Adam’s choice of portraying Ketoprak Tobong in ‘Tobong’ painting is melancholically representative of the act of preserving memories and maintaining that inherited imagination. Competing against the fast and easy contemporary world of entertainment, Tobong becomes a dying art that its practitioners unrelentingly try to revive, as if holding onto something that has long gone. Likewise, the vision of home always stands on the edge of being forgotten, and it is through the ingrained sense of belonging, the vision is rebuilt, retold, and reimagined. Additionally, Tobong itself refers to an impermanent, nomadic theatre building, a fitting allegory of the itinerant history of diasporic communities.
