Indonesian artist Roby Dwi Antono has opened his first solo exhibition in Thailand at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Bangkok. SUDO RUNGU: Echoes of Fire runs from 27 October 2026 to 3 January 2027, curated by Loredana Pazzini Paracciani, and turns the memory of his late father's blacksmith workshop in Central Java into a meditation on labour, inheritance and loss.

The title comes from the Javanese phrase sudo rungu, meaning diminished hearing. Roby's father worked as a blacksmith, and the sounds and sensations of the workshop - hammer blows on metal, furnace heat, smoke and the smell of burning charcoal - stayed with the artist from childhood. Decades of exposure to the noise gradually damaged his father's hearing, yet as the older man's hearing faded, the workshop's sounds lodged more deeply in his son's memory. What began as an occupational hazard became an inheritance of another kind.

Installed across the museum's atrium and three ground-floor temporary galleries, the show unfolds in three movements that follow the stages of blacksmithing: the residue of production, the furnace's heat and force of transformation, and finally silence, contemplating what remains after the fire has died and the hammer has stopped. A monumental nine-metre-long painting anchors the exhibition, gathering the artist's recollections of the workshop into a single vast image. Visitors are also invited to make their own charcoal marks on a large canvas, turning remembrance into a shared act.

The show marks a departure from the hybrid creatures and wide-eyed figures that first brought Roby international recognition. Painting now sits alongside drawing, photography, video installation and participatory work. Born in Ambarawa, Central Java, in 1990, Roby built his practice without formal fine-art training, moving from graphic design and illustration into painting, and his work has since been shown by Almine Rech and sold at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips.