Adi Jumaadi's world of art is in the living

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne, Australia

At the opening reception of The South Project conference in Melbourne last week, among a gathering of people of different racial backgrounds from various places in the southern hemisphere, Adi Jumaadi did not just blend into the background.

Maybe it was because he is fairly tall (178 cm) for an Indonesian. Or perhaps, despite his decidedly unassuming manner, it was due to his quiet magnetic aura, and his face reveals openness and a natural ability to absorb everything new.

He does not put on airs. He does not talk about his achievement as an artist unless someone specifically asks about it. In fact, in the conference, he conducted a workshop on making straw puppets, known in Javanese as wayang suket. The participants were taken by the engaging way he taught them while telling them personal stories steep in the cultural cradle where the making of these puppets took place.

He did not once drop any hint that, since finishing his scholarship at the National Arts School in Sydney in 2000, he had won several awards in Australia, among them, the Waverley Arts Prize, Art on the Rocks and the Salon des Refusis. He also was highly commended for the Mosman Art Prize only last year.

When I pressed him, without affectation, he described himself as a kampong boy. Born 30 years ago in the small rural village of Pecantingan in Sidoarjo, East Java, Adi may have traveled a fair way, but deep in his psyche he is still very much grounded in his village.

He has always been interested in environmental issues, which prompted the question if that had anything to do with him being an artist.

"Probably because I was born and brought up in a rural village," Adi replied. "From the word go, we learned from our parents about the importance of rivers, rice fields, bamboo and other plants, to us villagers. Now, what we learned then has a name: ecosystem."

Adi's family lived in a fish-farming area, and his father would make nets and weave fish-catching baskets using slivers of bamboo. Adi and his friends would pick up the unused bamboo slivers and would make wayang puppets out of them.

"We'd use just about anything available. Cassava twigs, long grass, anything free lying around," he recalled.

"As a little boy, I used to take my family's ducks from rice field to rice field for them to find food," Adi reminisced. "I remember that when I was five years old, my family had about 300 ducks. During rice-planting season, and during the time when the stalks were still young, the ducks would eat the insects which would have been a problem to the farmers.

"Then at harvesting times, the ducks would eat the slugs and the snails which would have been terrible pests. So I learned about the ecosystem naturally.

"When I felt tired, I'd get together with other villagers, adults and children alike, and we would entertain ourselves making wayang puppets from straw, then we'd stage impromptu performances with improvised instruments. We became skilled in improvising musical instruments with our own voices.

It also provided an education in other ways.

"In fact," Adi added brightly, "that was how I learned Javanese literary language. As we played with wayang puppets, we performed. And we learned about the Mahabharata story. The Mahabharata story was always told in a literary language. Now that there is hardly literature taught in Indonesian primary schools, I try to reintroduce it by visiting the kampongs and teaching the children some literary language through our own cultural mores."

The lore of the Mahabharata is indeed entrenched in Adi's family's realm of consciousness. This became very clear in the way he described his family.

"I have three younger brothers, since the youngest died. Originally we were the five Pandawa," he said, referring to one of the Bharata families in the epic story.

Adi does not go for elitism, and likes telling the story about the development of wayang in East Java.

"It is actually the result of a famous act of dissent on the part of Prince Pekik in the 17th century, against the establishment, the kingdom of Mataram. The prince found that wayang had become the property of the elite. Mahabharata, for example, had to be performed in 12 hours and the audience had to stay the whole time. He began to break down this inflexibility by creating other forms of wayang puppets, made of wood, instead of the traditional buffalo hide.

"While the original Mahabharata stops at Parikesit (the grandson of Arjuna), Prince Pekik made it continue, to Damar Wulan. Damar Wulan was a peasant who married a queen and became a Javanese king."

This strong equalizing drive falls nicely with The South Project's objectives of facilitating dialogue between countries in the southern hemisphere to raise consciousness of their own potential.

He sees centralization of the north breaking down, and of local cultures beginning to gain importance and eminence.

"I believe in the equality of all cultures and their respective arts. Grass puppets from East Java are not inferior to European paintings, for example. The arts of people from New Zealand, Tonga, South Africa, South America, are equally important."

Personally, Adi has to a great extent proven his stance, by winning awards for his artistic works, in Australia.