With more contemporary Balinese artists — most notably I Nyoman Masriadi — rebellion is overt: a radical departure from the quixoticism imposed on Balinese painting through decades of careful cultural cultivation. For them, defying tradition has paradoxically meant an exile into another “tradition” — Western painting.
What an idea — that Noah’s Ark, fleeing the noise and fractures of a confused world, sets sail from Bali, carrying the planet’s most extraordinary species across a backdrop of terraced rice hills, escaping before the storm arrives.
In Mencari Tempat Baru (Searching for a New Place), there is an exhilarating sense of a painter in the making: humour, defiance, tension, restlessness, the quest to find where one truly “belongs”, and the embrace of the absurd. In I Nyoman Arisana’s “flotilla of the imagination”, we find an almost perfect encapsulation of what breaking from tradition means for a creative restlessness already constrained by it.
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