A collage of Indonesia’s May 1998 Tragedy & our family moments.

Hi my name Peter Christian Cung, born in West Borneo, Indonesia (1993). This is a story about my father, a Chinese Indonesians, born in West Borneo, Indonesia (1967), a father to 3 biological children and 1 adopted child. A guy who is always curious about new technology and an artist at heart.

In the late 90s, my father often used his office VHS handy-cam to record our family events. Birthdays, daily lives, or even a funeral. Resulted in 8 VHS tapes, that we watch together annually during the Chinese New Year.

Time goes by, my father’s office didn’t use the handy-cam anymore and we didn’t have a VHS player at home. So the tapes were just kept in a box until I found them again in 2018.

Curious about what’s inside the tapes, I went to convert the VHS tapes into digital format. When I got the footage, I was shocked. Out of the 8 tapes, 1 of them is a 31 minutes recording of a TV playing local and international news about May 1998 tragedy in Indonesia, recorded on 14-15 May 1998.

On May 2021, after I went through the clips again and talked to a friend of mine, I realized something: to my dad, those clips are as important as our family videos. At that time, he believes that recording these events are really important to him. That makes me want to feel what it is like living in that year as my father.

23 years later after never even seen by anyone beside our family, I am selling these collages of Indonesian history, and our family memories.

About the May 1998 tragedy in Indonesia: back in May 1998 there were incidents of mass violence, riots, and civil unrest of a racial issue triggered by economic problems including food shortages and mass unemployment that occurred throughout Indonesia. The main targets of the violence were people of Chinese ethnicity although they are also Indonesians, but most of the casualties were caused by a massive fire and occurred among looters.