Jakarta gets world-class art museum

Jakarta

FOR a city of its huge size - 10 million people - and economic heft, Jakarta lacked many things one might expect of a thriving Asian metropolis: a metro system, for one, as well as a major international modern and contemporary art museum.

The metro system will be operational in 2019, but the contemporary art museum has come even sooner.

In November, the Museum Of Modern And Contemporary Art in Nusantara, known as Museum Macan, opened.

It has items from the 800 contemporary and modern works owned by Haryanto Adikoesoemo, the museum's founder, an Indonesian property and chemicals tycoon turned prodigious art collector.

Situated on a horseshoe-shaped floor of a tower in the western part of this city, the museum in its early days has stunned Jakarta crowds with phantasmagoric light installations like Infinity Mirrored Room - Brilliance Of The Souls by Yayoi Kusama, along…