Contemporary batik collaborations: Mountain meets ocean (2001)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 23 January 2012
This article was previously published in the Jakarta Post on 27 May 2001.
On June 1, a unique exhibition opens at the National Gallery. Not only are the art works which will be hanging there unusually long; their textures and consistencies are dramatically different from what is usually encountered in contemporary art galleries.
These art works bear the traces of hands, minds and spirits moving hot lines of molten material across soft surfaces of spun and woven larvae-products. The subtle hues are memories of immersions in pools of color and exposures in spaces of air and light.
The art is the results of movements and acts undertaken in humility and concentration, for the sake of invocation as much as for pure expression— acts resulting in marks that whisper stories about bringing bloodlines and ancestral lines from far and near together in common seal and zeal.
Segaragunung is one of four exhibitions that make up the JakArt Festival, held during the month of June. While modern and contemporary Indonesian art today enriches a global art world increasingly aware of the artistic treasures that exist beyond Europe and America, also in conventional media like painting, sculpture, and installation art, one could claim that this exhibition offers the world a contemporary art form that is at once contemporary, in the international sense, and uniquely Indonesian, unseen in any earlier Euro-American modern version, here offering glimpses of a vision unknown to the Western art world.
Javanese batik is widely recognized as the pinnacle of achievement in this resist-dye technique practiced in many areas of the world from ancient times. Based on the detailed cloth patterns visible on reliefs on Candi Borobudur, it is estimated that the Javanese courtly batik arts date back to at least the mid-9th century AD. Many batik artists still work with sacred patterns that have been copied meditatively for centuries. But Isnia’s approach has been somewhat different.
Ismoyo and Nia have studied the philosophical and aesthetic roots of this batik art with the aim of continuing to give form and life to its essence. To these artists, this does not mean a purist or orthodox repeating of the old motifs, with old methods in cloth making, patterning and dying, but an embracing of what is seen as timeless spirit in contemporary forms, reflecting current sensibilities— even while challenging some of the bases of modern and contemporary art internationally.
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