With optimism, Miranda Goeltom, then chair of The Indonesian Arts Foundation, penned the foreword for Indonesia’s first book on women artists, Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens. She described the book as an ‘historic step to record, recognise and present the works of our inspired and talented women artists and art writers to a wider audience both here and abroad’. 1 Like other feminist-inspired texts, this first major survey on the lives and works of Indonesia’s ‘most prominent women artists from the early twentieth century to the present’, 2 aimed to show precisely that women artists were present and they were active within national circles. For over four decades, feminist art historians and social historians across the world have conducted research and developed methodologies with the aim of rediscovering and re-evaluating women artists. Indonesian Women Artists (2007) was launched in conjunction with a ground-breaking exhibition, Intimate Distance: Exploring Traces of Feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art, curated by the book’s authors. It coincided with the exhibition Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007) at the Brooklyn Museum, the first large-scale American exhibition to consider the internationalisation of ‘feminism’in art. The former was held at the National Gallery of Jakarta and aimed to examine traces of feminism in Indonesian women’s art and the strategies employed by the artists. It also marked the first attempt to map the issues that are related to creative development and femininities in ‘Indonesia’s patriarchal art world’, a subject that was later developed into a cogent doctoral study by one of the curators, Wulandani Dirgantoro. 3 In Dirgantoro’s study, she argued that Kelompok Perek (Women’s Experimental Group) was the first Indonesian art collective to express left-leaning, feminist intentions in their work. This was congruent with the common observation that the 1990s marked the moment when ‘Western/Post-structuralist feminism/s’ entered the Indonesian art discourse. 4 In her study, Dirgantoro used psychoanalysis as a methodological tool to frame the analysis of selected works by Indonesian women artists. Her readings of the confronting works by the late Balinese painter, IGAK