About
Sharon Hardjono is an Indonesian-Chinese artist with a background in graphic design and an interest in the fine arts world.
Her practice has evolved toward a deeper engagement with personal inquiry and conceptual reflection, examining the vulnerability, uncertainty and curiosity surrounding identity. Through her work, she investigates how identity is constructed, fragmented, and continually reassembled through reflection, memory and perception.
Working across multimedia and currently focusing on drawing and animation, she examines the fluid nature of the self and how it shifts in response to external narratives and internal introspection. She is particularly interested in the paradox of self-perception: we can never fully see ourselves as we are, yet we continuously construct an image of ourselves through representation.
Moving between the personal and the universal, her work often employs self-portraiture not as a literal depiction of the self, but as a way of questioning how one exists, appears and is understood in the world.
Acts of Becoming
Video, aspect ratio 4:3
4 mins 16 secs looped
(2026)
Acts of Becoming
Acts of Becoming is a body of work that explores gesture, repetition and self-observation as ways of understanding identity.
Through a compilation of softly rendered sketches, the work captures intimate gestures of hands caressing the face alongside fragmented close-up frames of the eyes.
Drawing from the repetitive act of looking at and touching oneself, Sharon considers these gestures as moments of self-recognition and negotiation. The face becomes both familiar and uncertain, a surface through which identity is continuously observed, questioned and reconstructed.
Rather than presenting identity as something fixed or fully knowable, Acts of Becoming reflects on the self as an ongoing process of becoming, shaped through repetition, perception, and the intimate relationship between the body and its own image.
Acts of Becoming
Video, aspect ratio 4:3, 4 mins 16 secs looped
(2026)
Research methodology and theoretical framework
In this project, she investigates how identity can be represented through moving images, questioning the notion of the self as fixed or singular.
Rather than approaching self-portraiture as a depiction of a stable individual, this practice-based research examines identity as a dynamic and ongoing process shaped by repetition, bodily gestures, social interaction and perception.
The study draws on theories of performance and performativity, psychoanalysis, and embodiment to explore how the self is continuously constructed through the interplay between internal experience and external observation.
The research employs frame-by-frame, hand-drawn animation as both a method and medium, focusing on subtle, repetitive hand gestures that often occur unconsciously in everyday life. By shifting attention from the face to the hand, the project proposes habitual bodily movement as an alternative site of self-representation.
Through drawing, repetition, and moving image, the work explores how identity is continually negotiated, performed and transformed, contributing to contemporary discussions of self-portraiture, performativity and embodied artistic practice.
Yen Melia
Chen Shitong
Deanna Ng
Agastya Sharma Laimayum
Caddie Aiw
Brenda Lee
