OCEANICA
In 1989 and 1990, I spent some time in Indonesia, often pretty far off track, especially in Sumatra and Riau. These were not glamorous places at the time. I spent a bit of time by Lake Maninjau in Sumatra, watching the giant bats, strolling, and learning the correct protocol against dogs.
I travelled across a map I hardly knew, navigating the real world as if it was a paper map. I learned so much. The real map differs from the paper one. That difference is intrinsically political. That difference may be the best concise definition of political: why does the map not fit the experience? Why does the experience not fit the world?
I bought cheap Chinese watercolours in Bukittinggi. I only painted two pictures with them at the time: View from a Dutch Teak Lodge and (the breakthrough) Some Island Somewhere.
Then I let it rest for a while, but then I revisited those ideas, more formally, in 2002. Oceanica (The Economic Consequences of the Peace) is about colonialism, and borders, in places where they make no sense. But it is also, more sensuously, about Moghul watercolour painting, and also about those beautiful airbrushed Nelles Maps from the 1990s where the world seemed to make such sense—the maps I imagined I was walking when I encountered the real world instead.
