A full recap of Silk Road Day 03 / Jakarta

Jakarta greeted me with intense rain and thunder, and a contrast of warmth with high humidity outside versus being traffic jammed in heavy AC-ed taxis. A place that never really quiets down.

The team gathered in the enormous city and we began the trip with a private gathering inside art collector Wiyu Wahono’s office-gallery on Thursday, October 30. Wahono welcomed us very wholeheartedly, being so in touch with his collection. The visual density of his collection amazed us all, and he kept on talking about all the different concepts behind the works – and why he collected the specific pieces in the first place.

His hidden space is an incredible archive ánd a living organism, with time-based and nature pieces. Beyond the works I already discussed in my earlier interview with him for Silk Magazine, the visit revealed much more: photographs by Erwin Olaf, a painting with an Augmented Reality layer that started an animation of the piece, documentation of Melati Suryodarmo’s Butter Dance performance, a large-scale portrait by Zhang Huan, and installations blending science with a tat of dark humour – including a vending machine dispensing water distilled from diabetic patients’ urine. He let us taste some of it, only to mention after the first sip that he put normal mineral water in the extra bottles he kept in a separate fridge.

Wahono maybe collects ideas more than the artworks themselves. He told us stories about each acquisition, how they captured something about our times, our fears, the scientific possibilities, or our ever-changing bodies. One work in particular stayed with me: Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s project where she reconstructed faces from discarded cigarette butts (and hairs or gum) found on the street. From a few strands of DNA, she 3D-printed an eerily lifelike face. “It’s the portrait of someone who never posed,” Wahono said. The notion of anonymity turned tangible: a reminder of how much of ourselves we unknowingly leave behind.

In a lot of ways, the visit set the tone for our other Jakarta days: art as inquiry, and art as relationships between people. On Friday the 31st, we welcomed Niceaunties – the Singapore-based artist whose digital practice can be classified as humorous storytelling, using AI to reflect on the Asian ‘auntie culture’. Over dinner, our conversations swayed between the current state of AI, collectibles, artist residencies all over the world, fan culture and how this slips into (artistic) products (a topic that started because BLACKPINK was playing two consecutive concerts in Jakarta over the weekend), and just the randomness of everyday life.

The next day, at IdeaFest Jakarta on November 1st, we joined thousands of attendees from Indonesia’s creative industries. IdeaFest is one of Southeast Asia’s largest annual gatherings of designers, innovators, artists, and entrepreneurs. Niceaunties took the main stage and delivered a masterclass in cultural storytelling. Her talk had people laughing out loud, recognizing fragments of their own families in her characters. She captivated the audience through her witty and insightful reflections on Asian family culture and showed everyone her crazy weird but oh so fun Niceaunties World. Her characters are both recognizable as over the top: loud and nosy, but loving and caring at the same time.

When I joined her on stage for a short conversation afterwards, we spoke about authenticity in AI art; a topic that continues to divide opinions. Some in the audience wondered if AI makes art too easy, or if it devalues originality. Niceaunties didn’t hesitate: “It’s all within the artist. They are the ones creating with their own curiosity.” She compared the skepticism around AI to the early resistance to photography as an art form. This parallel is a convincing argument that new mediums are rarely accepted instantly, but authenticity will remain within that. To attest to that, I told the audience that I’ve tried recreating AI artworks myself, just to understand if it would work. And no, it’s not as simple as typing a one-line prompt. Each artist uses different tools, combinations, training models, and post-production processes. The best ones – like Niceaunties – build their own systems, almost like private languages. You can imitate the form, but definitely not the essence.

After Niceaunties’ session, it was our turn to take the stage: SILK’s talk on The Art World’s Best Kept Secret. Spoiler alert: it’s digital art. We began with the simple fact that art discovery has changed. “We no longer walk through galleries alone – we now mostly scroll through feeds. The screen has therefore become a new type of white cube.” From there, we mapped the evolution of digital art: from early net art and browser-based experiments by JODI and GIFs by Cory Arcangel and Tom Moody, to the rise of social media platforms like DeviantArt and Instagram, and finally to blockchain-based art and the NFT era that redefined authorship and ownership.

We spoke about how the digital art ecosystem has expanded yet remains fragmented — full of creativity but still hard to navigate. That’s where SILK positions itself: as an art house for the digital age. Not a gallery, not a marketplace, but an infrastructure built around the idea to redefine how art is created, curated, contextualized, and then collected. Our goal in Jakarta was to show that digital art isn’t a sideshow to contemporary art, but a continuation of it. That the same questions of creativity, authorship, process, mediums, and material still apply. The only thing is that the tools have evolved on the tech side of it.

After the session, several attendees came up to talk. One was a young collector curious about starting with digital art but wary of “crypto-bro culture.” Others had flown in specifically to see Niceaunties speak live. It was clear that there’s interest in this field, but people are still looking for the right entry point, the relevant information, knowledge on how to access best, whom to trust, and where to go from there. That, in essence, is what Silk Road Day 03 / Jakarta was about: showing what’s out there and who the pioneers are. What the challenges entail and how we hope to give solutions for that. Making the digital world more personal and human, connecting with others and creating an environment where there are no wrong questions. The road between art and its right audience can be long and we think the future of digital art isn’t confined to screens alone – it lives in these shared moments of explanation, curiosity, understanding, and exchange.