RADEN SALEH

Amy Wong - Arnout Killian

September 14 - October 5

Amy Wong’s portrait of 19th-century Indonesian painter Raden Saleh can be interpreted as both a self-portrait and an anti-self-portrait. After seeing Raden Saleh’s portrait in the Rijksmuseum, Amy created her version in Arnout’s studio, where I first saw it, some months or perhaps years after it had been completed. At the time, I knew little about Raden Saleh, but Amy’s brushwork struck me with its virtuosity. I sensed that she must have felt a connection to Raden Saleh, who, in her portrayal, comes across as a dandy, an upper-class figure navigating both Indonesian and European worlds. 

Before seeing Amy’s painting, Arnout had shown me a portrait of Amy that he had painted. Having shared a studio with Arnout in the early 2000s, I was familiar with his approach—working primarily from photographs, often incorporating a subtle distortion which gave his works a psychological depth. Arnout explained that he had invited Amy to sit for him, as he had with many of his close friends. He started by working from live modeling sessions, took photographs, and completed the portrait primarily from memory. When Amy first saw the draft, however, she noticed that Arnout was unfamiliar with rendering her features. He reworked the portrait, and by the time I visited his studio, I saw the final version, alongside Amy’s painting after Raden Saleh. 

The contrast between the two works was striking: Amy’s painting was expressive and dynamic, while Arnout’s was more subdued and methodically worked over. What stood out to me in both was how memory and preconceived notions of "Asianness" played key roles. In Amy’s painting, I saw echoes of self-portraiture; she later told me that she identified with Raden Saleh. However, she was careful to express that she didn’t want to conflate their distinct anti-colonial identities from differing vantage points, as she is a Canadian artist of Hong Kong-Cantonese descent, while Saleh was an artist of Arab-Javanese descent who lived in Europe for many years. Raden Saleh’s original painting is often attributed either to the Dutch painter Friedrich Shreuel or to Saleh himself as a self-portrait, reflecting the ambiguity that often surrounds works by non-Western artists—a pattern tied to colonial assumptions about authorship and artistic value. 

The discourse within Hybrid Cultures is not concerned with justifying the authorship of Raden Saleh’s painting, but rather with exploring how we perceive portraits—how we connect to them and how we recognize the relationships between the painter and the subject. To me, a portrait captures something of the psyche of the sitter only when the painter has a meaningful, committed relationship with the person portrayed. In these works, one sees the friend through the painter’s eyes or, perhaps, sees the painter’s reflection of themselves through the lens of memory. That memory shapes how the sitter is rendered, often altered by a conscious or intuitive approach. It is in this memory, shaped by history, identity, and subjective perception, that the true character of the person emerges—albeit, in warped or contested forms.