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While Ong’s idea as the festival grows is to position it as one of the leading design events in Southeast Asia, at its heart, Jia Curated embraces the traditional Indonesian principle of gotong-royong—the idea of cooperation and collaboration that also extends to the environment and community. The team’s brief to all the artists and exhibitors was therefore, to embrace the genius loci of the place—they could design their exhibitions however they wanted, as long as they didn’t cut down any trees, or make structural modifications. “We asked the brands to instead try and use the trees and the undergrowth as part of their displays,” Ong says. The results, which reframed adaptive reuse as both ecological and cultural practice, were so gratifying that some brands even rebooked the same spaces for next year’s edition.
Over the almost-two hectares (of the Park’s original nine) allocated to Jia Curated, open areas became the settings for art installations; an indoor auditorium with graffitied walls became the stage for a series of curated conversations, and in perhaps what was the most stunning use of the park’s old structures, an exhibition featuring architectural maquettes by 24 practices across Indonesia, was set in an open-air amphitheatre, underneath skeletal gothic arches—all that remained of the roofed structure that once stood here. During the day, the arches perfectly framed the sky and the sea; at night, they dissolved into the dark, leaving the lit-up displays of the maquettes looking like grounded sky-lanterns.
Ong’s own pavilion, designed to showcase the latest offering from his lighting brand Ong Cen Kuang, was a pergola-like structure curtained by long, black fabric threads. The collection of hand-shaped pendant lights—named ‘Jamur’, from the Indonesian word for ‘mushroom’—hung low above seating for visitors, over a floor carpeted with dried leaves collected from the site.
