Cayung bridges cultural divisions with art
Cynthia Webb, Contributor, New York City
From a family in which a career in the arts was frowned upon, Cayung Siagian has found success in a land far from home, but he is still a North Sumatra boy at heart.
Cayung Siagian is one of the huge number of Indonesians sharing their rich cultural heritage with others around the planet.
He sees himself as a spiritual being having a human experience, rather than the other way around, and when you look at his artworks or read his poetry, you will agree this is a good description.
He was born in 1968 in Balige, a small town on the southern shores of Lake Toba, North Sumatra, a Toba Batak and very proud of it.
He learned to read and write in the ancient Toba Batak hieroglyphic script, which many of his peers today have not bothered to do. He studied his rich cultural heritage with great appreciation. Although he has now been away from Indonesia for seven years, his Batak identity is just as strong within him -- perhaps even stronger now.
Cayung is one of seven children of a teacher and housewife. The siblings all attended university and pursued successful professional lives.
Cayung laughingly said he was "the black sheep" of the family -- the one with a strong artistic personality. He says that most of his four brothers had better drawing skills than him, but did not pursue their artistic bent.
Cayung's father envisaged a career as an accountant for him, but after a year he changed to something a little more in keeping with his personality. He attempted for a while to live according to the family ideals, working in the tourism and entertainment world.
Of course the "inner artist" could not be suppressed indefinitely. While living and working in Bali, surrounded by art and also foreign influences, Cayung made up his mind to live according to his truth. He left his steady job to become a full time artist. He moved to Ubud and began filling sketchbooks, making paintings, and also writing poetry.
He also has a strong and fine musical appreciation, and during his time in Bali, he came into contact with the trance-dance movement sweeping around the world at the time. Spreading from Goa, India, Full Moon Parties were held in Bali as well as other locations in Southeast Asia.
The original concept was to dance all night in beautiful outdoor locations chosen for their atmosphere. This, plus the special rhythmic nature of the music, encourages a transcendental state to develop in the participants.
The international nature of Goa Trance, the music and the free wheeling energy of the participants banishes parochial attitudes and tastes. Barriers are broken down between people, and sharing and love emerges. This freedom and multiculturalism appeals strongly to Cayung's wider worldview.
During this time, Cayung's artistic work method was increasingly bypassing brushes and he was using his finger to apply paint, in an attempt to be more intimately connected -- literally "in touch" with his work. As this self-taught artist developed his technical skills, ideas flowed and his subject matter became increasingly imaginative.
In November 1997 he had a unique solo art exhibition, finger painting for three days at a rather charming location in Junjungan Village, close to Ubud. It was an area of palm trees among the nearby rice paddies. Is it just a coincidence that Junjungan is also one of his own middle names?
Instead of exhibiting in a gallery, he gained the required permission, and hung his works on the trunks of the palms. His gallery was larger than most and appropriate considering his deep reverence for nature.
The following year, Cayung headed for New York, with rolled up canvases beneath his arm, to find his destiny in a place as different from Ubud as one could possibly imagine. For a man who loves nature, the contrasting lifestyle forced upon him by life in "the Big Apple" must have required big adjustments.
He worked very hard at whatever he could find, and he found a niche for himself, made friends and continued with his art and writing in his spare time.
On New Year's Day 2000, he went to Broadway on a freezing morning, and marked the occasion by standing in the street making a finger painting.
Destiny intervened the same year when he met his wife Jennifer, also an artist, at a Life Drawing session. Now they live in Brooklyn with their two poodles, and Cayung has a steady job again as a graphic artist in a large health food store. He works in downtown Manhattan.
He was at work on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001, not too far from the World Trade Center. As a world altering tragedy was occurring, he wrote in his e-mails to family and friends: "So far, I am OK. The second tower has just collapsed".
This choice of words revealed how New Yorkers must have felt, as they wondered what might happen next.
He did not want to discuss the negative aspects of that day except to say, "Peoples' facial expressions are changed, perhaps this includes myself. But I would rather die dancing, than die in fear".
However he added: "The positive thing, from my point of view, was that most of the urban New Yorkers became close and cared about each other. We cared. We saw a long line of blood donors at every hospital, people of all different colors and origins... New York colors....like a new world of people who heard each other calling".
Cayung said that it took him a while to find the scene now known as PsyTrance, in New York.
"It is truly multicultural and everyone is equally accepted, and it is a world free of falsity and consumerism. It's the only place where you can see an Indonesian and an Israeli hugging each other and eating together at the same plate.
"The people have a third eye in their heart. They are open minded people who love nature."
He explained that PsyTrance was not the same as Rave, which is often associated with "kids who want to escape from parents and mess themselves up with drugs".
For him, PsyTrance functions are very different, mostly drug and alcohol free and attended largely by people who prefer not to abuse their mind and body with chemical drugs or alcohol.
He said he could leave his wallet on the table, go to the dance floor and it would still be there, untouched, when he returned.
Aligned with this PsyTrance world, Cayung's artistic activities have stretched to enormous proportions. He now paints "reflective UV Psy-art". His canvases have expanded to mural size, sometimes around 8 meters x 3 meters, but averaging about 3 meters x 1 and a half meters. He paints works of Visionary Art, with colors sensitive to UV light, which are used to decorate the venues where PsyTrance dance parties are held.
The parties, which in tropical locations are usually held outdoors, must usually be held indoors in big cities in latitudes like New York where the summer is short.
However, the New York area still has several three day/three night dance parties each summer. He regrets the modern trend that it is becoming increasingly difficult in many countries to organize the parties to dance in "Mother Nature", due to opposition from the local business establishment.
In New York, the flip side of this is that Cayung's art is much in demand to decorate the indoor venues. His amazing paintings are credited as "Atmosphere" on the PsyTrance website advertisements for upcoming parties.
This year he has been invited to fly over to the West Coast twice, so that his works could adorn the walls at PsyTrance Dance parties on the other side of the country. His fame is spreading.
The style is psychedelic, transcendental and the subject matter is deeply spiritual, containing beings from other worlds and images from nature. It also draws on his deep respect and identification with his Toba Batak heritage.
He seems to have awakened a sort of ancestral memory since he arrived in New York. Along with motifs from Batak culture, art, history and legend are other Asian motifs. One example is the dragon painting, which is a beast as no one ever imagined.
"Its a magical dream that will always exist in the Asian mind -- it will never be born and it will never die," said Cayung of his dragon.
His ancestors' voices are also coming to him in the form of vivid dreams which tell a story of a time long ago, concerning Chinese traders, Buddhist monks, ocean voyages under sail to India, discoveries of virgin islands and more.
The dreams seem to tell the origins of the Batak tribes, whose beginnings are still somewhat mysterious and indefinite even to modern anthropologists. These dreams or visions have become a book in progress.
According to Cayung, all of his art means nothing "unless there are good and aware eyes to see it", so in that sense he feels that all of his work is collaborative. For him, art is the way to bridge the gaps created by the distance and diversity of humankind.
"Let's open and melt, mirroring each other, flowing back into our natural beliefs, which have been forcibly pushed from our brains, leading us away from Nature. Let's link and become one peaceful human family. We should rely on each other the same way that art needs our eyes and our eyes need art."
Cayung's paintings are on the following websites:
* www.dayavision.50megs.com
* www.dreamcatcherstudio.net
* www.gallart.net/painters/cayung/siagian.html