My mother worked tirelessly to help revitalize the flagging Malaysian batik industry and to promote batik at home and abroad. My father, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Malaysia’s fifth prime minister, has since taken her place as patron, and together with our dedicated CEO, Leela Mohd Ali, and the entire team at Penyayang, we continue to strive for the noble work she began and to ensure her legacy.
In 2010, Penyayang celebrated its tenth anniversary and marked a significant milestone of its key cultural project, the ‘Malaysia Batik—Crafted for the World’ movement, the specific aims of which are outlined on page 76. In the intervening years, comprehensive phases were launched, each building on the previous year’s events, from the early phases of ‘Batik Extravaganza’ and ‘Sharing with the Nation’ to the current Phase 6 ‘Innovating the Industry’. Among the wide and exciting range of activities is an annual Batik Week, batik street carnivals, local and international roadshows, batik trade and craft promotions, fashion showcases (some in conjunction with foreign designers), batik bazaars, exhibitions and demonstrations, as well as workshops and seminars for people in the industry.
One of our greatest local successes has been the Piala Seri Endon (Seri Endon Trophy), an annual batik design competition in the areas of fashion, soft furnishing and handicraft, which has unleashed the enormous batik-making ingenuity of students, textile and fashion designers, artists and batik producers. The Galeri Seri Endon, set up in August 2007 to nurture batik talent, markets the products of several Piala Seri Endon prizewinners alongside those of established fashion designers working with batik fabrics. Penyayang also organizes the biennial Kuala Lumpur International Batik (KLIB) Convention and Exhibition, which brings together speakers and practitioners from around the world to share their knowledge and expertise. The World Batik Council sprang out of the 2005 KLIB, along with the Malaysian Batik Association, set up with the aim of putting the hard work of the ‘Malaysia Batik—Crafted for the World’ movement on a formal, long-term footing. The Batik Guild magazine, launched in 2004, serves as a platform for sharing information and engaging stakeholders surrounding Malaysian batik.
I believe that the years we have spent working for and with the batik fraternity, complementing the efforts of the Malaysian Handicraft Development Corporation (Kraftangan) and other government organizations as well as batik associations, have borne fruit. Batik sales have risen exponentially, there is much more optimism among producers, more Malaysians are wearing batik with pride and Malaysian batik has unquestionably stamped its mark internationally.
As innovative as our strategies and as ambitious as our programmes may have been, none of our work would have been possible, however, without the generous support of many sponsors, the judges of our annual batik competition, and everyone else involved in assisting the growth and expanding the profile, locally and globally, of Malaysia’s batik industry. To them and to my team at Penyayang, I give my heartfelt and enduring gratitude.
NORI ABDULLAH
Chairman, Yayasan Budi Penyayang Malaysia
Hand-drawn batik floral motif, Lizza Creations. Carved woodblock, Lembaga Muzium Negeri Terengganu.
the beauty of Malaysian batik
It has often been said that art and craft can reveal something of the history and character of a nation, and the craft and, more recently, art aspect of Malaysian batik—a generic term referring to a process of decorating and dyeing fabric by making use of a wax-resist technique—is no exception. The work of local batik designers and producers is highly original and adventurous, but at the same time rooted firmly in age-old traditions established as far away as East Turkestan and West Africa and as nearby as the island of Java in Indonesia. Centuries of maritime trade along the East–West ‘water silk route’ and the reciprocal exchange of goods and ideas from outside and within the area that came to be known as Southeast Asia have contributed to the techniques, pattern structures and motifs of the region’s handwoven and surface-decorated cloths.
Malaysia is a relatively young nation—independence was achieved only in 1957—and its batik industry is less than a century old. Its development in the east coast states of Kelantan and Terengganu in the 1930s was inextricably linked to local production of the batik sarong, the earliest and most enduring costume in the Malay World. Decoration was applied with wax from the metal block (cap), initially in imitation of imported sarongs from the north coast batik centres of Java but later with uniquely Malaysian motifs inspired predominantly by the natural world and in accordance with the Islamic preference for geometric and denaturalized stylization—the triangular pucuk rebung (bamboo shoot) motif on the kepala or main decorative head of the sarong, and stylized plant forms and meandering veins on the surrounding badan or body. Coloured hairlines, produced by cracking the wax, were a dominant feature from the start, as was the concept of ‘reversibility’—visibility of the design on both sides of the cloth. The advent of metal block-stamped yardage in the 1960s allowed batik to be tailored into items of clothing other than the traditional sarong.
Since the 1970s, with the enthusiastic adoption of the stylus or canting, batik making in Malaysia has become less a craft and more an art. The Malaysian definition of batik has also acquired a much larger meaning than the Javanese one, which is renowned for its masterful but laborious canting- drawn wax lines and dots on the sarong format. Lengths of batik are no longer simply made into sarongs in Malaysia. More often they are creations that display all the characteristics of works of art—originality of composition and design, effective use of colour, a high level of technical expertise and, above all, a flair for working in the medium of batik. Similarly, the old system of anonymous artisans is giving way before a new style and organization of the batik industry that encourages individual talent and promotes recognized batik designers and artists. The batik fashion designers and artists featured in this book are only a few of many. For every one that is highlighted there are several more that could have been. There is an enormous pool of creative and talented young people working in the medium of batik, all striving to imbue batik with a Malaysian identity while experimenting with new techniques, fabrics and patterns.
The tenacity of batik, of its ability to survive by adapting to new situations, is reflected in the way it has been successfully applied to home interiors and in the hospitality trade, though more through ‘accessories’ than upholstery. Batik painting has also come to take its place among the fine arts of Malaysia. The most significant diversification, however, has been into contemporary and couture fashion. Much of the impetus for this is due to the initiatives of the Yayasan Budi Penyayang in the first decade of the twenty-first century to revitalize Malaysia’s batik industry by focusing on the adaptation of batik to suit fashion needs and the use of high fashion as a tool for displaying the beauty of batik. Penyayang’s ‘Malaysia Batik—Crafted for the World’ movement, launched in September 2003, has done enormous service in augmenting the number of designers in the local fashion industry, many of whom have been ‘discovered’ during the annual competition for batik fashion design. These designers are finding handmade batik an exciting fabric to work with and a strong seller. Because they are willing to experiment—with fabrics, techniques, designs and colours, often incorporating other non-batik materials and embellishing their work to highlight motifs and add glamour—they are rapidly gaining a reputation for being bold and innovative. Several have made inroads on the international scene, while others have enjoyed prestigious collaborations with foreign design houses, launched their own fashion labels or opened boutiques. Labour-saving mechanized production of textiles carrying batik designs will always find a place in the market for mass-produced, low-cost clothing and items such as uniforms, but batik tulis (hand-waxed batik) and, to a lesser extent batik cap (wax-stamped batik), is here to stay for leisure, day and formal wear.
The beauty of Malaysia’s special brand of stylus batik (batik tulis) is apparent to all in its bolder, freer designs—striking abstracts and energetic floral forms—brighter palette and innovative colour combinations. But Malaysian batik is beautiful on other levels—as a promoter of Malaysian cultural and national identity, both locally and internationally, and as a unifier in a multiethnic