Irfan Hendrian Reopens Memory Through Paper in “CLOSED”
ara contemporary opens its exhibition calendar this year with CLOSED, a solo presentation by Irfan Hendrian that brings the artist’s latest body of work into focus while also exposing the slow, meticulous process behind it. Installed across the gallery’s Main and Focus spaces, the exhibition pairs Chinatown Window Sample with an Open Studio presentation, inviting visitors not only to look at finished works but to trace the thinking and labor that produced them.
For Irfan Hendrian, paper is not merely a surface to receive images. It is both material and subject, something to be examined from within rather than worked upon. At a time when digital media continues to erode the everyday presence of printed matter, his practice insists on paper’s stubborn relevance; its ability to carry memory, history, and ambiguity in equal measure. Manuscripts, letters, and documents have long served as vessels of permanence, yet they are also fragile, temporary, and easily altered. Irfan Hendrian’s work sits precisely in that tension.
The works presented in CLOSED begin from a deceptively simple unit: a single sheet of paper. From there, Irfan Hendrian builds structures that are less about image-making in the conventional sense than about uncovering what he calls “the other side” of form; where material, memory, and history intersect. In this exhibition, that inquiry takes on a particularly charged resonance.
The photographs used in the works were first printed in hundreds of copies using risography, a technique that introduces subtle variations in each print. These layers were then sliced and cut by machine before being rearranged into new structures. In their final form, the images themselves almost disappear; what remains visible are thin traces of ink along the edges of stacked paper. The result is a body of work that treats history not as a clear narrative, but as a fragile accumulation–something that can only be sensed through layers and scars rather than fully seen.
Recurring motifs appear throughout the exhibition: window trellises, corrugated metal fences, locks, and keys. Hendrian refers to these as an “architecture of fear,” forms that carry both personal and collective weight. They are drawn from his memories and experiences of the anxieties that have shaped the lives of Indonesia’s Tionghoa community, where everyday structures meant to protect can also signal exclusion, surveillance, and vulnerability. In this context, the works function less as abstract objects and more as quiet witnesses, pointing to histories that continue to leave their mark.
Seen together, the pieces in CLOSED resist quick readings. They ask viewers to slow down, to look closely at what is barely visible, and to confront the shadows that persist within memory’s wounds. The exhibition does not offer closure so much as it opens a space for reflection, where material and meaning remain in constant negotiation.
Irfan Hendrian, an artist and printmaker, has long explored paper’s formal and sculptural possibilities. Over the years, his practice has expanded from treating paper as a planar support into shaping it as both pigment and structure, resulting in increasingly complex objects and installations. His solo exhibitions have included Incognito at The Arts House, Singapore (2024); Incognito at Art Jakarta (2022); Constructed _scape at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore (2020); Some Other Matter at Aloft at Hermes, Singapore (2019); SANS at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore (2018); and Terenne at Jeonbuk Museum of Art, South Korea (2016). His works are held in the collections of institutions such as Deutsche Bank, the Singapore Art Museum, Museum MACAN, the Jeonbuk Museum of Art, and Tumurun Museum.
With CLOSED, Hendrian continues this trajectory, using paper not to illustrate memory, but to reconstruct its texture until history reveals itself not as a fixed image, but as a delicate, unsettled presence.
