Davina: A refreshing look at changes in Bali

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR (JP): It has been seventy years now since Bali was discovered by foreign painters. Their approach is usually aesthetic and exotic. They appropriate images of the island and make it an object of idyllic consumption: a paradise. They thus prevent Bali -- or rather the visual discourse on Bali -- from entering into modernity.

Davina Stephens belongs to a new generation of painters which is shaking this stilted image of the island. She never 'discovered' Bali. Bali was instead inbred in her.

Born a New-Zealander and the daughter of a 'hippie' from the happy 70s, she spent the key years of her childhood, between 6 and 12, in Kuta, attending the ceremonies on the beach and going to school with the young Balinese. She was thus shaped by the new Bali in the making.

To her there was never real meaning in the word exoticism nor was there a perceived conflict between tradition and modernity. There is simply life and its changing ways and surroundings.

This daughter of Kuta, this witness of the new, global Bali is now exhibiting her works for one month from Sept. 21 to Oct. 28 at the Ganesha Gallery of the Four Seasons Hotel in Jimbaran Bali. Golf courses and offerings, beach boys and Western tourists, peddlers and coca-cola, she is presenting the Bali no one wants to see: the changing Bali.

These observations have been made possible by Davina's particular mix of personal experience and talent. She has not only resided in Bali. She went to high-school in India before studying design in New York. She now regularly visits France where she has held several exhibitions. Not yet thirty years old, she has no identity qualms.

The world which was her childhood playground is now her home. One day she is drinking wine in a Parisian cafe and the following day she is at the beach with Balinese friends before going to India to attend a Kathakali. And she does this naturally, her curiosity being existential rather than abstract and intellectual. She is a traveler and artist of a new, global world which she not so much questions as grasps.

This easy going approach to life inspires all of her works. She never wanted to 'express herself', within the framework of contemporary art. She started her career in a humble way, by making textile designs, thus manipulating forms and colors without having to deal with the avant-garde question: how to be in the new.

Her first paintings were inspired by the flowers, feathers and other decorative objects she used to make her textiles. Then she started painting cars, Harley Davidsons and other individual objects from her Kuta background, and suddenly, two years ago, it was the contrast and changes of the world around her which came to the tip of her brush, first Bali, where she still spends much of her time, then France, India, the States, and all of the places she visits now and then.

Davina paints spontaneously, from the heart, in a manner which reminds us of Pop Art, neo-figuration, naive art and a gentle Combas. She owes nothing to any of these though. If there is a debt it is indirect and it probably owes more to comic books and the flat colors of the Balinese Penestanan painters than to any Western artist or school.

Davina's exhibit comprises both water colors and oil paintings. She is by far much freer in the use of oil. Her water color pieces are often drab-colored and tend to focus on decorative topics such as beach scenes and ceremonies.

In her oil paintings, however, both the color and the theme come to life, and the composition is more complex: Paradise in One has side by side a golfer, a woman carrying offerings, a temple, a jumbo jet, and a Kuta sunset.

All in one, thus, presents both the cliches and the reality, matter-of-factly, in a non judgmental way. Legian Beach Cottages is more metaphorical: Two youths are seen surfing while a third one is drowning among objects of modern consumption: a mobile phone, a water bottle etc. "Welcome to Bali" is a depiction of the island's daily reality: a temple with a warung coffee stall in the background, two youths playing football in the middle, and a young surfer apparently trying to catch the attention of a nearby Western woman.

Davina's best work and, I hope, a preview of the future direction of her creativity, is a reflection on the fate of the world called Global Challenge, featuring, seen from above and in lively colors, representatives of the main human groups gathered around a table and gambling with money, religion, nature, drugs, etc.

There is even a painting representing the former president Soeharto on his Harley Davidson, together with Arafat, Habibie and a Balinese priest, the latter two also riding a motorbike. The painting was made before the fall of Soeharto though. Therefore it is non-committal.

Davina is still just at the start of her career. The casualness of her unburdened nature adds to her strong, natural sense of color and promises to make her a significant artist with an original message.

If there is something she should be wary of it is "naive art", for which there is an important market, and with which her manner shows some similarity, both in the subjects chosen and in the finishing of the works.

The artist is far from naive, however. She 'knows', even though it is intuitive, what she sees and represents. And what she sees with her open, spontaneous eyes is a transient, multicultural world in which people communicate with each other mainly by exchanging 'things' or going places rather than by exchanging ideas. She is an early witness to the coming of the post-modern world.

She also gives a truer depiction of present day Bali than all of her Balinese contemporaries, most of whom, because they continue seeing themselves through the eyes of tourists when they don't avoid figuration altogether, refuse to face the reality of their changing island.

Davina would be a good example to demonstrate that foreigners still have their say in Bali, if she were really' a foreigner. As her life and works testify, she is as much a 'modern Balinese' as any Balinese painter and peasant. She is the forerunner of a new, multicultural identity and art.