Arya News - Through paintings, textiles and installations, a group exhibit in Bali explores the changing relationship between tradition, identity and contemporary art.
JAKARTA – Long overlooked in dominant narratives of art history, women artists have continually shaped the region’s artistic development, negotiating influences from abroad while drawing on their own cultural experiences. An exhibition at Museum Pasifika in Nusa Dua, Bali, offers an opportunity to revisit their contribution and consider how women’s artistic practices have evolved across generations.
Titled Women Artists of Asia-Pacific: Nostalgi = Transendensi (nostalgia = transcendence), the exhibition brings together 47 works by 30 women artists from 12 countries. Running from Oct. 9 to Dec. 9, it surveys more than a century of artistic practice, from pioneering modernists to contemporary artists exploring new materials and forms.
The exhibition also includes artists from outside the region, particularly Europeans whose connections with the Asia-Pacific developed through travel or extended residence. Their presence adds another dimension to the cultural exchanges that have shaped artistic expression in the region.
Looking beyond the artworks themselves, the exhibition invites reflection on the different paths taken by pioneering women artists. Chinese artist Pan Yuliang, Singaporean painter Georgette Chen and Indonesian painter Emiria Soenassa, for instance, each negotiated the encounter between Western modernism and local cultural contexts.
Their experiences, however, were far from identical.
Emiria (1894-1964) traveled extensively across the Indonesian archipelago and brought the lives and cultures of its diverse communities into her paintings. Chen (1907-1992), who received artistic training in Paris and New York before settling in Singapore, became an important figure in the development of the Nanyang style, combining Western painting techniques with Asian subjects.
Their practices illustrate how modernism was not simply imported from the West but reinterpreted through the regional experiences of individual artists.
The contemporary works in Women Artists of Asia-Pacific extend this dialogue, showing how inherited knowledge and cultural memory can be transformed through materials and artistic approaches that challenge conventional boundaries.
Woven identity: Barkcloth, Dark Cloth, a collaborative work by Dutch artist Mella Jaarsma and Papuan artist Agustinus Ongge, explores texture and form while reflecting on cultural identity, vanishing indigenous knowledge and the historical forces that have marginalized traditional practices. COURTESY OF MELLA JAARSMA AND AGUSTINUS ONGGE/THE JAKARTA POST
Reworking inherited knowledge
One particularly compelling work is by Meta Enjelita, who was born in 1994 in West Kalimantan and graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta, where she studied textile crafts.
Her work, titled Mata Benang; Lembar Hidup Perempuan Pemintal (Eye of the thread; women weavers’ fabric of life), features an image of a Rp 50 banknote on a coarse, handwoven cotton canvas treated with rust dyeing.
The work recalls Indonesia’s devastating hyperinflation in the early to mid-1960s, when the national currency rapidly lost value. Yet Meta shifts attention away from the collapsing monetary system toward the largely invisible labor of rural women, whose handcrafted textile traditions endured.
The image of a woman operating a spinning wheel, engraved on the banknote, becomes the starting point for an intricate intervention: Meta deconstructs its graphic lines, painstakingly restitching them into a three-dimensional form.
The installation’s presentation further enhances its impact. Suspended in space and animated by lighting and movement, the work evokes the unstable physical reality of currency during a period of economic turmoil.
Beyond its historical reference, Mata Benang offers a reconsideration of value itself: while official currency can lose its worth, the knowledge and labor sustaining communities remain significant. What was once relegated to the margins becomes the subject of artistic recognition.
Another compelling dialogue between inherited practice and contemporary art emerges in the collaboration between Dutch artist Mella Jaarsma, who has lived in Yogyakarta for decades, and Papuan artist Agustinus “Agus” Ongge.
Their collaborative work, Barkcloth, Dark Cloth, draws on the tradition of processing and painting bark cloth, a material deeply rooted in Papuan cultural life.
Agus has prepared and painted the bark using Sentani motifs, while Jaarsma has transformed the material into wearable architectural installations. The collaboration goes beyond an exploration of texture and form. It raises questions about cultural identity, the disappearance of indigenous knowledge and the historical pressures that have marginalized traditional practices.
Jaarsma’s long-standing engagement with bark cloth and her collaboration with Agus explore how material traditions carry histories that are often overlooked in dominant accounts of contemporary art. The artists also challenge the assumption that indigenous craftsmanship and contemporary conceptual art belong to separate worlds.
Unbreakable ties: Mother and Child (1956) by Emiria Soenassa portrays the enduring bond between mother and child. COURTESY OF MUSEUM PASIFIKA/THE JAKARTA POST
Expanding the language of art
Women Artists of Asia-Pacific also demonstrates how contemporary artists are extending artistic expression beyond conventional visual forms.
South Korean artist and cellist Eunju Park, born in 1978, brings together her musical and visual practices through synesthesia, a condition that enables her to experience sound through colors and forms. A member of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Park translates musical compositions into visual experiences using hanji, Korean traditional handmade paper.
Her work Blue Swan belongs to her Korean Color Symphony series, which interprets major works from the Western classical repertoire through color. First presented as a solo exhibition of around 40 works in Paris in 2023, the project explores the relationship between musical structure, emotion and visual perception.
Rather than treating painting and music as separate disciplines, Park suggests how one sensory experience can be translated into another, expanding the possibilities of artistic interpretation.
Meanwhile, Ni Nyoman Sani, born in 1975, explores womanhood at the intersection of local culture and global values. Her painting The Land moves beyond a literal representation of landscape, inviting contemplation of land as an experience shaped by memory, identity and changing relationships with one’s surroundings.
Taken together, these works suggest that the evolution of women’s art cannot be understood simply as a progression from traditional to modern or contemporary forms. It is also a process of revisiting inherited knowledge, questioning established narratives and finding new ways to express individual and collective experiences.
While Women Artists of Asia-Pacific brings together numerous artists and artistic approaches, its significance lies not merely in the number of women represented. It also provides a basis for reconsidering how women have negotiated changing artistic movements and contributed to the region’s cultural history, often without receiving comparable recognition.
More importantly, the transitions between generations raise questions about how new materials, technologies and interdisciplinary approaches are reshaping artistic imagination. Textile, sound, installation and indigenous materials are no longer confined to their traditional categories but have become vehicles for broader cultural and philosophical inquiry.
In this sense, the exhibition offers a reading of nostalgia that goes beyond longing for the past. What is inherited need not remain fixed: It can be questioned, transformed and given new meaning. The past, rather than being a closed chapter, becomes an active resource through which contemporary art continues to evolve.