NOW ON VIEW
CHILDREN OF JOMBANG
Pavilion, Wereldmuseum Leiden · Pasar Leiden
August 29, 2026 · 10:00–20:00
August 30, 2026 · 10:00–18:00
A research-based installation bringing together portraiture, archival material, sound and objects to explore the histories of children connected to Jombang, East Java.
Listen to the soundscape
Children of Jombang
The power of transgenerational transmission
nenek, ibu, anak, cucu
The Power of Transgenerational Transmission brings together works rooted in personal and family histories, colonial archives and inherited memory. Through painting, cyanotype, installation and archival material, the exhibition explores how histories continue to move through generations, in what is remembered, what is silenced, and what remains.
SOLO EXHIBITION · GALERIE WIND · ROTTERDAM · 2026
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EXPLORE THE POWER OF TRANSGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
CHILDREN OF JOMBANG
TRIPTYCH · INSTALLATION · SOUND · RESEARCH
An installation rooted in colonial archives, family history and the faces of Indo-European children in East Java. Through painting, sound and objects, their histories are brought into the present.
UNSEEN, SEEN · UNHEARD, HEARD
PAINTING · MIXED MEDIA
Two works reflecting on visibility, recognition and the stories that remain unheard or unseen across generations.
PORTRAITS OF INHERITANCE
PAINTING · PORTRAITURE · MIXED MEDIA
Portraits exploring what is carried from one generation to the next — through family, memory, identity and the body.
A BLUEPRINT OF YOU
CYANOTYPE · ARCHIVAL MATERIAL · RESEARCH
Works emerging from an ongoing exploration of the women in my family, tracing memory, migration and inherited histories through cyanotype and archival material.
SINYO TERBESAR
INK · DRAWING · PORTRAITURE
A monumental portrait emerging from the same archival research as the Sinyo series, confronting the ways Indo-European children were seen, named and classified within the colonial system.
SINYO
PORTRAITURE · ARCHIVAL IMAGERY
The faces of the children stayed with me. I began capturing them in ink, one by one. New faces continue to emerge from the archives, and the series continues to grow.
21 × 29.7 CM · INK ON PAPER
SOLO
PAINTING · PORTRAITURE · FAMILY ARCHIVE
Based on a family photograph of my grandmother as a young girl. Among the children in the photograph, she is the only one not being held. That small detail stayed with me: alone, upright, already carrying something of the strength and independence I would later know in her.
In Solo, I enlarged that childhood image to monumental scale.
KRETEK
CHARCOAL · PORTRAITURE · FAMILY STORIES
Kretek grew from a personal family story and the Indonesian clove cigarette as a carrier of memory. A smell, an object or a daily ritual can survive migration and remain within a family for generations. The work asks what we take with us when we leave a country behind, and how these seemingly ordinary traces continue to shape memory and identity.
JEUGDZORG VAN JAKARTA
PAINTING · PORTRAITURE · FAMILY STORIES
In many Indo-European families, children were sent to the Netherlands without their parents, first for education and later, around Indonesian independence, increasingly for safety. Families made difficult choices in the hope of giving their children a better future. Jeugdzorg van Jakarta asks what happens when families are separated by history, and how the consequences of those choices continue to live on in the generations that follow.
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”Even an orphan can have a mother.”
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PROJECT 01
CHILDREN OF JOMBANG
TRIPTYCH · INSTALLATION · SOUND · RESEARCH
An installation rooted in colonial archives, family history and the faces of Indo-European children in East Java. Through painting, sound and objects, their histories are brought into the present.
Archival image: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, the Netherlands
THE CHILDREN
Children of Jombang began with a series of historical photographs.
In the archives, I encountered the faces of Indo-European children connected to orphanages in Jombang, East Java. Many were born into a colonial society in which ancestry, race and legal status determined where you belonged — and often what future was available to you.
They were photographed, classified and preserved within a colonial archive, while much of their individual stories remained out of view. Behind the word ‘orphan’ were individual lives, mothers and families.
Their faces stayed with me.
I began painting them, not to reconstruct who they were, but to bring them out of the archive and into the present. The search for the histories behind these children gradually led from Dutch archives to East Java and into my own family history.
ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHY · JOMBANG · EAST JAVA · COLONIAL HISTORY
Listen to the soundscape
Children of Jombang
COENRAAD LAURENS COOLEN
The research led me to Coenraad Laurens Coolen, a Russian-Javanese landowner who established a community at Ngoro, near Jombang, in the nineteenth century.
Coolen brought Javanese traditions and Christianity together. Psalms were sung to the rhythms of tembang, the land was blessed with song before it was cultivated, and those who joined the community were given land on which to grow rice.
But my encounter with Coolen was not only historical. While tracing the children of Jombang, I discovered that his story also runs through my own family. Coolen and his third wife, a Chinese woman, are my direct ancestors.
The archive I had entered through the faces of unknown children had suddenly become personal.
NGORO · JOMBANG · FAMILY HISTORY · COLONIAL JAVA
Image: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Children of Jombang, 2026
Triptych, ink and acrylic on canvas, installation, sound, rice, objects
Three paintings, each 70 × 90 cm
Installation dimensions variable
Part of The Power of Transgenerational Transmission
Presentations
Galerie Wind, Rotterdam — February–March 2026
Wereldmuseum Leiden — August 2026
Research
Archival research, historical photography, family history and field research in Jombang, East Java
