The medium may be different, but the power of both art and literature lies in the stories they contain.

Join us in digging a little deeper for the stories behind selected artworks from Southeast Asia in the National Collection, in this exciting collab with Kolektif! Take part in our giveaways to win books and other prizes, inspired by the art and specially curated by us, and learn more about the artworks here.

You know what they say: a picture paints a thousand words.

Raden Saleh’s largest painting, Forest Fire, is a dramatic representation of wild animals chased by flames to the edge of a precipice. The monumental scale of the work and the dense, elaborate composition are testament to his ambitions as a painter. Although the setting is Javanese, Raden Saleh had already been in Europe for 20 years by the time he painted this work, where he had earned significant critical success and elite patronage. Forest Fire was presented as a gift to his patron King Willem III of the Netherlands in 1850, one year before Raden Saleh was awarded the title of “King’s Painter.”

Born in 1938 in Grobogan, Purwodadi, central Java, Djoko Pekik is an art student at the Akademie Seni Rupa Indonesia in Yogyakarta. Pekik's paintings are seen by some as reminiscent of social realism in the Yogyakarta art scene before it became taboo after the failed communist coup of October 1965.

Here, Pekik depicts a kuda kepang (literally, bamboo horse) a traditional street performance. With a sense of pathos, the bitterness of the performers' lives is perhaps most poignantly represented in the person of the entranced performer in the foreground. Like an animal oil fours, he feeds on a fragment of glass, all act of self-violence that is both attention-grabbing and abhorrent while the singer nurses her baby - a reminder of the person behind the performer, although perhaps significantly, the expression painted on her mask is one of melancholy and hopelessness.

In The Wall, a nuclear crisis has hit Earth and a sole survivor lives in isolation, literally separated from the destroyed world by a transparent wall. Her only companions are a dog, a cow and a cat — till a second human being shows up, his actions calling into question: who are the real animals here? Meanwhile, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a sci-fi/fantasy collection that digs deep beneath layers of normalcy and humanity to reveal the animalistic forces that drive us.