Art Moments Jakarta Online 3 (AMJO 3) is currently accessible through www.artmomentsjakarta.comuntil 31 August 2022. The offline version took place in Art:1 New Museum, Jakarta, from 9-12 June 2022. Displaying more than 1,200 artworks from 52 galleries in total and having survived the hardest times of pandemic, AMJO 3 is an art fair that art lovers should pay a visit. Indonesia Design had a chance to talk exclusively with Sendy Widjaja, the Co-Founder and Fair Director of AMJO 3, about how the even came about and the future of it.
Sendy is a seasoned academic. He has a doctorate in Managerial Behaviour and has decades of teaching experience in Business. That might be a background of someone you wouldn’t think be a co-founder of an art fair. But Sendy has always been an art lover and is an art collector himself. To him, “Art is a lifestyle that completes someone’s life. Art is a hobby, an identity and part of humanity because it can only be created and appreciated by human.”
He met Leo Silitonga, who had been a director of a few art fairs, and they decided to team up and create Art Moments Jakarta in 2018. Sadly, in the midst of preparation for AMJO 3 earlier this year Leo passed away. But the show must go on and Sendy took over the position of Fair Director, backed by his team that include Helen Koeswoyo Silitonga, Khai Hori, Putri Hidayat, Deborah Iskandar, Ann Delny, Viana Dien Igah and Rizki Zaelani.
“Since the pandemic the world has gone through a big change, which calls for some changes in Art Moments Jakarta, too,” Sendy said. This year they came up with a new way of exhibiting NFT art. Collaborating with Museum of Toys, some NFT arts were realised into life-sized sculptures and displayed at the offline exhibition. This is what differentiates AMJO 3 from other art fairs. They also looked into fashion and music because these are related to art as well. After the opening ceremony of AMJO 3, they held a party with music and themed fashion for a community of art lovers.
The art collector community has regenerated. A lot of millennials have become collectors now. “So, we invited a lot of new faces, younger people. We see that the older collectors are more and more selective when buying artworks, probably because they start to run out of space to display their collection,” Sendy said jokingly, but it does make sense.
Sendy said that his hope for Art Moments Jakarta is for it to be a sustainable business model, where it can be a source of income for artists, galleries and everyone in the art world. Also, he thinks Jakarta needs more art museums and events, and more parents should take their children to visit galleries in the weekend like they do in Europe and the US. Closing our conversation, Sendy added, “Art brings soul to communities. Even a shopping mall needs a lot of artworks for it to have a soul.”