In February 1999, a drawing contest for elementary school children titled “Reformasi Through Our Eyes,” was held in Yogyakarta, a provincial capital in Java, Indonesia. The contest promised to display children’s visions of the student-led movement that, nine months previously, had ousted President Suharto after thirty-two years of authoritarian rule. Emphatically marking the eyes of children as different from those of adults, the contest’s title used the exclusive rather than the inclusive form of “our.” Yet the images children made at the contest were hardly materializations of a discrete perception. Rather, their brilliantly colored images can only be understood as the outcome of complex processes of mediation and within a visual ideology that positions children as ideal witnesses of the nation’s history. Most children had seen reformasi, if at all, through exposure to print and electronic media images. Moreover, the location of the contest at a state museum devoted to the history of the Indonesian revolution, and the precedent there of annual national "struggle" (perjuangan) painting contests, already framed their drawings within preexisting nationalist narratives and visual iconographies. Finally, many of the children who participated in the contest were sophisticated young artists, trained at painting schools (sanggar melukis) in a particular representational style.

Among the children participating in the contest, there was a clear divide between sanggar-trained children and those who were formally untrained. The trained children drew in a faux naive style that resembled nothing so much as adults drawing like children. Their images were characterized by a high degree of abstraction; they pictured the idea (or ideal) of reform. Foregrounding the nation, the word “Indonesia” and Indonesian flags frequently appeared. By contrast, the untrained children’s images drew more directly on media images, focusing on reformasi’s eventfulness. Many showed large modern buildings and vehicles on fire, confrontations between students and police, and the raw anger expressed in demonstrators’ banners. Neither pleasing images nor visualizations of an ideal, the untrained images fixate on, rather than screen out, violence. Not surprisingly, it was the sanggar-trained children’s idealized visualizations of reformasi that won the coveted awards. Nevertheless, many of the sanggar images were fraught with internal tensions. A number depicted violent scenes in the naïve sanggar style, creating a jarring disjuncture between the form and content.

Located at a charged confluence of adult anxieties and aspirations, of state projects of citizenship and global discourses of childhood innocence, children’s vision becomes the target of multiple mediations and interventions even as their images are accorded a privileged authenticity. Reinforcing the ideological construction of the child’s gaze as innocent, authentic, and natural, the pre-technological process of drawing, coupled with the drawing’s naïve style, signify an appealing guilelessness. The redemptive vision of the child provides an ideally innocenting filter through which the nation might view itself in a time of transition and crisis. That children might witness circulating media images of violence and disorder and re-present them in a sanitized, idealized image of national unity and nationalist “struggle” assuaged widespread fears of the disordering effects of reformasi. Nevertheless, the internal dissonance within so many of the images suggests both the limits of such projects to shape children’s vision and the inability of nationalist mythologies to fully contain the effects of violence.