MYSTERIES OF CENTRAL JAVA
NOBILITY OF CIREBON by Paramita Abdurachman
The Old Faith
The New Faith
Status Symbols for Aristocrats
An Old Court in a New Mold
THE FREEWHEELING NORTH COAST
PEKALONGAN—BATIK CITY
An Unusual Group of Women
The Chinese Heritage
Three Generations
The Finest Workmanship
DIVERSITY IN EASTERN JAVA
Islamic Kingdoms
Lasem—a Walled City
Village Batik
Strength in Numbers
TRAUMA AND A NEW SOCIETY
Cloth of War
Batik Indonesia
Modern Trends
Batik for Clothing—and Home
The Future of Batik
Spectacular prada sarong with red and blue (bang-biru) colors may have originated in Lasem. The head, or kepala, shown here has curvilinear geometries and the body (not shown) is covered with the phoenix, a symbol of longevity.
PROLOGUE
For much of my professional life I saw the world in black-and-white. Buddhists and Catholics killing each other in the streets of Saigon—black and white. Ulanova and Plisetskaya in performance at the Bolshoi ballet—black and white. Marlon Brando on a Mekong steamer—black and white. Lithuanian survivors of World War II—black and white. I was a photojournalist and those were my colors.
Then one day quite a few years ago, my black and white world exploded into glorious color. It happened in a tiny, nondescript shop in Hong Kong—that moment when the splendors of Java's north coast batik burst upon me. It was an epiphany of sorts: suddenly revealed was a wondrous textile cosmos, where lions roar ferociously, ducks paddle serenely, mythical animals defy gravity and surreal flowers unfold their brilliant petals. The batik artists of Java's north coast splash their colors with controlled and uncontrolled abandon.
Entranced by what I first glimpsed in that Hong Kong shop, I set out on a mission: to unravel the mystery of batik. Before long, I was traveling the length of Java's north coast, working with local Javanese, Chinese and Arab batik artists, helping them design new patterns and rearranging old ones; mixing colors never before used in batik and demonstrating that it was possible to produce batik in lengths of thirty-two yards, long enough to be used not just for clothing but for upholstery and drapery as well. Later, my company, China Seas, Inc., helped open new markets for batik in Europe and Asia, in North and South America.
All the time I was learning, watching and learning some more. At first timidly and then with a bit more confidence, I began buying batik that seemed unusual. I used my eyes. Did a particular batik resemble another in color, design, and technique? Chances were that they both came from the same region, the same town, the same period and quite likely the same artist.
During this long and sometimes arduous search, I traveled to four continents, crawled through cob webbed attics, slogged through slithering mud, battled flying cockroaches, and once was apprehended by gun-toting policemen when I arrived unannounced in some remote village. I pestered scholars and friends alike in the hope of collecting and showing what had never been seen before. I also drew on my earlier training as an aspiring historian. I was gradually able to put most of the textiles into what seemed to be an appropriate cultural, geographic, and historic context. But sleuthing aside, in the world of batik there will always be dissenting opinions as well as new discoveries to be made.
For hundreds of years, Java has been at a crossroads of trade, near the routes sailed by Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, Sir Francis Drake and St. Francis Xavier. Trade brought with it a succession of religions and waves of colonization. Indonesia's official motto is "Unity in Diversity," which might just as well describe the wonders of its batik. Indonesia's climate is tropical, its predominant religion is Islam, its architecture is a mixture of Dutch colonial and petrodollar kitsch, its middle class is Chinese, and its lingua franca is Bahasa Indonesia. Its ancient monuments were built to both Buddhist and Hindu gods. Each and every one of these influences may be found in the many-splendored batik of Java's north coast.
Batik—Fabled Cloth of Java was conceived more than three decades ago. The north coast batik illustrated here comes from many collections, including my own. The book served as the catalogue for a major exhibit—of the same name—that was the brainchild of Mattiebelle Gittinger of the Textile Museum in Washington D.C. From the nation's capital the exhibit traveled to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, the Cooper-Hewitt in New York City and the Sewall Museum in Houston, introducing the wild and wondrous colors and forms of north coast batik to a wider audience.
That exhibit and that book were the impetus for curating my own collection of about 750 Southeast Asian textiles—complete with detailed descriptions and photographs—that I subsequently donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1996 the museum produced an impressive exhibit of my collection that also traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Fabric of Enchantment—Batik from the North Coast of Java, written by Harmen C. Veldhuisen and Rens Heringa, accompanied the exhibit.
Organizing and cataloguing materials for a book on batik is no easy task. Textiles are notoriously difficult to preserve, especially in the tropics. Mary Hunt Kahlenburg, a knowledgable textile connoisseur, at a recent Australian exhibit and roundtable called "Sari to Sarong," showed three woven, carbon-dated cloths from the 15th and early 16th centuries. Nevertheless, I personally found no existing batik created before 1800.
The first person to write about batik was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the energetic entrepreneur who founded Singapore—that vital link to the China trade. That was in 1817, after a five-year sojourn that established Raffles as an expert on the Indies. More than fifty years later, E. van Rijckovorsel, a Dutchman, spent four years in Java and collected batik that he donated to the Rotterdam Museum. By 1883 batik was shown in a colonial exhibit in Amsterdam, and fifteen years later another exhibit in The Hague spurred further interest. This show bore the curious title "Colonial Women's Labor" (Koloniale Frauenarbeit). A monograph by G. R Rouffaer and Dr. H. H. Juynboll appeared in 1900, and six years later the Dutch colonial government assigned S. M. Pleyte and J. E. Jasper to do a further study of folk art, including batik. These four men provided the cornerstone for all subsequent Javanese batik scholarship.
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