Museum Batuan Exhibiting Works by 70 Artists with Integrity

 

Museum Batuan was first established as a place to showcase the wealth of talent found amongst the unusually large number of painters working in this village, and houses a truly astounding collection of Modern Traditional Batuan Style Paintings on October 29th the museum opened an exhibition of contemporary works entitled “Integrity”.

 

The village of Batuan has an extremely long and rich history that includes an extraordinary visual and performing arts heritage. The village temple, which itself demonstrates the great skill of painters, sculptors, dancers, and other artists, also houses a document that refers to an artist guild that already existed when the temple was established some 1000 years ago. Archeological evidence also shows that skilled artists were already working in Batuan long before that.

 

For most of Batuan’s history, art was created in the religious-cultural context as a communal act of devotion intimately tied to a holistic way of life wherein all aspects of life were understood as being part of a unified cosmo-vision. While these Balinese Hindu practices still ensure that arts continue to thrive here with exceptional power, painting in particular has been developing on its own uniquely fine arts path, with traditional methods being expanded to include more contemporary themes and approaches.

 

The newly opened exhibition is a tremendous show featuring a remarkable 70 artists from Batuan, Bali, and indeed the world. While the artists of this exhibition work in a variety of styles, techniques, and methods, they share a common source of inspiration: Bali -and more particularly the spiritual, philosophical, or unseen forces that inspire them to create.

 

Keeping with the tradition of devotional works, each of the paintings speaks to the artist’s personal exploration of the unseen either within themselves or as it is expressed collectively and as such are direct references to the notion of ‘integrity’.

 

As museum owner, Pak Dewa explained: “my father created this museum as part of his dream to celebrate the rich artistic heritage of Batuan and Bali. I am pleased to say that this exhibition indeed celebrates the wealth of talented artists working in Bali today and is in integrity with the vision of this museum”.

 

Although the word integrity is often used to refer to being in alignment with one’s principles, integrity in fact has a wider meaning. Integrity is defined as ‘being part of the whole and in the context of this exhibition refers to the bringing together of different artists who share a common source of inspiration but it also refers to this source of inspiration and how it is expressed.

 

Balinese culture is -broadly speaking, based on integrity both in terms of acknowledging all parts of life and also in terms of how this is expressed with art, religion, farming, economics, architecture, fashion, cosmology, education, social, political, personal, spiritual practices interweaving as individual threads that make up part of a larger whole.

 

Each of these aspects of life is clearly tied to the others and this interrelatedness is explicitly acknowledged in the traditions of Bali in myriad ways. Painting is no exception and although most painting on the island is no longer created in the same communal devotional context that it once was, this understanding of life remains an integral part of art practices on the island.

 

So strong is this understanding, that even visitors to the island who may not fully grasp the astonishing degree to which these connections are honored here, certainly feel it.

 

Maintaining an artistic practice requires a certain degree of integrity anywhere in the world as it comes with numerous challenges – the greatest of which is perhaps remembering that we are always part of the whole of life and persevering in trying to express this integrity in artworks that necessarily fall short but always hold the potential of bringing us that much closer to expressing this integrity with all that is.

 

From Balinese fold tales and shadow puppet stories that carry moral teachings to scenes of everyday life in Bali represented as unified visions of life as one interrelated unfolding, to more conceptual expressions of particular struggles to maintain traditions or personal experiences of interactions with the subtle forces that inform these traditions, to satirical representations of our changing times, to simple homages to the beauty and power of the land of Bali whether literal, symbolic, metaphoric, conceptual or poetic, whether abstracted, personal, imagined or remembered, each of these paintings stands as a testament to the remarkable and enduring strength of the land and culture of Bali to invite us all to appreciate the beauty of life and our integral place in it.

 

INTEGRITY will be on display at Batuan Museum, until October 28th, 2018.

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Written by Gabrielle Thibaudeau, Published in October 2018 by International Bali Post