Report Alia Swastika – Muhammad Yusuf, also known as Ucup, is a 35-year-old artist who first found recognition with the populist posters he designed during the student-led protests against President Suharto's regime in the late 1990s.

An exhibit that opened in Yogyakarta last Tuesday highlights Ucup's art, as well as the shift in his work from the stridently political to his more recent personal explorations of identity.

The show follows a well-received opening in Singapore in July that highlighted the block-printing method Ucup and some other young artists are employing to great effect in their work.

The Yogyakarta exhibition, titled "You and I," contains a few of Ucup's most recent block print pieces, but the bulk of the show is devoted to his richly detailed and vibrantly colored canvasses.

Visitors to the exhibition, which is being held at the Tembi Contemporary art gallery through Sept. 14, will be treated to Ucup's surreal, cluttered and often mocking critiques of a society he sees as materialistic and neglectful of the environment.

Corruption and abuse of power are two themes Ucup has explored in his work for years.

When the student movement started to gain real traction in the 1990s, art became an integral part of the youth-led push against the Suharto administration.

The Taring Padi art collective, of which Ucup was a founding member, was a cornerstone of artistic involvement in sociopolitical issues, in particular government policies seen as hurting the interests of marginalized groups such as farmers and laborers.

Taring Padi members plastered cities with protest posters and were a vocal and visual presence at rallies. Most members were students at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta, and were highly skilled in the techniques of silk-screening and woodcuts.

Members of the collective adopted the concept of seni kerakyatan (people's art), which borrowed from the Communist-affiliated movement of the 1950s and '60s known as the People's Cultural Organization (Lekra).

While populist political demonstrations are rarer these days, Ucup and the other members of Taring Padi still find ways to keep their political beliefs and ideologies relevant.

The artworks on display in Yogyakarta, however, offer a more personal approach, particularly in Ucup's explorations of his identity as an artist.

He traces some ideas from activist artists of previous generations, such as the legendary painter S Sudjojono and the poet Wiji Thukul, and relates their ideologies to himself.

One of Ucup's paintings is called "Penyelewengan Sejarah" ("History Deprivation"). The work is a triptych of self-portraits that make reference to a triumvirate of heroic Indonesians.

In the left panel, Ucup assumes the guise of Diponegoro, a Javanese prince who became a national hero during the anticolonial rebellions of the 1800s.

Next to Diponegoro, Ucup paints himself as Sukarno, complete with the statesman's uniform, holding a large stone. The last figure is Sudjojono.

"Yusuf's treatment of history, while rooted in reality, is driven by a purposeful sense of pastiche, clobbering together an assortment of historical figures and episodes," Wang Zineng, an art historian from Singapore, wrote of the painting.

"His guises signal affiliations with protest, revolutions, uprisings and the triumph of people power, and stand as a distinct and powerful voice of social advocacy in today's Indonesian contemporary art scene."

Ucup's work can be topical as well. One piece, titled "Good Gaster," depicts a well-dressed man in a cape with a snake coiled around him.

In each of his four arms are various tools, and his two heads are the notoriously explosive three-kilogram liquefied petroleum gas canisters, stacked one on top of the other.

Another painting, titled "Layar Jutaan Rumah" ("Screen of Millions of Homes"), casts a critical eye on the growing materialism among Indonesians, with a man grinning widely as he displays a credit card along with his newest purchase – a high-heel shoe – which he wears like a hat.

While most young artists today create work based on personal issues, Ucup's show reminds audiences of the artist's role in inspiring and hastening social change.