EXI(S) at Biennale Jogja at Kandang Menjangan, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2013), Museum H. Widayat, Magelang, Central Java, and UPT Gallery, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2012).
Installation
Artworks
coming soon
Exhibition Essay
Alam dan Hal-Hal yang Tak Selesai (Nature and Other Unfinished Things)
by Ong Kar Jin
It began on May 29, 2006, not with fire, but with earth exhaling black mud. Within days Sidoarjo’s fields and lanes were wreathed in steam and slurry. This “Lapindo” mudflow, so named after the gas company drilling that day, has since gushed about 180,000 cubic meters of mud every twenty-four hours. In the glow of Indonesia’s evening news, it was proclaimed one of the largest mud volcanoes on Earth and the country’s most costly disaster. By now the mud has displaced more than 40,000 villagers in Sidoarjo, poisoning soil and water with toxins that has left hundreds ill.
Six months later, the front page of Jawa Pos Minggu captured the catastrophe’s new, surreal register: a troupe of dukun, shaman healers, travelled from Sumatra to “seal” the wound the engineers could not, and hurled a sacrificial goat into the mud. The Jawa Pos image is brutally simple: an ashen horizon, sulphuric vapour billowing like low cloud, and—caught at the precise crest of its parabolic arc—a goat, limbs splayed, muzzle flung sky‑ward. Three men in black batik-silk baju adat extend their arms as if directing traffic. One holds the switch-thin branch that moments earlier had prodded the animal forward. Below, the mud pool looks less like earth than liquefied asphalt: opaque, industrial, bottomless. Sacrifice photographed at shutter-speed becomes choreography, catastrophe masquerades as theatre. The caption TAK MASUK AKAL (“Makes No Sense”) blames superstition, but the scene is rational in another lens: a community, abandoned by corporate indemnity and in the limbo of litigation, resorts to metaphysics because geology and government will not listen.
Growing up near this wounding landscape, Banny Jayanata learned early in his life that maps are but provisional contracts with the earth. “Yes, that’s right, especially the road to Tretes, Malang, and Batu kept getting disrupted and jammed. And the man-made dikes meant to hold the mud broke again and again”, the toll road closed “for a really long time,” and detours became muscle memory. The disaster’s taxonomy (natural-versus-man-made) was academic to a teenager: “Even though it was triggered by underground drilling, people eventually called it a ‘natural’ disaster, though clearly it wasn’t purely natural.”
Slow disasters unnerve more than the sudden kind. An earthquake is brutal, but brief. A flood can be measured in days. But this mud kept coming. Life did not stop, it just bent around the mud. And in the wake of it: No resolution.
***
Banny Jayanata’s canvases declare their lineage before the first brushstroke dries. A lone figure wading through a turquoise swamp; mangrove roots clawing at a bruised sky; a hand reaching, quasi-Caspar David Friedrich, toward a cloud of butterflies. This is textbook Romantic staging: nature as mirror of the soul, the painter-wanderer dwarfed (and moralised) by a verdant sublime. Like Wordsworth or Emerson, Banny presents landscape as both confessional and cathedral; like Raden Saleh, who imported European Romanticism to colonial Java, he bathes the tropics in drama and reverence. Even his palette of damp pinks and luminous greens recalls that “sensation-first” ethos Edmund Burke prized when he linked beauty to pleasure and the sublime to trembling awe. In short, Banny’s Nature is capital-N Nature, an idealised elsewhere where spirit and scenery fuse.
But to romanticise is also to risk installing what philosopher Timothy Morton calls an “aesthetic screen”: a soft-focus filter that flatters the eye while insulating us from genuine entanglement. If Morton is right, does Banny merely repaint that screen in pastel colours?
The question sharpens when the paint thickens. Banny’s approach to nature and his dedication to thick impasto proclaims sincerity, but sincerity alone can sedate. Figuration courts empathy, yet empathy without indictment curdles into sentimentality. Consider Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters. The copper water glints like treasure; only a second glance reveals the figure half-sinking. Is that dissonance sharp enough to pierce comfort, or soft enough to be mistaken for melancholy décor above a sofa in Jakarta?
Raden Saleh’s lions tore Dutch uniforms to ribbons; Banny’s adversary stays offstage. By universalising the wound, he risks blurring its perpetrators. Banny courts the danger Morton describes. His swamps contain no oil rig, his butterflies dodge no smoke. Set adrift from smartphones, factories or plastic, the images feel timeless—mythic bards wandering an Eden that never quite existed. That temporal dislocation offers contemplative refuge, but it can slide into nostalgia, allowing viewers to project serenity where dread is warranted. The painting becomes a sanctuary that brackets out late-capitalist scars.
Baudelaiure knew that beauty and rot intertwine. In “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”), Baudelaire’s lover witnesses the radiant sun making carrion “blossom like a flower”. If Baudelaire shattered complacent prettiness by making rot radiant, Banny risks the reverse—making rot look elegiac enough to escape discomfort. If the Romantic screen once empowered resistance (Saleh’s predators mauling empire), it now threatens to anaesthetise urgency.
The show’s title declares that The Garden Bites Back, but does the bite draw blood or merely graze?
Such tensions align Banny with contemporaries who pry open pastoral veneers. Consider Walton Ford: like Banny, he revives 19th-century naturalist imagery, yet Ford’s Audubon-like watercolors hide disturbing depths, straddling the lines between the fantastic and frightening. Ford’s work is overt and satirical where Banny’s is lyrical, but both inject unease into pastoral panoramas. In the same spirit, the late Bree Jonson (1991 – 2021) flooded her canvases with snakes, simians, and wild dogs that stand in for human appetites and ecological precarity. In her depictions of feral entanglements, she delivered a brooding cautionary tale—less a landscape than an autopsy of paradise lost. Others confront crisis head-on: Olafur Eliasson famously hauled melting icebergs into city plazas to dramatize climate change (asking, “Can an encounter with art be more effective than cold, hard facts?”).
By contrast, Banny prefers gentleness. He does not place ice in our hands but holds up a painted mirror. Through close detail and symbolic gesture, he attempts a quiet re-tuning of the viewer’s gaze, trusting lyric tenderness over shock-and-awe.
It is a kind of leap of faith that an artist offers to his viewers. Yes, nature here may be drawn as refuge, but it is no innocent sanctuary. The anticipated communion with nature never quite arrives: butterflies alight then flutter away, the pastoral god never appears. The line Banny navigates is thus: he romanticizes nature yet simultaneously exposes the limits of that vision. By refusing to resolve this tension, his paintings become open-ended poems rather than manifestos, caught between affirmation and negation of the Romantic ideal.
In 2025, to paint a swamp with earnest awe is, to borrow Hal Foster’s phrase, “anachronistic on purpose.” That anachronism can read as either rebellion or retreat. Rebellion, because sincerity is unfashionable in a market that prizes deadpan irony, and to insist on beauty and emotion is to jam a crowbar into late-capitalist cynicism. Retreat, because lush brushwork risks lulling the viewer into reverie just when the planet needs alarms.
None of this is an argument for didactic agit-prop. It is, however, a reminder that Romantic longing and Anthropocene dread occupy the same historical minute. A pastoral image today cannot plead innocence; it either interrogates its lineage or extends the lullaby. Banny’s canvases hover ambivalently between those poles. He revives an old Indonesian tradition of celebrating nature’s beauty yet floods it with ambiguity and foreboding. This double vision of nature as tender and tragic invites its audience to confront that tension in quiet meditation rather than activist outrage. It asks us, as Baudelaire did, to feel nature’s poetry while risking what Morton warns about: that we might admire the tapestry even as the threads unravel.
Frank O’Hara once greeted his own poem with the cheeky fanfare, “Here I am, the centre of all beauty!”, a line equal parts swagger and self-mockery. Banny emulates that audacity each time he centres subjective wonder on a canvas. Despite his reserved nature, Banny seems willing to gamble that Romantic feeling still carries teeth.
***
If we search these paintings for prescriptions, we repeat the Lapindo error: imagining that one more engineer, one more ritual goat, will finally seal the vent. Banny offers, instead, what Pramoedya Ananta Toer once demanded of literature: the capacity to “menciptakan kenyataan baru”, to conjure a new reality beside a broken one. His canvases practice a politics of tremor: they vibrate rather than resolve, keeping the viewer in a state of ethical aftershock where neither cynicism nor sentimentality can fully land.
What remains, then, is a grammar of suspension: objects, bodies, even colours held mid-air, neither falling nor saved. Banny’s canvases adopt that tense. In Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters the central figure advances yet never arrives: one foot poised above water the hue of corroded copper, the other already vanishing in silt. In Fallen Tree and the Nature of Men five torsos strain under a trunk that appears to hover one brush-hair above complete collapse. Both scenes feel paused at the same impossible apex as the goat: the split-second before gravity reminds everyone who rules.
Just like the goat caught mid-flight, arced between faith and futility, Banny’s compositions hover inside an interval unresolved. The animal never lands, the mud never closes, the prayer never quite works; likewise, his figures never reach shore, his fallen tree never finishes crushing or being lifted. Painting, for him, is the perpetual freeze-frame of an unfinished calamity: a way to stare at the mess while it is still moving and say this is the truth of the moment, because nothing has healed yet. In those arrested gestures we hear the same verdict Lapindo passed on an entire district: there will be no neat ending, only the discipline of living inside the pause.
It could be that is why his canvases remain stubbornly figurative in an age of data dashboards and climate graphs. Where numbers flatten, paint trembles; where policy offers deadlines, mud offers the unceasing. Banny gambles that sincerity (an unfashionable word perhaps) can still wound, that to hold a moment of paralysis on canvas is to keep the pondering open long enough for inflection, or at least memory, to seep in.
Perhaps that is the most radical gesture available to a painter growing up in the backdrop of a disaster that will outlive him: to build images that stay unfinished, as Lapindo is unfinished; to insist, with every trembling brushstroke, that beauty and responsibility are not mutually exclusive but mutually aggravating. When the mud finally cools, perhaps decades or centuries from now, these surfaces may read as field notes from a crisis that was never declared over. Until then they ask us, in Goenawan Mohamad’s quietly devastating question, “Tapi apa arti roh tanpa tubuh yang buncah dan terbelah?” / What is the meaning of the soul without the ruptured and split flesh?
If Lapindo taught him that maps are provisional contracts with the earth, painting offers a counter-contract: an agreement to stay present while the ground keeps shifting. Aye, we remain in the realm of unfinished things, but here, unfinishedness is not a failure. It is the only honest grammar left.
— ONG KAR JIN, May 2025
Catatan Pinggir/Side Notes: A Practice in Over-Analysis
1. Lapindo Mudflow as Modern Sublime
Indonesian courts continue to circle the Lapindo Brantas drilling company, but the mud keeps rising. Each day Lusi discharges roughly 180,000 m³ of scalding slurry, enough to fill the Louvre pyramid nineteen times before breakfast. Geologists call Lusi a “mud volcano,” yet its trigger was human: a burst drillstring, a failed blowout preventer, a corporate shrug. Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century concept of the sublime prized towering mountains that “fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror”; Lusi updates the formula by replacing alpine peak with corporate negligence. Banny’s minorkey Romanticism therefore faces a structural opponent: the spectacle of nature weaponised by capitalism.
2. Chromatic Budgets
Every square metre of oil-painted canvas locks a few grams of carbon in linseed varnish: trivial, but symbolically pungent. Meanwhile Indonesia sells REDD+ forest carbon credits to Norway for US$103 million. Which sequestration is more honest: bureaucratic carbon or aesthetic carbon?
3. Agrarian Dreams, Plantation Nightmares
Java’s landscape has been cultivated since Majapahit, but the colonial plantation—and its latecapitalist heirs—reorganised everything. In 1995 the state held 1.13 million ha of oilpalm; by 2024 the figure exceeded 16 million. Clearing for palm is now Indonesia’s leading driver of forest loss, sending orangutan and hornbill into the same limbo that swallowed Sidoarjo’s villages. The result is a contradictory visual regime: touristic postcards of emerald riceterraces versus the charred grid of plantation blocks. When Banny overpaints mangrove roots until they resemble scar tissue, he is, whether consciously or subconsciously, touching that national wound. His thick impasto technique lays pigment on like bark, but bark without forest is just scab.
4. Genealogies of Green Melancholy
Nature in Southeast Asia is never just pastoral; it is always post-traumatic:
Raden Saleh staged lions and tigers as proxies for colonial predation (see Lion Hunt, 1841 – “humankind as brutal and somewhat wild like an animal”).
In Hutan Terbakar (1985), S. Sudjojono painted a forest ablaze—trees twisting under lurid skies, earth scorched into hallucination. Cast out from the political centre after 1965, the father of Indonesian Realism turned to landscapes not of nature, but of unspoken psychic terrain. These were no longer nationalist backdrops, but haunted inner worlds, where valleys, shadows, and fire stood in for memory, exile, and disillusionment. Nature, in the end, was what remained when ideology burned away.
Working with Muara Angke fishermen, Tita Salina & Irwan Ahmett lashed Jakarta’s own plastic detritus into an artificial raft, then tugged it from the garbage‑choked mouth of the Ciliwung River out into Jakarta Bay, turning the capital’s waste and the state’s neglect into literal ballast. (1001st Island: The Most Sustainable Island in the Archipelago, 2015)
5. Beauty is a wound
Timothy Morton warns that “clinging to a capital-N Nature becomes an arbitrary aesthetic screen … a bit of a disaster”. Yet Goenawan Mohamad reminds us that pure abstraction also fails: “Keindahan tak bisa jadi total. Ketika ia merangkum total, ia abstrak, dan manusia dan dunia tak akan saling menyapa lagi. / Beauty cannot become total… when it grows total, it becomes abstract, and man and world no longer speak.” Banny’s middle path is to paint the abstraction and the wound at once.
6. Mangrove testimonies
In 2021, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador granted legal personhood to mangroves; Philippine lawyers cite the case to protect Palawan reefs. If Java’s mangroves ever gain such status, Banny’s clawlike roots begin reading as courtroom sketches—botanical witnesses testifying under oath.
7. Scapegoat, Sacrificial Goat, Commodity Goat
Lapindo villagers hurled goats into Lusi’s maw believing blood might plug the vent. Anthropologists will recognise a classic scapegoat ritual: sin transferred, body discarded. But Indonesia’s goat economy is itself tied to land conversion; pasture follows cleared forest. Sacrifice thus repeats the violence it symbolically repairs.
8. The Eden Industry
Tourism boards across ASEAN have monetised “untouched paradise” even as bulldozers idle behind the billboard. Art history, too, runs an Eden industry: Rousseau’s noble savage, Emerson’s oversoul, Walton Ford’s bestiary … Banny’s gambit is to perform paradise with the brakes half-on. Paradise rendered, but tonally dissonant; Eden scored for minor key and offstage siren.
9. To Matter Once
Chairil Anwar’s wartime lyric “Aku” shouts, “Sekali berarti / Sudah itu mati!”/ “To matter once, then die!” The independence poets framed nature as revolution’s drumbeat; the New Order converted it into park décor and infrastructural canvas. Banny inherits both rhetorics: swamp as existential stage, blossom as décor. He leaves them unresolved; petals look like exit wounds.
10. Painting after Policy
A final perversity: oil paint is a petrochemical byproduct. Banny’s luminous turquoises are literally Lapindo’s kin, distilled from the same carbon chain that fuels drilling and deforestation. To paint a swamp in cadmium and cobalt is to acknowledge complicity.
“Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality… We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now.” – Pramoedya Ananta Toer
By insisting on making pictures, even though they may be anachronistic, Romantic, tactile, Banny enacts Pramoedya’s wager. The garden may bite back, but the painter’s reply is to keep planting colour in the wound, one deliberate stroke at a time.
About the Writer
Ong Kar Jin is a curator, researcher, and cultural strategist based in Kuala Lumpur. He is a co-founder of cloud projects, a research‑forward collective operating at the intersections of art, architecture, and history to produce critical interdisciplinary practice. He has held a variety of roles in the tech and public affairs industries. Notable curatorial projects include All the Lands Within the Seas (The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, 2021), Strategies of Dissent: Works from the collection of Ng Seksan (+n by Ur-Mu, Kuala Lumpur, 2024, co-curated with Lim Sheau Yun), and Zamboanga Encounters: Where Land and Sea Meet (National Museum of the Philippines, Zamboanga, 2025, co-curated with Noelle Rodriguez). He holds a BA in History, with distinction, from Yale University. His work has been supported by institutions such as the Yale Law School (2015–2017), the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2020), the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (2020), Malaysia’s Cultural Economy Development Agency (CENDANA) (2022), and the National Research Council of Korea (2024).