Days That Slip Away Untouched: Today’s Disruptions in Uji Hahan’s Works
Uji “Hahan” Handoko Eko Saputro — who has become a household name in the contemporary art scene — has launched a latest solo exhibition Days That Slip Away Untouched. The exhibition is open to the public at Gajah Gallery Jakarta until 31 May. Through this new body of work, Uji Hahan examines the ever-evolving relationship between physical reality and digital mediation.
Working across painting, sculpture, and sound, Uji Hahan investigates how perception and meaning are shaped within the landscape of digital media. His works trace the ways images and experiences are presented, consumer and interpreted, while revealing how the boundaries between the real, the constructed, and the circulated continue to blur–and how authenticity is constantly renegotiated in the aftermath of their production.
In recognition of the instantaneous nature of digital systems, Hahan’s practice foregrounds slowness and material engagement. Through close collaboration with the Ace House Collective and the artisans in his studio, the works emerge from what he describes as an “aesthetic kinship,” a process rooted in shared labour and collective exchange.
Throughout the exhibition, Hahan appropriates imagery from the works of Raden Saleh, Tomás Sánchez, and Walter Spies to reflect on how knowledge, power, and systems of seeing have historically shaped dominant narratives. In doing so, the works point to the instability of images in an era governed by algorithmic visibility, where depth and context risk being flattened and reduced.
Within these compositions, moments of disruption emerge through hybrid figures and altered landscapes, introducing a sense of dissonance that unsettles familiar visual frameworks. These gestures operate as subtle “glitches,” interrupting dominant modes of representation while opening alternative possibilities for seeing and understanding.
The exhibition title, Days That Slip Away Untouched, gestures toward an awareness of time that often passes without full attention. Across his practice, Hahan foregrounds attentiveness to history, process, and everyday experience as a way of resisting such conditions. Here, authenticity is approached not as something fixed, but as something continually negotiated within the complexities across contemporary life.
