sea-through

When I first encountered Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu’s kinetic painting installation at Bangkok Art Biennale in 2024, my mind immediately piqued! The seamless combination between Kei’s canvas of digital distortion and Bagus’s mechanical alchemy entice the classical traditions of the easel to converse with encoded technology, an exchange mediated through everyday-life objects. For their current duo show at ROH Projects, both artists combine their forte once more, transforming the gallery’s interior into a theater of irony, where power symbols are subverted and nature struggles to breathe through monotonous mining sounds. What a feast to the senses and the mind alike!

Bios courtesy of the artists and ROH Projects. Photos courtesy of the artists, ROH Projects, and myself.

Read more about Bagus and Kei’s practice at sea-through.com

Bagus Pandega’s (b. 1985, Jakarta) works ingeniously addresses the extraction of natural resources in Indonesia—from the 16th century spice trade in nutmeg and cloves, to the palm oil industry, to the contemporary global demand for nickel used in batteries for computers, phones, and electric vehicles. Adopting a do-it-yourself, hacker approach, Pandega constructs modular systems using readily available, everyday technologies, natural materials such as plants and rare earth minerals, and musical instruments. These responsive installations are programmed to trigger mechanical and chemical reactions that generate sound or movement, influenced by changes in hyperlocal conditions such as human presence in the space.

Kei Imazu (b. Yamaguchi, Japan; l. Bandung, Indonesia)’s painting practice takes root in the peculiar conditions of the contemporary Internet age, where the visual torrent of information becomes a repository to distort and reassemble. These resulting 3D-renderings and digital sketches, by-products of a saturated image world, serve as sketches for her oil paintings. This approach is shaped by the artist’s archaeological impulse and her interest in the recovery and reconstruction of human lifeworlds from material cultures; since moving to Indonesia in 2018, Imazu’s works have come to address the country’s colonial histories as w