In Java, it is said that to be a real man, one has to have a house, a wife, a horse, a keris and yes, a bird! Songbird contests are the rave in Indonesia with one in every five households said to be keeping birds as pets and for competition. A 2005 survey estimated that there are 2.6 million birds in captivity in Indonesia’s five biggest cities. Some are kept as good-luck charms and others as status symbols. Which is why you find almost all the people haggling in the market in Rudy Mardijanto’s painting to be men. They are all huddled in groups attentively looking at the birds on offer, as if examining some precious gems. To city-slickers, keeping birds remind them of life in the village. There are birdclub congregations with specialized jockeys to train these birds. The more popular songbirds are the orange-headed thrush, chestnut-headed thrush, long-tailed shrike and the white-rumped shama. Indeed, the demand is so great that some 131 species in Indonesia are ‘red-listed’ as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and even an Asian Songbird Crisis Summit was held in Singapore (September 2015). Rudy Mardijanto is a familiar face in Malaysia, having been featured by the H Gallery of Jakarta in the International Art Expo Malaysia eight times and given a solo by interpr8 gallery in Kuala Lumpur called Indonesia’s Rural Society in Transition in December 2013-January 2014. He was educated at the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) in Yogyakarta. He was a finalist in the Indonesian-level Asean Art Award in 2001. In the Henry Butcher April 2016 auction, his work hit a record RM7,840 and in the April 23 auction, a work sold for RM7,280.