BALINESE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST · BALI, INDONESIA
Budi Agung
Kuswara
Working between Balinese visual traditions, contemporary image-making, sunlight and historical memory.
Enter the work ↓Selected Works
Practice
Artistic identity is not a fixed form but a living process — a continuous search for harmony with time, geography, landscape, and the exchanges between cultures and ideas.
Budi Agung Kuswara (Kabul) is a visual artist from Bali, Indonesia. His artistic practice is rooted in a decolonial spirit, exploring how bodies, memories, and archives can reveal alternative histories and possibilities of healing.
Working primarily with cyanotype and socially engaged art, Budi connects sunlight, time, and community as living elements within his process.
In recent years, his inquiry has evolved into an approach he calls Solar Synthetic Realism (SSR), examining how contemporary images shaped by digital systems can be brought back into dialogue with sunlight as an index.
For Budi, materials are not passive objects but active participants. Paper, sunlight, pigments and visual archives carry historical, ecological and cultural memory.
SOLAR SYNTHETIC REALISM
From the synthetic image
back to sunlight.
Through cyanotype, mediated images return to contact with the sun as an index, where light, time and material processes intersect. Painting becomes a manual intervention — an embodied trace that complicates the status of the image.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Between inheritance
and possibility.
Budi is the Founder of Ketemu Project, an art organization fostering collaboration between artists and communities. His practice moves fluidly between personal reflection and collective care, questioning the function of art beyond aesthetics.
View selected CV →Selected CV
Public Collections
- Museum Azman, Shah Alam, Malaysia
- Urmu Museum, Kuala Lumpur
- National University (NUS) Museum, Singapore
- Tumurun Museum, Solo, Indonesia
- Singapore Art Museum
- Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan
Recent Exhibitions
- Tracing Shadow — Mizuma Gallery, Singapore · 2026
- Gothic Modern: Nusantara — Taksu Gallery, Kuala Lumpur · 2025
- Beyond Unsettled Pasts — Erasmus Huis, Jakarta · 2025
- Art Jakarta · 2025
- Connection — Mizuma Gallery, Singapore · 2025
- Art Basel Hong Kong · 2023–2025
- S.E.A. Focus, Singapore · 2023–2024
Selected Solo Exhibitions
- Tiba Anak Cucu — The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur · 2024
- Repose under the Sun — Kiniko Art, Yogyakarta · 2023
- Residual Memory — Mizuma Gallery, Singapore · 2020
- Anonymous Ancestors — Ubud Readers & Writers Festival · 2018
- Arus Berlabuh Kita — Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore · 2018
Full CV available on request. The selected chronology above is drawn from the 2026 artist CV.
FOUNDER · KETEMU PROJECT
Art as a space
for connection.
Alongside his studio practice, Budi founded Ketemu Project, fostering collaboration between artists and communities and extending art toward care, connectedness and collective awareness.
Visit Ketemu Project ↗
CONTACT
Exhibitions · collaborations · enquiries
budi@ketemu.orgBali, Indonesia