Looking for the Zeitgeist: Indonesian collector Wiyu Wahono on what counts as ‘now’

He remembers he liked the view better than he liked the art. Venice in the 1970s; Peggy Guggenheim’s canalside terrace; the relief of open air after rooms filled with what looked for him – at the time – like black stains. “I went inside and saw all the paintings were really ugly,” collector Wiyu Wahono tells me, laughing at the certainty of youth. Jackson Pollock’s early, near-monochrome drip works were then unintelligible to him. The museum, though, was a ‘must-see’, a marker of cultural authority. That dissonance set an itch for Wahono, asking himself: “If this is supposed to be great, what am I missing?”

My journey in the art world started as – and always remained – a journey of finding answers.

The line runs through Berlin, where Wahono lived for years, past the Neue Nationalgalerie, whose Miesian (designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) glass box got him to stand still and look, over and over again, and let him straight into the Bauhaus-adjacent reading rooms where he started gathering language for his instincts. The first work ever that really touched him was a László Moholy-Nagy painting, Konstruktion Z I (1989), with constructivist forms floating on a beige field. “That was the first time I fell in love with art,” he says. After seeing that, he bought a poster of it and hung it in his German apartment; almost serving more as his new orientation rather than decoration.

How a scientist goes about collecting art

Back in Indonesia at the end of the 1990s, with a business taking off in Jakarta, he decided to begin buying art. Like many, he started with collecting paintings, based on what he liked visually. However, this way of choosing soon changed. Trained as a scientist, with a PhD in plastic technology and years lecturing at the Technical University in Berlin, he soon realized that his brain has always been stronger in decision-making (with anything in life) and that ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ are just sensory. The scientist in him reframed the task: if taste is a function of knowledge and experience, then the remedy is study. He started reading seriously – Arthur Danto was the hinge – and shifted from impulsive acquisition to a structured program: assemble works that make sense together, that register the conditions of their time. Knowledge first, then judgment; feeling is acknowledged, but it does not lead. From there the collection tightened. He wasn’t stockpiling favorites; he was testing a hypothesis about what counts as contemporary.

I try to build a coherent collection that represents the zeitgeist.

That word, zeitgeist, is a working tool for Wahono. Ask what makes him proud and he doesn’t name an auction result; he cites validation by institutions whose curatorial filters he respects. For example: 15 years ago he acquired an edition of Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation, a two-channel video with a mirrored installation originally shown for Singapore at the 2009 Venice Biennale. “Now another edition is in the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern has given Wong dedicated rooms; MoMA has shown his work,” he says. The pleasure isn’t ownership but calibration: he spotted the line of force early. He tells a similar story about Ryoji Ikeda, whose data-driven minimalism he collected nearly two decades ago, before museum ubiquity. “That makes me happy,” he says. “That’s a kind of confirmation that fuels me.”

Jakarta’s quiet consensus

If the early years were about building a compass for Wahono, the present is about using it in a specific ecology. The Indonesian art world, he insists, is distinct not simply for its histories but for its habits. Collectors speak to one another frequently and overlap is not treated as rivalry. “There is no sense of enemy,” he says. “We share what we buy and don’t mind if others collect the same artist.”

Artists in Indonesia mirror that cooperation, Wahono feels. “Especially in Yogyakarta, a long-time production hub,” describing to me the small collectives there who graduate together, work in proximity, and then redistribute support when one of them gains traction – paying studio rent for others, buying materials, keeping the group alive. He names a principle he thinks almost every Indonesian knows: ‘gotong royong’, which stands for mutual assistance or collective effort, where people work together to achieve a common goal or solve community problems.

That cohesion affects how he shows his collection. At home he defers to family taste, but at his office he installs expansively, with hundreds of works in rotation. He is pragmatic about balance there: international art sits alongside Indonesian art because visitors expect to encounter Indonesia. The goal isn’t nationalism, however, it’s hospitality and again: showing the spirit of the time.

Post-digital, pre-genetic

Where his thinking departs most starkly from conventional narratives is in his diagnosis of that present, the zeitgeist. “I actually think we are not living in a digital era anymore,” he says. “We are living in a science and technology era.” He cites two dates: 2022, when scientists announced a 100% gapless sequence of the human genome; and 2012, when CRISPR-Cas9 made gene editing practical. Tools used to extend human capacity – he names things like spears, bicycles, and over time computers – have now become tools that can alter the human itself. “Designer babies will be reality very soon,” he says as forecast. For art, he argues, this shift matters more than another round of internet-native aesthetics. “So, that’s why I started collecting DNA art.”

He mentions Eduardo Kac’s Natural History of the Enigma as a lodestar – a transgenic plant expressing a gene sequence derived from the artist – a complicated icon for porous boundaries. He points to bio-art using living bacteria and to works where artists splice their own DNA with that of a flower. Wahono is watching China closely in particular: “I think China is currently ahead in DNA technology. On that note, I should actually collect DNA art from Chinese artists,” he says, half to me, half as a note to self.

But in general, Wahono’s technological focus is wider than biology. He has bought robotic and sound art early; for AI, he is interested in the inception phase where machine agency is still legible as such. Sougwen Chung’s Study 23 (2024), in which an industrial robot learns a painterly hand, talks to that. So does an Indonesian counterpart: Muhammad Aqil Najih Reza, who generated an image with Midjourney and then rendered it as a painting – two versions, one machine-imagined, one human-made, deliberately paired.

Wahono also likes works that compute over time. Years before Beeple’s auction made NFTs a mass headline, he collected digital files, but not for their tokenization. “Tokenized or not doesn’t change the artistic quality for me,” he says. What the blockchain enables that a QuickTime file does not, in his view, is condition-dependence – artworks that can only exist in a chain-aware environment. He mentions a piece that follows seasons and time zones: summer light in Europe, snow in winter, still night over there while it’s morning in Jakarta – an image that breathes in sync with the world. Another NFT in his collection grows a Monstera from seed into a tree on-chain; yet another is keyed to environmental data. “When the Sphere in Las Vegas opened with U2, the first image I remember is a flag – mould rippling in simulation – by John Gerrard,” he says. “I have a work by him that changes with the height of the Monaco tide.” What matters is not the certificate for Wahono; it’s the live link.

Other names pepper his inventory of the present tense: So Kanno’s Lasermice (2019), a swarm-intelligence robotic piece; Louis-Philippe Rondeau’s Liminal (2019), where image and body fold into an elastic mirror; artists like Iroha Ozaki and Dicky Takndare among the Indonesian cohort he follows. The through-line is the context of the work in itself, and within his collection as a whole.

Analyzing the current future

There’s a slight running irony in talking with a collector who ‘distrusts’ taste. Wahono is frank about buying works he doesn’t particularly enjoy visually because they sharpen the collection’s argument. “Some works I find important; I don’t like them so much, but I buy them because – I think you already know the answer – they represent the spirit of the time,” he smiles. He speaks about reading, about building a system, about correcting for bias. And again, he is also candid about uncertainty. Because, theories lag. The image economy of NFTs, the communitarian production models of Indonesian studios, and the first wave of AI-assisted practices don’t yet have a settled canon or a consensus vocabulary. “I do feel insecure sometimes,” he admits, “because there are no art theory books dealing with the younger generation. So, how do I make a judgment?”

The answer, for now, is to keep the question open and keep collecting as if it were a research practice: watch, test, triangulate, resist the shortcuts of price and applause. That stance makes him a useful guide for readers in Indonesia and beyond as SILK heads to Jakarta for Day 03 at IdeaFest. The scene Wahono describes is neither provincial nor derivative. It is porous, self-organized, and increasingly keyed to the same global transitions that preoccupy artists elsewhere: machine agency, biological plasticity, the paradoxes of attention.

I analyze what is significant right now. In a hundred years, people will look back and say the era began when we could alter human DNA. I want a collection that makes sense in that timeline.

It’s an austere benchmark – future legibility rather than present pleasure – but it has a clarity that recalls that Moholy-Nagy poster on a Berlin wall: not an answer, exactly, but a way to see what counts.