Balinese artist Budiana honored in Tokyo

Balinese artist Budiana honored in Tokyo

Jean Couteau, Contributor, Denpasar, Bali

If, in this month of July, you happen to take the train in Tokyo,
Yokohama or Nara, or from any other station in Japan, you may see
on walls dark posters with fanged monsters that do not look
Japanese, but unmistakably Balinese.

Don't be surprised: Ketut Budiana, Bali's most creative "post-
traditional" artist, is guest of honor at Tokyo Station Gallery,
where he is holding a retrospective exhibition from June 14 until
July 21, 2003, sponsored by the East Japan Railway Culture
Foundation.

One of the cultural events of the Japanese summer, this non-
commercial exhibition has received wide coverage on Japanese TV
and in the press, including Asahi Shimbun, among others. A
beautiful catalog has been published for the occasion.

One is never acknowledged as a prophet in one's own land, goes
the adage. A low-profile artist, Budiana, 53, is indeed little
known in the Indonesian art world beyond a small circle of local
and foreign initiates. This probably owes much to the Balinese
character of his painting.

Balinese art may be glorified with respect to dance, but its
fine arts, except when exotic or "modern", receive little
acceptance at the national level. Few people are ready to make
the effort to accept the peculiarities of Balinese esthetics:
dense occupation of the canvas, darkness, minimum use of color.
And when this Balinese esthetics comprises, as in Budiana's
works, a world of ghoulish figures symbolizing the cosmic forces
of Hindu tradition, it is really asking too much.

Budiana may arguably be one the most "inspired" of all
Balinese contemporary artists, but he suffers from the
paradoxical belittlement of his culture on the national stage:
"produce Paradise or modernity -- or else". He produces neither.

Looking at Budiana's paintings is indeed entering a
nightmarish world of gnarled demons, gargoyles and unworldly
landscapes that take the form of our deepest fears before
swirling away into absolute nothingness or, on the contrary, into
the blindness of total light.

In the words of the Japanese curator, Itoh Toshibaru, his
works "are celebrations of visually disparate and ceaselessly
undulating elements -- motions, waves, vibrations and complex
intersections of lines that are engaging and repelling one
another ... Notions of strength, rapidity, height and lightness
accumulate in the mind's eye as a spectacular relational
drama ... unraveled in phantasmagorias of hallucinogenic color
and form." Owing to these qualities, Budiana's works carry a
universal feel of cosmic power that goes well beyond the
idiosyncrasies of local Balinese culture.

The universal feel of Budiana's works is rooted in Hindu-
Balinese tradition, though. The son of a village architect
(undagi), Budiana is the traditional artist par excellence. One
day, he will be making a set of sculpture for a temple, another,
direct the preparation of a cremation -- the making of the bull,
the construction of the cremation tower, and then perform a dance
in a temple.

He is also one of the last wanderer-cum-teacher artists: he
has been called to Java and Lombok for the making of temple
sculptures, and people often come to him to enquire how things
should be from a classical point of view. Budiana can thus be
seen as the ultimate guru-artist-worshiper whose actions
eventually merge into a service to the community and the Divine.

With regard to art, Budiana doesn't simply transmit Balinese
cultural memory. He rejuvenates it. His works do not have the
stereotyping, both formal and thematic, so common in Balinese
art. While he still uses the wash technique with Chinese ink, he
achieves his own chiaroscuro effects using a paper with blotting
proprieties that he makes himself from a mix of leaves and
recycled paper.

As for the characters shown in his works, although they derive
from the wayang, it is in a very free way. He doesn't simply
narrate stories of heroes and gods from a mythical past. He
instead borrows mythological figures to be the players of great
philosophical Hindu themes that he interprets in his own ways:
the cosmic balance of male and female, right and left, gods and
demons, the relationship between the cosmic self (buana alit) and
the universe (buana agung); the thirst for oneness, the never
ending transformation of the world and the unity of creation and
destruction.

The artist gives these themes a psychological twist. His
paintings brings to the surface the deepest of Man's dreams and
nightmares, the thirst for purity and the attractions of
profanity, the very point in which the individual gropes for
encounter with and eventual disappearance into his/her own
mystery.

Budiana's spiritual, cosmic-related endeavor, is best
explained in the artist's own words: "Nothing is inherently good
or evil," he says, "but rather all entities and forces move
between positive and negative states. What appears negative in
one context is positive in another. The dissolution of the
physical body in the grave fills us with horror. Yet, with deeper
insight, (this process) allows dead matter to become the basis
for a new life."

Explaining the misty, outlandish atmosphere of most of his
works, he further elaborates: "The ritual process of returning to
a more positive, pure state is symbolized in the mystical
marriage of fire and water. When fire is met by water, the two
neutralize each other, and give rise to a new, more refined
entity: vapor. This can be achieved by the self through
meditation. Vapor symbolizes the spiritual aspect of the person,
which is freed to unify with its pure source.

"When achieved in the inner concentration of a holy person,
the union of fire and water produces tirta amerta, the elixir of
life. This water symbolizes a new, purified or more spiritual
phase of life."

This awareness of the artist toward his own creative spiritual
process, and his ability to uncover from the deeper, subconscious
depths of his imagination the haunted shapes that give life and
meaning to the lasting teachings of his culture, makes Budiana
the most rooted, yet arguably the most universal of contemporary
Balinese artists.

Yet, he still awaits recognition in Indonesia. In a national
art world dominated by modernist discourse, and where "other
modernities" are therefore theoretically acceptable, it is a
mystery why Budiana hasn't gained such recognition.

Blindness? Lack of exoticism? Too much of it? Too difficult,
businesswise? Whatever the case, Budiana is one of the most
important "fantastic" artists of our days, and as a soul mate of
Bosch, Fussli, Odilon Redon and others. It is hoped that the
"different brand of beauty" shown in his art will soon gain
acceptance in the country of his birth.

It will be a sign of maturity for the Indonesian art world.