Angga Sukma Permana

Before becoming an artist, Angga Sukma Permana was a karate athlete who enrolled at an art institute just to find out that he took the wrong major. Despite the ups and downs, everything went better for him after he decided to give total focus to his art career. Since 2009, this young Javanese artist has been involved in many art activities and exhibitions in Indonesia, especially in his home city of Yogyakarta.
Why and how did you become an artist?
Historically, it might be because of the education system that encouraged me to exhibit and feel the atmosphere of the art world. But personally, it happened when I made a unanimous choice. The fifth semester in my college life was the hardest as my study results weren’t very good. One day, when I met my lecturer for his signature, he told me to immediately resign from campus, change profession and work as a security. At that time, I was indeed still active in the training activities as I was a karate athlete. His words then disturbed my mind for a long time. In the middle of 2007, I finally decided to put total focus on my art activities because I realized that totality is really needed in the art world.
What is your inspiration, and what topics do you raise into your works?
It all starts from my anxiety about the ever-rising social world, both in the mass media and the dehumanism that I feel myself in the real environment around me. I imagine these social changes grip the souls of human beings, turning them to be like animals with wild instincts. The anxiety about it then overflows into an emotion in my works.
Some of your works use many colors, while some of them are made in black and white. Is there any certain emotion you want to convey through the uses of those colors?
There are some considerations that I want to show with and without colors. My works, which are now exhibited in Bali, were all made in black and white. With the bold lines, these works show a unanimity of thoughts from the context of the story that I want to communicate. Meanwhile, in works that heavily rely on colors, I want to show more of the complexity of the problem, as well as the explosion of my emotions when visualizing it.
Tell us about your works being exhibited at Griya Art Gallery.
Through my works I want to tell the audiences that we don’t have to rely on someone else to make a change. It’s because if one person is uprooted, then the spirit of change will fall with him. If we want to make a change, we must work and strive to make it happen ourselves.