Painter Diah reinvents cultural heritage

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta

As images were taking shape on several parts of her body, it must have dawned on Diah Yulianti how tradition and customary beliefs were still playing an important role in her life.

The "tattoos" drawn on her flesh with a lidi (palm leaf rib) dipped in a mixture of daun pacar (lawsonia enermis leaf) and gambir (uncaria) were part of the ceremonies preceding her traditional Kalimantan wedding on July 7.

Flowers, leaves, the sun, a centipede, tiger's teeth, ferns and serpents either in the naturalist style or the semi-abstract style, decorating her hands, feet and arms, carried symbolic contents of well-wishing.

"These days, I myself have become the canvas of other artists," she said surrendering to those decorating even her head, face and everything that tradition demands. During those strenuous days, she was asked not to touch a single canvas of her own.

Born in Rantau, a small village about 113 kilometers to the northeast of Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan, and about 40 kms away from the Meratus mountain chain, Diah, who brings together the Javanese culture from her father's side and the Kalimantan tradition into which her mother was born, is a graduate of the Indonesian Institute of Arts in Yogyakarta.

Settling down in Yogyakarta has not isolated her from the environment of her native land. On the contrary, it has enforced an intense urge to delve into the cultural mysteries of the people she considers her kin.

Cultivating close ties with the people in the interior of the rainforests, their culture and their syncretic religion called Kaharingan, she has explored the traditional longhouse, where about 20 families live in the age-old way of life. Wandering the winding paths of the dense forests, overwhelmed by the scent of blooming cinnamon trees, Diah became one with the people that live in the realms of ancestor-spirit worship in Loksado, a village at the foot of the Meratus mountain chain.

One of her earlier abstracts depicting a young woman in yellow against a bark-colored background with tiny floating spirits, is inspired by the traditional wedding ritual of the Bukit people. In the work titled Mayang, the areca palm is symbolic of a young woman she enters the marital state.

Diah may have settled in Yogyakarta, but her soul is home in the spirit world of the Bukit people. It is this bond that has pulled her back time and again, inspiring her almost beyond imagination to large canvases with figures taking the shape of elongated phantoms floating between heaven and earth. Using bark and colors in the tradition of the local people, the multicolored dots that used to cover the ghost-like figures only added to the intense mystique of a gripping atmosphere.

As she immersed herself deeper in that world, the line between spirits and the spiritual tends to blur into something that might be called the transcendental. While a deepening of the spiritual is taking place, and the dialog with her inner-self intensifies, it seems Diah is coming out of the shadows of the Meratus mountains.

At least, one would think so, given the nudes and the breasts painted in the realistic mode. But for Diah it means the spiritual evoked exactly by that atmosphere. Nudes, she says reflect the need for people to strip themselves of the attributes that hide the real self. Neither should one consider the bare breasts as an allegiance to alluring sex, she says. Rather, the breasts which she calls bunga surga (heavenly flowers) in her recent canvas titled Pusaran Kesejatian are a reflection of her inner blossoming.

Earlier Diah had taken actual issues of the mortal world to the world of spirits as evidenced in some of her large canvases.

At the time of political turmoil in 1999, for instance, her canvases showed the phantoms of the world "in-between" either bloodstained, bewildered or convening and discussing the shatters of the mortal world. Dialog roh-roh tentang negeri ini, 110 x 260 cm, oil on bark, was an impressive painting presented in her solo exhibition at Cemara-6 gallery in Jakarta at that time.

As well, the Sept. 11 tragedy prompted her to paint Catatan Akhir Tahun (End of the Year Note), applying realistic and abstract modes to fuse the mortal and the spirits world in a shared concern.

What impact, if any, will her marital state make on her artistic imagery? A further development is bound to happen. However, to what extent this will intertwine with a declining strength of the Bukit culture, only time will tell. For now, Diah is fervently preparing for a joint exhibition in Manado/Sulawesi, scheduled to open on July 27.