Vendy Methodos absorbs his memories of wandering through the city, encountering vacant houses, and weaving them into the narrative of his work. He has passed through narrow alleys and cramped streets, moving between towering hotels and dense informal settlements. These empty houses spark his curiosity, prompting him to take photographs and trace the stories that he might later rewrite.

This exhibition is titled “Suwung”. I see suwung not merely as the Javanese term for emptiness, even though it speaks of uninhabited homes and structures, but as something far deeper, a spiritual state. In Javanese philosophy, suwung is not an empty void but a profound stillness of the soul, a stage of spiritual maturity that leads to liberation. The Suwung houses also become spaces where the awareness of being takes shape in their own way.

In his realist depictions of these structures, Vendy captures the intricate details of how time and shifting seasons gradually reshape their facades and physical form. Thick layers of moss creep up the walls, cracks form abstract lines across the surface, wooden beams rot and blacken, peeling paint curls away from the damp walls, and wild plants spread rapidly, all revealing how nature reshapes things. Nature does not merely overtake these homes; it rewrites their story. For Vendy, these form an aesthetic of their own. What he calls the aesthetic of post-emptiness. A state of suwung where something fades yet pervades.