“Stitching Stories” pays tribute to the art of collage, showcasing ten of Pujiarto’s extraordinary mixed-media collages that incorporate torn magazine pages and scraps of clothing into painted canvases and tapestry works. With textile and thread as his dominant medium, Pujiarto, formerly trained as a painter, stylistically “stitches” stories together in his works. Constantly exploring different treatments of fabrics—such as pasting, patching, tearing and braiding—Pujiarto demonstrates a distinctive weathering technique in his collection of highly intricate, textured works.

Upon entering the gallery, which houses a spacious, all-white interior, one encounters a large work of densely packed textile and thread on canvas, situated against a floor-to-ceiling glass window, entitled Air and Water Pollution (2015). While it depicts a cluster of mountain-like features, a sense of distortion also exudes from the tangled web of threads and their ends that hang loosely over the canvas like dripping oil. Air and Water Pollution is among the body of Pujiarto’s works that delves more intriguingly into his personal stance toward social and moral issues. Like Dirty Mind (2008), a critical and abstract portrayal of an indeterminate figure losing control over his addiction to pornography, Air and Water Pollution expresses Pujiarto’s feelings towards the devastation of the societal environment caused as a result of human activities.

Upstairs is another exhibition highlight, Meditation (2015), a 200-by-150-centimeter canvas depicting a ghostly, standing figure—whose form is outlined by brown, densely overlapping stitches—that Pujiarto admits is his own reflection, an image he conjured while meditating. Stitched all over the acrylic-painted surface are white, simple strokes of thread, abstractly dissolving the figure into its surroundings.