ABSTRACT
Bandung today is often depicted as a modern, intellectual metropole where creativity is cherished and flourishes. It has been the pillar where modernity was adopted and implemented during the early year of modern Indonesia. Later, this city is known to be a productive site for contemporary creators to develop, incubate, exercise, experiment, and contemplate their progressing ideas. Within contemporary art practice, their works are known for proposing intellectual merits manifested in sophisticated art idioms, modalities that granted them the status of being ‘globally relevant,’ albeit individually. Predictably, these commonly circulated qualities and characteristics are carefully curated and constructed, subverting various sincere representations of the city, such as local dynamics and everyday struggles. Giving credit where it is due, this article will explore Mufti Priyanka's illustrations highlighting these subverted narratives of the city. His depictions are somewhat curious, presenting the irony of everyday struggles operating within localism over displaying the ‘typical’ romantic descriptions. By adopting a specific 90s comic style laden with satirical, deliberate, and raw idioms, Muti's works appear to us as the journal of the truthful representation of the local dynamics of the city.
