Indonesian multimedia artist FX Harsono (b. 1949), part of the small vanguard that spearheaded contemporary art emergence in 1970s Indonesia through the collective Gerakan Rupa Seni Baru (GSRB), has contributed a seminal oeuvre to Southeast Asian contemporary art over five decades. In this exhibition, Harsono presents his lyrical light installation The Light of Spirit (2025). The work, a variation of The Light of Spirit 2016, comprises 228 candlestick-top lit bulbs forming a gently swaying hanging piece, mesmerising and consoling as it casts a warm red aura. Beneath the candles, on the floor, lies a flat, stone-like plaque inscribed in Bahasa Indonesia with a place name and date, followed by 17 names Tang Lam Sam, Tang Pak Sam, Kwee Mau Yang, Ong Kiem Liong, Oei Kiem Djoen, Liem Boen An, Liem Gwan Bing, Tjo Liong Wat, and others. The listed people, several from a single family, were Chinese Indonesians, killed between 1948 and 1949, years of political volatility when post-World War II, after the Japanese defeat and retreat from occupied Java, the Dutch returned to recapture Indonesia. Launching what they called first and second “police actions”, Dutch forces, due to reduced manpower, and facing resisting Indonesian republicans, enlisted Chinese villagers as collaborators and spies. Members of the Chinese community, predominantly Indonesian born and integrated into local society, were therefore obliged to fight their Malay compatriots, and in the mayhem before Indonesian victory and independence in 1949, hundreds were killed. Harsono, from Blitar, East Java, grew up in the 1950s when corpses of Chinese victims of these Dutch-instigated actions were being disinterred by local Chinese community groups keen to re-bury them with dignity in Chinese cemeteries—Harsono’s father, a photographer, documented such excavations. The plaque anchoring The Light of Spirit references the 1952 tombstone erected on a mass grave in the Chinese cemetery of Muntilan, a small city near Jogjakarta, central Java, where 17 Chinese Indonesians were killed in December 1948 during a police action incident. Thus, The Light of Spirit, incorporating a facsimile of the tombstone of long-ago Indonesian Chinese victims, commemorates the dead through art. But beyond memorialising specific victims, the piece, captivating and mystical with its luminous swaying in a darkened room, recalls all traumatic histories too easily forgotten and repeated. Without anger or recrimination, The Light of Spirit invites viewers to join a silent ceremonial pilgrimage, a way of confronting dark episodes of history through memory. The Light of Spirit, deeply personal to Chinese Indonesian FX Harsono, with its solemnity, beauty, and light, is a life affirming force of spiritual continuation and transcendence.