The humidity hit first, the way it always does at Soekarno-Hatta. It was late morning on a Tuesday in early November, and I had made the mistake of wearing a linen shirt I thought would breathe. It did not. By the time the taxi cleared the toll plaza and the city’s brutalist apartment blocks began pressing in from both sides, the shirt was a damp, unwearable thing—and I hadn’t even seen a single painting yet.
Most people I know skip Jakarta’s art scene entirely. They fly into Bali, maybe stop in Yogyakarta for a day, and leave Indonesia thinking the country’s visual culture begins and ends with batik sarongs and Ubud’s tourist galleries. This is a mistake, and I made it myself for years. On my fourth or fifth visit to the country, a friend who worked at a gallery in Kemang finally cornered me about it. “You’re coming to Jakarta and you’re not seeing anything,” she said, not quite asking. So I started planning a trip that would treat the city’s art spaces not as a side note but as the entire reason for being there.
The sheer spread of the galleries is the first thing to accept. Jakarta is not a walkable city. It is not a city where you can casually stroll between venues between coffee stops. The distances are real, the traffic is punishing, and the air quality on certain days will make you reconsider your itinerary. I learned this the hard way on day one, trying to squeeze three galleries in South Jakarta into a single afternoon. I managed two. The third I abandoned at a traffic light on Jalan Gatot Subroto, watching the minutes tick past on my phone as the car hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes.
The gallery that saved that afternoon was Dia.Lo.Gue, tucked into a compound off Jalan Kemang Selatan. It occupies a converted house with a courtyard garden, and the transition from street noise to the quiet, air-conditioned interior is abrupt enough to feel like a kind of teleportation. The exhibition that day was a solo show by a young Bandung-based painter whose name I did not catch and whose work I was not prepared for—large figurative canvases that seemed to hover somewhere between political cartoon and devotional painting, full of saturated colour and deliberate awkwardness of line. A woman at the front desk, who introduced herself as Mira, told me the artist had spent two years working as a sign painter in Cikini before applying to art school. “You can see it in the brushwork,” she said. “The confidence of someone who had to learn fast, not someone who spent years in a studio being careful.”
There is no single Jakarta art scene. There are several, layered on top of one another, and they do not always acknowledge each other. Museum MACAN, out in Kebon Jeruk, is the heavyweight—a purpose-built institution with the kind of international programming and climate control that makes you forget you’re in a city of ten million people. The building itself is a statement: all white concrete and angular lines, designed by the same architecture firm behind several of the city’s luxury malls. I went on a Thursday afternoon and found myself the only visitor in the main gallery for about forty minutes, walking through an exhibition of Indonesian modernists whose work I had only ever seen reproduced in books. The room was silent except for the hum of the air handling system and the occasional squeak of my shoes on the polished concrete floor. It felt less like visiting a museum and more like being let into a private collection after hours.
The permanent collection at MACAN is strong on mid-century painters whose names are known inside Indonesia but rarely travel beyond it—Affandi, Hendra Gunawan, Sudjojono—whose work grapples with the country’s independence and its aftermath in ways that feel urgent even now. Affandi’s self-portraits in particular have a physical intensity that photographs cannot convey. The paint is applied so thickly in places that it casts its own shadow. I stood in front of one for several minutes, trying to understand how a person makes a self-portrait that looks less like a record of appearance and more like an act of aggression against the canvas.
I took a ride-hailing car to Cipulir a few days later, a district in West Jakarta that does not appear in any art guide I have ever seen. The destination was a gallery called Ruang Mes 56, housed in what was once a textile warehouse on a street lined with auto-repair shops and small eateries selling fried chicken and iced tea from plastic tumblers. The gallery’s name means “Room 56” in Indonesian, a reference to the address, and it has operated since the early 2000s as a collective-run space focused on photography and video art. The exhibition that week was a group show exploring the city’s relationship with its waterways—the canals, the rivers, the flooding that defines Jakarta’s wet season. One artist had installed a series of photographs showing the Ciliwung River at different points along its length, from clean-looking upstream stretches to the trash-choked sections that pass through the city centre. Another had placed a video monitor on the floor playing a single static shot of water rising slowly over a period of several hours, the frame eventually submerging completely. I sat on a wooden bench watching it for longer than I needed to. The gallery had no air conditioning. The only sounds were the video’s faint audio track and the occasional motorbike passing on the street outside.
The contrast between Ruang Mes 56 and Museum MACAN is not just a matter of budget or polish. It is a difference in what each space believes art is for. MACAN operates like a global institution—curated, educational, professional. Ruang Mes 56 operates like a workshop that happens to be open to the public. Neither is better. Both are necessary.
I found my favourite gallery in Jakarta almost by accident. Galeri Nasional Indonesia sits on Jalan Medan Merdeka Timur, a stone’s throw from the national monument, in a colonial-era building with a grand staircase and tall shuttered windows that let in a particular quality of late-afternoon light I have not seen anywhere else. The space is state-run, which means the exhibitions are uneven—some are excellent, some are bureaucratic exercises in filling wall space. The day I visited, the main hall held a retrospective of the late artist I Nyoman Masriadi, whose hyper-detailed, muscular paintings had made him one of the most commercially successful Indonesian artists of his generation before his early death. The work was not subtle. A painting called I Think I’m OK showed a man trying to lift a woman’s skirt while eight more women stepped on his head, all rendered in the kind of crisp, shadowless realism that looks almost digital. I watched a group of high school students in blue uniforms stand in front of it, whispering and laughing. Their teacher did not try to move them along. She stood at the side of the room, letting them look.
That teacher’s patience reminded me of something a curator at Cemara 6 Galeri had mentioned earlier in the week. Cemara 6 is a small space in Menteng, run out of a historic house that belonged to a former governor of Jakarta. The curator, a man in his forties named Andi, had been showing me around an exhibition of contemporary batik works that pushed the medium far beyond its traditional associations. One piece used beeswax and indigo on raw silk to create a map of Jakarta’s power grid, the city’s electrical arteries traced in dark blue against a pale surface. “The problem with Indonesian art,” Andi said, “is that everyone wants to export it before it has been seen here. They want to prove it can compete in New York or London. But the audience that matters is the one that lives here, the kids who walk past the building every day and don’t know what’s inside. If they don’t learn to look at this work, what is the work for?”
He had a point. The attendance figures at most Jakarta galleries are modest, and the local press coverage of the visual arts is thin. A city of this size and wealth should support a more robust ecosystem of criticism, collecting, and conversation than it currently does. Several people I spoke to mentioned the lack of a dedicated arts journalism scene as a structural problem—galleries that cannot get reviewed struggle to build audiences, and audiences that do not read about art struggle to know what to look at. It is a chicken-and-egg situation that has persisted for years, and no single initiative seems likely to fix it.
One afternoon, I took a taxi to Taman Ismail Marzuki, the city’s cultural centre, which has been undergoing a long and frequently interrupted renovation. The building complex contains a planetarium, several theatres, and the Jakarta Arts Institute, and the whole place has the slightly tired, slightly hopeful atmosphere of a public institution that has been promised renewal but has not quite received it. The gallery space inside was showing a selection of works from the institute’s permanent collection, which turned out to be a chaotic and fascinating mix of academic exercises, student experiments, and genuine masterpieces stacked next to each other without much curatorial logic. A painting of a market scene from the 1970s hung beside a conceptual piece from the 2000s involving a stack of old newspapers and a fan. The labels were handwritten on scraps of paper taped to the wall. I spent almost two hours in a single room, not because the work was uniformly good but because the juxtapositions kept surprising me.
The logistics of gallery-hopping in Jakarta are straightforward enough once you accept their limitations. Most spaces are closed on Mondays. Many open late in the morning and close by evening, though hours vary widely and should be checked in advance. I found it useful to group venues by neighbourhood rather than by genre or reputation. South Jakarta’s Kemang district contains half a dozen galleries within a few kilometres of each other, including the aforementioned Dia.Lo.Gue, as well as Sangkring Art Space and the Edwin’s Gallery. Central Jakarta’s Menteng and surrounding areas hold Cemara 6, Galeri Nasional, and the smaller Rubanah Underground Hub, which occupies part of a shophouse and specialises in emerging artists whose work would never make it into MACAN’s programming. The distances between these clusters are not walkable—you will need ride-hailing or a driver—but the grouping makes the day feel less like a logistical puzzle and more like a neighbourhood crawl.
I had one genuinely bad afternoon in the art district around Kemang. I had read about an exhibition at a gallery called KOMIT that was supposed to feature large-scale installations by a collective from Surabaya. I arrived to find the space locked and dark. A security guard sitting on a plastic chair outside told me the exhibition had closed two days early because the artist had fallen ill and could not attend the scheduled finissage. He shrugged when I asked if the work was still inside. “Mungkin,” he said. Maybe. There was no information online, no sign on the door, no indication that anyone had considered informing potential visitors. I stood on the pavement for a few minutes, watching the traffic, then called a ride and went to lunch at a nasi padang place around the corner. The disappointment felt oddly appropriate. Jakarta’s art scene is not a service industry. It does not owe you convenience or clarity. It exists on its own terms, and sometimes those terms involve a locked door and a shrug.
What I will remember most clearly is not any single work of art but the accumulated texture of moving between these spaces—the temperature shifts as I stepped from street heat into air conditioning and back out again, the smell of fried food and exhaust that followed me from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, the way the light changed across the course of a week that began in the deep grey of the rainy season and ended in the hard white of a tropical afternoon. Jakarta is not a beautiful city in any conventional sense. It is loud, crowded, polluted, and in many places genuinely ugly. But that ugliness is part of what makes the art produced here worth looking at. It comes from a place that has not been smoothed over or sanitised. The paintings and installations and video works I saw were not trying to escape the city. They were trying to describe it, in all its difficulty and excess.
📷 Photos: Syahril Fadillah (Unsplash), Hardingferrent (Unsplash)
