Radi Arwinda

Radi Arwinda (1983) is a Bandung-Cirebon based artist who graduated from the Doctoral (PhD) programme in Visual Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology (2012). In 2019 he became lecturer at the Craft Department of the Faculty of Art and Design, at the same school where he had previously graduated.

His artistic exploration departs from self-awareness that stems from his personal experience in subject matters related to family. He was born and raised within a family that has a strong tie to its Cirebonese ancestor customs and as such, he was acquainted with traditional visual artifacts, myths and folklores from an early age. However, this tie to tradition was combined with living in a modern, cosmopolitan city like Bandung. This offered him an array of other cultural influences outside of his family. Having been born in the 1980s, his adolescence was heavily shaped by the ‘Japanese cultural invasion’ when anime and manga succeeded in becoming the dominant popular culture for Indonesian youth.

The emotional connection and visual exposure to both stimuli had brought to him to develop a personal fondness of the blending and interweaving of polarities : tradition and modernity, mythology and contemporary images, local and global influences. His offerings of allegories, imaginary figures, and appropriations of borrowed visual codes from other artists are essentially an attempt in finding personification and eventually establishing an artistic identity whilst approaching a range of issues such as questions about origin, instant gratification culture, consumerism, the mass culture mindset, fetishism and the process of art manufacturing.

During his residency at Devfto Arwinda focussed mainly on screenprints, bringing his colourful cartoons, which were circulating as NFT’s, to life as manually printed artworks.