A MONUMENT BUILT IN THE DARK
MFAXII x SURIALISM
A MONUMENT BUILT IN THE DARK: MFAXII x SURIALISM
Bandung — A dragon coiled around a chimney. A knight half-devoured by his own armor. A single eye set into a frame carved like the entrance to something you’re not meant to walk out of. This is the image two from Bandung-based and Bogor-based artists have been feeding, in secret, for eight years and it is finally ready to be looked at.
The piece belongs to MFAXII and Surialism , and it does not behave like a normal collaboration. It was not made to a brief. It was not made against a clock. It was made the way certain things in nature are made. Slowly, in the dark, no more pressure until it hardened into something that could survive being seen.
Look at it long enough and the surface starts to feel less like illustration and more like excavation—as if the paper had been dug into rather than drawn on. That instinct belongs to MFAXII, who has spent seventeen years narrowing his practice down to black ink and nothing else, ever since parting ways with a former creative partnership that once handled color and clients on his behalf. What’s left is austere by design: line as ritual, repetition as discipline, a visual language with no interest in decoration for its own sake.
Cut into that austerity is something feral. Surialism’s contribution reads like a fever breaking through stone—organic forms bent into anatomies that shouldn’t cohere, drawn from a private mythology he’s been building since 2018. Indebted to the unsettling worlds of Shohei Otomo, João Ruas and Aaron Horkey. Where MFAXII builds walls, Surialism finds the cracks in them and grows something through the gaps.
The two languages don’t blend so much as negotiate a truce, line by line, across a single sheet. And the negotiation nearly didn’t survive.
Bandung — A dragon coiled around a chimney. A knight half-devoured by his own armor. A single eye set into a frame carved like the entrance to something you’re not meant to walk out of. This is the image two from Bandung-based and Bogor-based artists have been feeding, in secret, for eight years and it is finally ready to be looked at.
The piece belongs to MFAXII and Surialism , and it does not behave like a normal collaboration. It was not made to a brief. It was not made against a clock. It was made the way certain things in nature are made. Slowly, in the dark, no more pressure until it hardened into something that could survive being seen.
Look at it long enough and the surface starts to feel less like illustration and more like excavation—as if the paper had been dug into rather than drawn on. That instinct belongs to MFAXII, who has spent seventeen years narrowing his practice down to black ink and nothing else, ever since parting ways with a former creative partnership that once handled color and clients on his behalf. What’s left is austere by design: line as ritual, repetition as discipline, a visual language with no interest in decoration for its own sake.
Cut into that austerity is something feral. Surialism’s contribution reads like a fever breaking through stone—organic forms bent into anatomies that shouldn’t cohere, drawn from a private mythology he’s been building since 2018. Indebted to the unsettling worlds of Shohei Otomo, João Ruas and Aaron Horkey. Where MFAXII builds walls, Surialism finds the cracks in them and grows something through the gaps.
The two languages don’t blend so much as negotiate a truce, line by line, across a single sheet. And the negotiation nearly didn’t survive.
In 2019, a grinder accident tore through Surya’s hand and stopped the piece cold—a wound serious enough that the drawing sat untouched for the better part of a year. He returned to it in 2020, finished his half in 2021, and somewhere in the years after, MFAXII carried the work from Bogor back to Bandung to close the loop. Neither artist can say with certainty when. That imprecision is not a failure of memory. It’s the whole point.
“There’s nothing grand or profound behind the concept of this piece,” MFAXII says flatly.
And means it as a compliment to the work, not a dismissal of it. What he values isn’t the density of the linework or the difficulty of what he rendered. It’s the residue: the mood he was carrying on a given night, the sound in the room, the state of the world outside the window while the ink dried. The finished image, to him is only ever a receipt for time already spent.
Surialism carries a version of the same conviction, phrased darker. “Life moves fast and uncertain — drawing is how it gets slowed down,” he says.
He describing the practice less as a discipline than a kind of controlled bleeding: a place to let ideas out that owe nothing to logic or resolution. This collaboration, for him, was never about producing an artifact for other people to admire. It was a way of returning to zero, back to the reason he picked up a pen in the first place, before ambition, commissions or outcomes had a say in it.
No statement accompanies the work and none is needed. What eight years produced isn’t a message. It’s a residue. Proof that something left alone long enough, fed patiently instead of forced, will eventually grow teeth
“There’s nothing grand or profound behind the concept of this piece,” MFAXII says flatly.
And means it as a compliment to the work, not a dismissal of it. What he values isn’t the density of the linework or the difficulty of what he rendered. It’s the residue: the mood he was carrying on a given night, the sound in the room, the state of the world outside the window while the ink dried. The finished image, to him is only ever a receipt for time already spent.
Surialism carries a version of the same conviction, phrased darker. “Life moves fast and uncertain — drawing is how it gets slowed down,” he says.
He describing the practice less as a discipline than a kind of controlled bleeding: a place to let ideas out that owe nothing to logic or resolution. This collaboration, for him, was never about producing an artifact for other people to admire. It was a way of returning to zero, back to the reason he picked up a pen in the first place, before ambition, commissions or outcomes had a say in it.
No statement accompanies the work and none is needed. What eight years produced isn’t a message. It’s a residue. Proof that something left alone long enough, fed patiently instead of forced, will eventually grow teeth
MFAXII x SURIALISM,
“A MONUMENT BUILT IN THE DARK: MFAXII x SURIALISM”
By Karel (25 Aug 2026)
By Karel (25 Aug 2026)
MFAXII 2026