Indonesian students protest government policies as economic pressures grow

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Hundreds of Indonesian students rallied Friday in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, demanding lower fuel and food prices and urging President Prabowo Subianto to roll back costly state spending programs as economic pressures mount.

About 1,500 protesters tried to march to the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, a key city landmark, after Friday prayers. Authorities stopped many of them and also blocked streets leading to the presidential palace, where many protests often end up. More than 6,000 police and soldiers were deployed there.

Protesters, many wearing yellow university jackets, voiced their frustration over living costs, which have risen as a result of higher fuel costs since the U.S. launched its war against Iran. Indonesia’s rupiah currency has come under pressure, hitting a historic low of 18,000 rupiah to the U.S. dollar earlier this month.

Protesters outlined five key demands, including cuts to what they called wasteful state spending, lower prices for fuel and staple goods, and a halt to major government programs such as a free nutritious meal initiative and a plan to revitalize rural areas.

The free meals program, costing about 268 trillion rupiah ($15 billion) for this year alone, is aimed at alleviating poverty and malnutrition but Prabowo recently fired the head of the program amid a massive graft probe.

They also called for an end to what they described as the increasing role of the military in civilian affairs, something they view as a threat to the young democracy.

“The government is in denial about the current situation," said Yatalathof Ma’shum Imawan, who chairs the student organization that organized the rally. “We urge Prabowo to have the courage to acknowledge his mistake and stop denying it."

Friday’s demonstration marks one of the largest student mobilizations since nationwide protests erupted last August, when thousands took to the streets and clashes with security forces left at least 13 people dead.

Similar protests were also held in West Java's Bandung city and in Pontianak, a city on Borneo island.

A student protester kicks a police barricade during a rally against a fuel price hike, government inefficient spendings, and military involvement in civilian affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Indonesian soldiers block student protesters during a rally against a fuel price hike, government inefficient spendings, and military involvement in civilian affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Student protesters tear down a police barricade during a rally against a fuel price hike, government inefficient spendings, and military involvement in civilian affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Police officers block student protesters during a rally against a fuel price hike, government inefficient spendings, and military involvement in civilian affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

A student protester holds up a mask of Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto during a rally against a fuel price hike, government inefficient spendings, and military involvement in civilian affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

LONDON (AP) — Artist David Hockney, whose paintings of pools shimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine became icons of 20th-century art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of the last century, Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. He became one of the U.K.’s most treasured artists, his works selling for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said it's no mystery why his work is so enduring.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, his great-nephew and studio assistant Richard Hockney, his brothers Philip and John, and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, from Renaissance portraitists to 19th-century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He told The New York Times in 1964 he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.” Nonetheless, he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition,” he said in 1995.

Even his move to California in 1964 had a historic precedent, he noted, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the brilliant light of Italy.

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries. Friends and lovers frequently posed as models, and some images were based on photos in men’s bodybuilding magazines.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money but I did what I wanted. ... You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”

That freedom brought Hockney acclaim and wealth, with his works fetching record-breaking sums. In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist. In February 2020 another pool painting, “The Splash,” from 1966, sold at Sotheby’s for 23.1 million pounds ($30 million).

While paintings of pools were a Hockney trademark, he also literally painted a pool when he decorated the bottom of the swimming pool at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits. “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 dual portrait of two of his English friends and their cat, was ranked No. 5 in a 2005 BBC Radio-National Gallery (London) online poll of the greatest paintings in Britain. It was the only work by a living painter in the top 10.

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

He didn’t limit himself to drawing and painting, though. He contributed costume and set designs for theater and the opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

Always an innovator, Hockney also embraced printmaking, photo collage and video in a seven-decade career.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

The insight he gained from his photo work led him to research and write a 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” He argued that through the centuries, artists used lenses and other optical devices to aid them in drawing much more often than most historians believe.

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Completed in 2018, the Queen’s Window depicts a landscape of blossoming hawthorn trees in hues of blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and red.

By this time, Hockney was widely considered Britain’s greatest living artist, and a national treasure. In 1997, the queen named him a Companion of Honour, an award limited to 65 people “of distinction.”

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

Art curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put together the Paris exhibition, called Hockney “the Picasso of our times.”

“When I say that, people laugh at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the 20th century,” Rosenthal told the Independent newspaper. “But David Hockney is also an incredibly popular artist whose work changes how we see things.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. ... He smoked up to the end.”

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said had improved his visual perception.

“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he told the AP in 2017.

He never stopped working.

“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.”

FILE - British artist David Hockney poses for photographers in front of his acrylic on canvas "Studio Interior #4" which features as part of the "David Hockney Painting and Photography" exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London, Thursday, May 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting 'Bigger Trees Near Water', the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Sang Tan, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney sits in front of The Queen's Window, a new stained glass window at Westminster Abbey, London, designed by David Hockney and revealed for the first time on Wednesday Sept. 26, 2018. (Victoria Jones/Pool via AP, File)

FILE - Painter David Hockney, right, with British Ambassador Edward Tomkins, left, at the opening of his exhibition at Musee des Arts Decoratifs on Oct. 10, 1974 in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Lipchitz, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney, stands next to his friend and model Celia Birtwell, in front of one of his most famous works ' Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy' at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Wednesday Oct. 11, 2006. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney stands before one of his paintings of the East Yorkshire landscape at The Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, London, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, ahead of his exhibition called 'A Bigger Picture'. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

FILE - Artist David Hockney after unveiling the bottle design for the 2014 vintage wine of Château Mouton Rothschild in London, Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)