Originally from Cirebon, Haryadi Suadi is a well-known printmaker trained at the art training institution in Bandung where he studied printmtmaking under the tutelage of Mochtar Apin from the late 1950s until mid-1960s. Unlike the earliest generation of Bandung artists, such as Apin, Ahmad Sadali, and A.D. Pirous who worked closely with Western abstraction, Haryadi's prints engaged more closely with the works of Japanese printmaker, Shiko Munakata, and local languages of representation informed by Javanese and Cirebonese cultural and material tradition. This print is one of a few silkscreen prints of calligraphic abstraction that Haryadi produced in the 1990s. While Haryadi experimented with different printing techniques, including silkscreen, lithography, and intaglio, he engaged the most with woodcut print. In this print, Haryadi showcases a rather pure exploration of textuality informed by Islamic talismanic writings and a triangular structure that often occupies a spiritual and cosmological imaginaries known in many parts of Southeast Asia as "gunungan," an axis mundi that connects the mortal realm with the divine.
