Socially responsible painting?

This morning the sun was burning holes through the smog and I sweated my way through the vibrant Central and Soho.

• Breakfast at the American-palate friendly Flying Pan (yes, that's an L, not an R.)
• Exploring the ancient Chinese art galleries along Hollywood Road
  
• Leisurely reading through The List ( expat magazine) at Pacific Coffee
• Strolling through the costume shops of LKF (it's like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, complete with feathery masquerade masks)

Finally, I couldn't take the heat anymore. I popped into the luxurious International Financial Center Mall, heard some live piano music, and eventually stumbled onto an art installation in one of the atriums.

I was enraptured.

This was my first interaction with the hyper-realism work of Indonesian artist Budi Ubrux, whose latest oil paintings of newspaper-wrapped figures resonate with a pure conscious I have lately found lacking in New York. Meticulously-painted headlines cling to the animated human forms, encasing them in news of the financial crisis, women's right to enter the workforce, and global warming.

His technique is heart-stopping trompe-l'oeil (literally, "fool the eye"). Viewed from even just 2 feet away, I was absolutely certain that there would be a strong surface texture like paper mache. But when I was up close (so close the guards came over, but it was still worth it to see!), I could see that the surface was perfectly flat, entirely 2-dimensional. What a gift.

And what a bold man to speak out, through his work, about the storm headlines swirling around him. I wanted to fly immediately to his studio and paint with him, to feed off that intensity with which he must work to achieve such hyper-realism.

Outside, a typhoon was brewing (this is like a really intense hurricane) and I hurried back to my uninspiring neighborhood of Fortress Hill to buy groceries before the rains hit. On the way, I passed by newspaper headlines about the deadly bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia. Budi Ubrux's country. The words seemed surreal on the flat surface of a stack of newspaper, like they were made light simply because they were typed and neatly stacked. I wanted to see the human forms that Budi Ubrux would build from those papers. I wanted him to translate that flatness into 3-dimensional forms in his imagination, then back into the two dimensions of the canvas. With his brush, the absurdity of the bombings would melt away.