From 1965 to 1998, Indonesians with Chinese ancestry were banned from expressing their culture, tradition, and language in public. They were forbidden to use their Chinese name during three decades of coup led by Suharto.

A Silent Name is a visual project that questions the disappearance of ethnic names, identity, and culture within the Chinese-Indonesian community. Each character’s name that carries a specific meaning and relationship to their ancestor will bridge larger issues within the context of censorship. Using personal stories, I’m interested in unraveling what it means when a language gets lost and the impact of being distant with our roots through the loss of our ethnic names.

It incorporate collaborative portraits, stills, soundscape and oral history from lived experiences between two generations of Chinese-Indonesian. The work recreate collective memory by articulating the nuances that an ethnic name carries and revealing structural tensions from the revolution.

I conducted interview with the community and dig deeper on the semantic behind the loss of name that extends to the loss of identity using journals and newspaper articles.