Painter Diah reinvents cultural heritage

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.