Umi Dachlan: Epistemic Legacies Between Dutch Colonial Knowledge and Reclaiming Femininity in Indonesia’s Modern Art Narrative
Description
This research hypothesises that Umi Dachlan’s abstract paintings cannot be understood solely through a formalist lens. Instead, her artistic practice should be interpreted as a form of embodied resistance shaped by gender realities, femininity, colonial knowledge, and the socio-political conditions of Indonesia’s New Order period. The study argues that abstraction, in Dachlan’s work, functioned not merely as an aesthetic or formal exercise but as a critical strategy through which she negotiated and challenged dominant artistic, institutional, and gendered expectations. The data for this research consist of qualitative art-historical materials, including visual analysis of Umi Dachlan’s paintings, historical accounts of Indonesian modern art, discussions of art education at the Bandung Institute of Technology, and relevant literature on gender, femininity, colonial knowledge, formalism, and New Order cultural politics. These materials were gathered through close reading, archival and bibliographic research, and contextual analysis of Dachlan’s position within Indonesian modern art historiography. The data are interpreted by connecting formal aspects of her abstract paintings with broader social, cultural, political, and gendered conditions. The data show that Umi Dachlan’s work has often been read through European-influenced formalism, a perspective shaped by the legacy of Dutch colonial art pedagogy and later reinforced by institutional and cultural structures during the New Order era. However, this formalist interpretation tends to obscure the role of femininity in shaping Dachlan’s artistic consciousness, choices, and forms of resistance. A notable finding is that her abstraction can be understood as a means of liberation from rigid artistic conventions and from gender stereotypes imposed on women artists in Indonesia’s modern art landscape. This research, therefore, interprets Dachlan’s paintings as sites where artistic form, gendered experience, and political context intersect. Her work demonstrates that femininity was not simply a biographical background, but an active framework through which artistic agency and resistance were expressed. These findings can be used to broaden the historiography of Indonesian modern art by reconsidering women artists not as marginal figures, but as critical agents who challenged dominant narratives of modernism, formalism, and national art history.
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Steps to reproduce
We built this dataset from our field research in libraries, archive centres, and sources estate. The method including oral history, archival studies, and digitisartion.
Institutions
- Bandung Institute of TechnologyWest Java, Bandung