Zico Albaiquni, a visual artist from Bandung and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, held a solo exhibition entitled The Land That Refuses to Be Beautiful at Ames Yavuz gallery, Sydney, in early 2026.
Through an exhibition that summarizes the work of his three years of study in Australia, Zico presents a critique of the Mooi Indië tradition that he considers obscuring the complexities of Indonesian history in favor of a molek colonial aesthetic.
His artistic process is unique in that he does not start from a blank canvas, but rather paints on billboards containing public and personal archives that are then processed through the act of erasing or changing the form as a visual dialectic.
The use of striking colors that are often considered to be camps was deliberately chosen as a form of resistance to Western aesthetic standards as well as an attempt at decolonization rooted in the visual reality of everyday Indonesia.
Behind those technical aspects, his works hold a deep emotional charge because it uses the family archives from Ciamis as a means for Zico to care for memories and stay connected to childhood memory as well as his loved ones.
The painting was never blank, there was never a blank canvas. It was from a heap of memory, a heap of events, even the everyday. And I ended up printing that and painting over it, it was so kind of a dialogue processZico Albaiquni
