Zico Albaiquni (b. 1987) seeks to explore and expand the discourse around painting, as medium, technique, as well as a genre with its own histories. In The Artist Studio: Ciwaruga, Albaiquni captures an area of Bandung in a state of destruction. A small district in Bandung, Indonesia, where Albaquini lives, Ciwaruga is considered a sacred area as it houses an old Sundanese tomb that is still a place of worship for the local community. The area was recently designated for commercial development, with the natural environment giving way to large-scale, high-rise residential development that completely ignores local culture. Albaiquni’s work also makes reference to the Mooi Indie genre of painting during the colonial era, where foreign artists (predominantly Dutch) painted romanticized images of the Indonesian landscape, ignoring social realities and local culture. By ‘setting’ his painting with the context of an artist’s studio, Albaiquni acknowledges his role as an artist in framing the landscape and locality being depicted, while locating his practice within a wider arc of art history and the genre of history painting
