At the Art Stage Singapore last year, Heri Dono, 56, dressed humbly as usual, wearing flip flops and t-shirt. Yet, he was still a crowd magnet with people greeting him and tak-ing photos. “I’m hairy Dono,” he jokes with one visitor, pointing to his long ponytail. Heri extends his sense of humor also into his artwork, although they also express a dark and often political satire. He often employs monstrous and scary wayang-like figures, to express himself in paintings and installations.

Despite his casual attitude, Heri is currently one of Indonesia’s leading contemporary artists and one of the first Indonesian artists to break into the global art scene in the early 1990s. He has joined in 270 exhibitions and participated in no less than 27 international biennales. His early works are filled with political criticisms as he grew up in a political era where there was a change of power from the Suharto regime. Heri was born in Jakarta and studied at the Indonesian Institute of Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta; he was also in the same class with another renowned contemporary artist, eddie Hara.

Heri, however, deliberately dropped out just before graduation, as he wanted to show that he could succeed as an artist without the certificate. His oft-used Javanese wayang motif he got from the puppet master Sukasman. Meanwhile his lizard or dinosaur like figures reflect the primal instinct of humans. “I see myself as a dinosaur, because I suspect there is still dinosaur DNA in humans, that’s the reason why there are still wars, violence, and fraud,” Heri says. For him, art’s ultimate goal is to balance humans and nature. “Art exists to bring a new consciousness for people to go back to nature, and preserve it rather to destroy it,” Heri says.