The AI Art Marriage: An Interview with Agan Harahap
Photograph by Indra Leondari
2pm
My father and I have meandered to different corners of ArtJog, an art fair housed within Java’s Yogyakarta - Indonesia’s creative vein. Pale light moonbeams glass, illuminating pieces like stage stars: traditional Batik paintings repping the Crack of Doom, seers as sculptures arrowing time, ceramic ears playing hide and seek to listen in amongst brick. These, diverse and far flung, are all reactions to the fair’s 2024 theme: PROPHECY. I amble round corners. My sunburn settles itself in the AC.
It is then that I am stung by a series of small frames - housing the jungle itself, shot with ‘it’. These photographs belong to artist Agan Harahap’s series ‘The Border Line’, each piece co-ordinating to bear the fruit of Sumatran village Huta Babiat: a sensitive antelope head, masks cresting with the tiger, flora upon fauna. The last of the collection holds a tender mist over the first hour of the jungle, the mind colouring the sweet pink that befriends first light; the acid of untamed, curved hills. It is this one that I hang on for the longest, a cool snake of memory curling - in my hammock in Bukit Lawang, the lights off, a silver thunderstorm throwing itself white against velvet night.
Image by Agan Harahap
But it is when I read Harahap's accompanying statement that my intrigue invades its own membrane. Huta Babiat, located in the hills on the border of South Tapanuli, is not real.
Not an hour later, before my father and I are even out of the car, I have organised to have dinner with him.
7pm
“So it’s not real?” I say, facing Harahap and his two children - cherubic and patient, sitting on the smooth sofa as Bapa keeps his eye on me, listening to each question carefully.
“It’s not real.” he says, a smile starring his expression.
Agan Harahap is a Jakarta born artist working with photo manipulation and computer generated images - “fooling people” as he describes it, a second grin cutting itself with mischief. Working with AI to create mock photographs mostly with political and comedic intent, Harahap began working with editing as a way to get through his graphic design degree at Indonesian Design School. “I had to take photos [for my degree] and I didn't really like photography at the time so I had to cheat. We still used film and so I would say to my friends ‘Which one don’t you like? I’ll have it, I’ll edit it’.” What made him continue the process beyond university? “To make a manipulation. I create around events, mostly political events, that happen here in Indonesia. I want to make people understand that what you see is just… it’s just drama. Everyday we have one issue and another issue, so, ok - relax. We don’t have to put energy into it. It’s dangerous for us”.
At this he leans over, cooler than you and calm to the blood, ordering a beer. The waiter knows him, he knows the waiter. There is a permeating familiarity that garlands the place, a Mediterranean restaurant on Tirtodipuran, the odd westerner shot stark from local patrons. This togetherness, he tells me as he turns back, is what he enjoys about Yogyakarta: “There are many communities that have a part in my life - not just the art community, but parents community, neighbours community. We all take part.” he says, “I love everything about Jogia. Every day, after I take my kids to school, there is a small warung, a small shop - cheap rice, cheap everything. And we start talking. We share stories - mostly about parenting.” he explains, nodding to his son and daughter.
Image by Agan Harahap
In comparison, Jakarta - where Harahap spent his own childhood - does not yield the same affection. “Too fast” he says, shaking his head. “It’s rapidly changing and developing everything. When I am back in Jakarta, I think: where is this? I am lost.”
Luckily, despite its sovereign mayhem, Jakarta did offer up several gifts. “Back in 2008, I made an artwork - maybe it was new in Indonesia - I combined a couple of photos together in one frame and then I got into an art competition and I was one of the finalists. I had an exhibition in the National Gallery in Jakarta. And from that, I met a lot of artists and made connections, made friends”, he explains. “My first ArtJog was in 2011 maybe. But ArtJog offers us a new experience. As an artist it is a challenge for me. It is challenging for me.”
“Recently, I have gotten a new hobby. When I’m editing photos, I listen to podcasts, Indonesian podcasts about horror and myths. In the jungle, you don’t wear this kind of dress, you don’t do this and don’t do that because there may be a spirit that gets angry with you. For me, it's good, because it means… there are the boundaries, rules. You have to obey, you have to follow, and so it becomes harmony.” he explains, the magnitude of ‘The Border Line’ coursing back, flung from Nature’s gun. “Huta Babiat is a fictional place that I created over one and a half years on my computer. Huta means village. Babiat means tiger. I created a village in which people and tigers can live together but there are boundaries. They still practise what their ancestors told them to do: to live together, to make harmony with the jungle and everything inside the jungle.”
“People in Indonesia were mostly doing that many, many years ago. But since religion came, its kafir - infidel. Religion is imported from the Middle East or from Europe and these new religions - the Abrahamic religions - they don’t teach as much about how to get harmony with nature, how to get harmony with the jungle because they are from dry land. Indonesia is different. Our ancestors already taught us how to create harmony, but we don’t follow it. All of the jungle, they cut the trees and plant palms and create monoculture. It’s all the same, all for coconut oil. They cut trees and they still ask for money and then we don’t know where most of the money goes.”
There is a pause, his passion pressing, brilliant, open - little is needed to yield it. I ask, somewhat tentatively - where does he see Indonesia in ten years? “I hope there will still be Indonesia in ten years. I hope Indonesia will be better. Recently, it’s been crazy. But I hope in ten years it will be better.” He pauses. “I hope so”.
Image by Agan Harahap
Image by Agan Harahap
Moving towards where his ideas crest, I ask him multiple questions about his inspirations. But this, he tells me - figures and idols - is not what threads his creation vein. “I don’t have specific artists. I love the artwork, not the artist. Ok, I love some of Damien Hirst, I love some of Jeff Koons, but are they my favourite artists? No.” I continue to press, thinking back to ArtJog. Are there local artists that he enjoys in particular? “Yes, some.” he says, somewhat reluctantly. “On the second floor of ArtJog I like the drawings - he makes landscapes, black and white. But my style is freestyle. Because I work in digital photography, it’s everything. So yeah, I like the art - not one specific artist.”
Image by Agan Harahap
As Harahap turns to settle his son, who has just risen out of seraphic patience, I observe the characters that adopt the night air around us more closely. Tshirts, cigarettes, motorbikes singing past at perilous speeds, easy laughter that rises like heat: all beers and low chairs, dim light slinging the moon of the glass table and grey slate floor. Just like any tourist fresh to the spoils of the new, I imagine that inspiration must be abundant. Harahap turns back to me, ready for my next inquiry. What is he thinking about for his next project? “Of life and farming. There are some important things I have to do in farming. Because what is happening isn’t right - for traditional farmers now, they might be the last generation, because no youngsters want to be a farmer any more. So me, as an Indonesian, I ask myself - ‘Ok, if the youngsters don’t want to be farmers, what will happen for our food? We will have to import all of the food?’”. At this, words taking ready shape of passion, his daughter smiles at me - somewhat cheekily, a slice of her father arrowing her expression. From this, the soft of Harahap’s character presents itself: he is an observer, untethered by inhibitions that jade thinkers of his intensity and care. It is a quality to be admired. I smile in its presence, fresh to truth.
*
As we part, he presses his palm into mine. “Just relax. When you relax, you can see everything more clearly”. He smiles: “That’s just me”.
Image by Agan Harahap
8pm
I walk back into the velveteen deep of Yogyakarta, street lamps yellowing the road, waiting for a GoJek. Thoughts pulse and energise themselves against the night - they camp upon AI’s unknown hill, its relationship to art. My stance upon the prospect of artificial intelligence colonising creation has always been blunt, a fear and genuine disapproval akin to the first reaction to cinema or the first steam train - the threat of the new, a dread of a world outrunning my conceptions of what is and isn’t possible (and having no need for me to match pace). I therefore uniformly issue the same sentence when I am asked of it’s place in my creative life: ‘it's not my thing’.
But that something created with AI was not only undetected by me but also moved me - brought me to a standstill amongst white gallery light, tuned my inner weather to its frequency - hums against this disapproval uncomfortably. I am left with questions. Given Harahap’s effect, is it fair to continue to render AI an exclusive threat to romanticism, the hand that puts a knife to art’s white throat?
But this is ArtJog’s catch and wink, questions fizzing in the mind:
What are these questions, these worries, but prophecies?
It is with this that I step into my car. I remember the journey to Borobudur tomorrow - five hours on the new train track built to marry the west and the east of Java, Jakarta to Surabaya. I close my eyes.
I’ll have a lot to think about.