Kinez Riza

“I find peace in the isolation of the wilderness”

Kinez Riza was a questioning child who tested her parents’ patience with constant enquiries. That seeking of answers continues in her art and life.

At least once a year, she sheds the trappings of modernity to visit Indonesia’s “hidden Edens”.

“There is the special feeling of the equal measure between nature, beast and man. It’s a very quiet moment. You slow down to the pace you would have been without all our extensions from technology, staying present and looking at your immediate environment,” she says of waking up to the cries of hornbills and hunting deer for food.

“I love everything that makes you feel alive. I’m not saying that there is a preferable state of reality, but you do have to balance yourself between the two. I can’t disassociate myself from modernity; you have to know how to survive in both.”