Zai Kuning

Justice

Justice presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open. A bundle of small red rattan balls hang from the front end of the plank, precariously knotted to a single thread hanging from the gallows’ edge. A book hangs from similar red threads at the plank’s rear, its surface wrapped multiple times over with the thread to hold it in place, the red thread resembling blood vessels or connective tissue. A strange substance covers the book’s surface: translucent manila-hued beeswax that gives it a cream-colored luster. This assemblage bears anthropological significance, as Zai notes, Justice reimagines the life worlds of the Orang Laut, an indigenous nomadic tribe from Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago that migrates through maritime travel but that has become increasingly displaced and marginalized in recent years. Each component of his installation, by extension, draws inspiration from different objects that Zai found amongst the Orang Laut during his fifteen years of researching the tribe. Zai tellingly does not allow his work to slip entirely towards ethnography, and he does not describe the use value for these objects, presenting Justice instead as a creative rendering of the Orang Laut’s “world” through a composite of their accumulated ephemera. Justice functions as both an imaginary artifact as well as an artistic statement of resistance against forms of cultural imperialism that threatens to erase non-mainstream cultures.