Batuan Miniaturist style', revisited

Batuan Miniaturist style', revisited

Jean Couteau, Contributor, Denpasar

An interesting painting exhibition has been taking place at the
Ganesha Gallery at Four Seasons Hotel, Jimbaran. Titled Style by
Made Jata and Wayan Rajin, it takes us, through these two
masters, to the origin of what has been one of the main, little-
known developments of Balinese post-World War II painting, the
"Batuan Miniaturist style".

The village of Batuan, one of the oldest centers of Balinese
traditional culture, came into being in the late 1920s under the
influence of two Western artists who had settled in Ubud under
the patronage of the Sukawati princes of the latter village.

The story of these two artists is well known, and so is their
influence on Balinese painting history. They introduced new
materials and opened new markets, setting off the Pitamaha
renewal of the 1930s.

Batuan was part of the Pitamaha movement. Its artists quickly
adopted Chinese ink and the use of paper, yet its artists kept
free from the formal, stylized influence that pervaded the
artists from the Ubud area, where Bonnet's "anatomism" has left
to this day deep traces.

In Batuan there developed instead a rich, dense use of Chinese
ink in washes, layered to create an atmosphere of dark shades off
white highlights. The paintings depicted Balinese daily life or
the strange ghosts and spirits haunting the Balinese people's
psyche. As shown by Hildred Geertz's Images of Power (1994), this
early Batuan school of the 1930s was a short period of absolute
expressive freedom.

It is against the background of this early Batuan school,
which bloomed in the 1930s, that the new "Miniaturist School"
appeared in the late 1960s in an altogether different spirit.

While the Batuan School of the 1930s had emphasized the
expressive thematic aspect in an often rough visual manner, the
Miniature School emphasized the formal aspect. It developed, to
an extraordinary degree of sophistication, the use of Chinese ink
wash introduced four decades earlier.

This transformation was spurred in part by the renewed wave of
tourism following the rise of Soeharto to power in 1965: People
were visiting Batuan and looking for paintings. At its origin was
Made Jata (born 1910).

A sophisticated draughtsman, he took on his own son, Wayan
Rajin (born 1945), and two of his nephews, Made Tubuh and Ketut
Murtika, as apprentices in his workshop. All were highly
talented, and were soon competing with each other about who could
produce the most intricate paintings, the smallest drawing, and
the finest layering of Chinese ink wash. The impressive
combination of their talent soon led to the burgeoning of a new
school, the Miniaturist School of Batuan. This Chinese ink
technique was similar to that of preceding artists, but the
drawing was finer and a layer of color was added to the Chinese
ink. The themes were mainly borrowed from traditional stories and
myths from the wayang kulit puppet show.

The works exhibited at the Ganesha Gallery are some of the
late works of the two masters of this school, Made Jata and Wayan
Rajin, both of whom are dead.

They are a good introduction to Balinese esthetics. Forget the
discriminated organization of space, with well defined focus and
easily identified in Western, or even Far Eastern, art. Expect
instead work that is "full" to the point that nothing stands out,
either thematically or visually.

It is work that literally "blinds one by the accumulation of
elements that overfill the surface. To the Westerner, this is
beyond "appreciation". Expect also a tight and generalized
patterning of the iconic elements.

In contrast to Western, or again Far Eastern, work, which is
always uniquely structured and made of unpredictable forms,
Balinese miniatures, more so than Balinese paintings in general,
are "surpriseless".

As if made by computer, they consist essentially of a
combination of a limited number of graphic patterns and
subpatterns regularly distributed on the surface of the canvas.

There are, for example, three or four types of eyes, five or
six postures, seven or eight types of headdress, etc. But if one
accepts that aesthetics may indeed be different and express a
collective feeling rather than an individual expression, and,
more importantly, if, within the system above, one lets the eye
roam freely on the surface, gaze at a patterned detail, visually
dig into it, then dance on the surface, following step by step
the lines of identification of the drawing, then one enters into
a different world, a mythical world of classical myths and
agrarian balance. One enters into the soul of Bali.

For those who accept other esthetics and want to see Balinese
painting at its most exquisitely sophisticated, Balinese
miniatures from the Batuan school are the best way to do it.

Style by Made Jata and Wayan Rajin at the Ganesha Gallery, Four
Seasons Hotel, in Jimbaran, until April 26, 2003.