The Javanese artist of Chinese descent Dadang Christanto, who established an early reputation with his human rights and social conscience art when still at the College of Arts at Yogyakarta, has been living in Australia since 1999. In his art, he mixes the autobiographical with the historical as he explores the many faces of genocide that occurred in his country, especially under President Suharto.

Christanto was the first Indonesian artist to represent his country at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and has participated in many other biennale-style exhibitions, including the Sydney Biennale (2010), the Yogyakarta Biennial (2003), Kwangju Biennale, South Korea (2000), the Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil (1998) and the first and third Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (1993 and 1999). Although recognised in his home country, he is still wary of repercussions for his relatives at home and I remember him, a couple of years ago at his large retrospective exhibition at the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, worrying about the reception of his work in Indonesia.

Christanto works across a number of art mediums and perhaps is best known for monumental installations with life-size repetitive figures cast in various materials and shown in different circumstances and relating to loss and disappearance. He is also a performance artist and works in sculpture, video, painting and works on paper. This exhibition consists of large acrylic, predominantly blue paintings that dwell on the theme of loss of collective memory.

The common motif throughout this exhibition is that of the submerged blue head, a metaphor for the loss of traditional knowledge, called pawukon (wuku), which has sunk to the bottom of the ocean and is now being swept over by waves. In these rather large-scale paintings, a polarity is set up between traditional Javanese knowledge, customs and collective memory, and the waves of amnesia that seem to sweep over and conceal this heritage.

This dichotomy finds expression in the contrast between the exquisitely rendered Javanese figurines, which remind me of traditional Indonesian shadow puppets, and the broader expanses of blue that have been allowed to run and splatter over the carefully articulated forms. In the painting Shinta, the head is framed by a black void on one side and splash of crimson blood on the other. I felt that I was at a possible disadvantage when viewing this work due to the lack of a cultural context provided for the viewer. Queen Shinta, the wife of Rama, was kidnapped by King Rahvana and then liberated by an army of monkeys and reunited with her husband. I understand that traditionally this was interpreted as a clash between good and evil and Shinta was traditionally shown with a beaming white face, but I am uncertain if this narrative relates to this painting or to the artist's intentions in making this work.

Lovely in their appearance and striking in their impact, Christanto's paintings appear somewhat enigmatic and inaccessible to the contemporary Australian viewer.