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.