Bali
The rajas of eastern Java retreated before the Muslim invaders during the 16th century and departed to the island of Bali, where they remained. The old Javanese Indianized culture they brought with them survived and combined with animist folk elements. In Bali that culture bred a widespread popular art. There are many hundreds of temples in Bali of varying age. Each family group has its own temple, dedicated to the ancestors; each village, too, has its temple, in which special attention is paid to a rich fertility goddess identified with the ancient Indian goddess of bounty, Shri. Special temples dedicated to the goddess of death stand near the cremation ground. There are numerous major temples—many associated with volcanic peaks—dedicated to different deities and spirits; they range in size and importance from Besakih on Mount Agung (where a megalith is incorporated as a phallic Shiva-emblem) to Panataram Sasih of Pedjeng (where the bronze drum called “the Moon of Bali” is preserved).
Balinese temples are conceived as multiple courts raised on terraces. The tall stone or brick and plaster gates are shaped like a candi-tower split down the centre. They are usually encrusted with ornament based upon deep multiple curlicues interspersed with simplified two-dimensional relief figure sculpture. Fantastic three-dimensional guardians sometimes stand at the foot of the access staircase. Beyond the gates are one or two courts within which various ceremonies (including sacrifices and cockfights) may take place. The rearmost court backs onto the mountain, whence spirits descend temporarily when invoked. The court has no icons; at most, there is a seat for invisible deities. The structures in the court, mostly of wood and thatch, may be of many stories. (Such structures are called merus.) Sometimes the treasuries are ornamented with carving, and a few older stone meru towers in local shrines are carved with mythological figures.
Temple ceremonials, especially the cremation of distinguished people, evoked elaborate ritual art objects in precious metals as well as in wood or fabric. All were characterized by exuberant and repetitive curvilinear floral ornament and by figures based on Indian legend, especially the Ramayana and parts of the Mahabharata. In the 21st-century villages, music, dance, sculpture, and painting are focused on the shrines and are practiced with an intensity unknown elsewhere in the world. Art is woven intimately into the life of the people. The masks carved of wood for the dances are specially refined, sometimes ornate versions of the masks used in the animist rituals of other Southeast Asian peoples.
Historically, painting was less important in Bali than music, dance, drama, architecture, and sculpture. The older tradition of painting for temples, which had almost died out by the 1930s, survived as the Kamasan school. Other Balinese painting traditions included palm leaf manuscripts (lontar) and cloth hangings, painted mostly for wayang kulit, puppet plays held within the temple enclosure. The painter I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, who during his very long career also practiced architecture and sculpting, created original works from traditional subject matter.
In 1936 Russian-born German painter Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet founded the Pita Maha (“Great Shining”) cooperative. Bonnet, in particular, guided and developed artists, introducing them to new materials, encouraging new subject matter, and promoting their works in the West. The Pita Maha was the catalyst for the establishment of a number of painters’ groups, such as the Bantuan painters movement, in the 1940s and ’50s. The majority of works dating from this period were painted by foreigners, such as Willem Gerard Hofker (Dutch), Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès (Belgian), Miguel Covarrubias (Mexican), Romualdo Locatelli (Italian), and Theo Meier (Swiss). Their romantic subjects depicted only certain elements of Balinese life, presenting Westerners a misleading representation. The Western view came to inform local artists and was a factor limiting their artistic interpretations. The cousins Anak Agung Gede Soberat and Anak Agung Gede Meregeg were early members of the Pita Maha, and their enchanting landscapes were much influenced by Spies’s work. Bonnet’s paintings included elongated figures and depictions of Balinese music-making, dance, and literary themes. These subjects continued to influence local artists into the 21st century. Bantuan painters, such as Ida Bagus Made Wija and I Wayan Bendi, depicted human forms in a highly animated setting. In 1956 Dutch artist Arie Smit went to Bali, where he developed and promoted the Penestanan group of young artists. Since the 1970s, artists such as I Gusti Nyoman Nodia, Nyoman Erawan, and I Ketut Budiana created works embracing traditional themes.
Java: 20th and 21st centuries
The 19th-century Javanese artist Raden Saleh, although acclaimed as the first Indonesian painter, had little influence on the art that came after. The Western-style painting that followed was called Mooie Indie (“Beautiful Indies”). This style was characterized by naturalistic landscapes and portraiture, and it came to dominate modern Indonesian art during the first decades of the 20th century. In the late 1930s the growing nationalist debate led artists to challenge the traditional aesthetics of the Mooie Indie School. In 1938 Agus Djaya and S. Sudjojono founded the Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar (Union of Indonesian Painters), which encouraged artists to experiment stylistically and to question the representation of Indonesian identity and social concerns.
After Java achieved independence from the Dutch (1949), two art schools emerged, whose differing styles and art theories helped to polarize modern art into the 1960s. The fine arts faculty at Bandung Institute of Technology espoused aesthetic formalism and abstraction, believing that art should be pursued for its own sake, but in Yogyakarta the Indonesian Academy of Fine Art encouraged artists to work in a more Social Realist style, advocating the active role of arts in the nationalist struggle. Artists working outside this academic system—most of whom were in the Yogyakarta area—formed themselves into small groups (sanggar) based on the master-student tradition. They became the primary organizers of group exhibitions before the emergence of commercial galleries in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
During the Sukarno years (1945–65) artists’ guilds and organizations were created. They were dominated by the Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat; Lekra), the cultural arm of the Indonesian communist party. Lekra’s cultural aims, while initially progressive, became oppressive, rejecting and suppressing any art that did not fit with its Social Realist style. Contemporary with Sudjojono and also depicting social themes were the painters Affandi and Hendra Gunawan. Affandi, the first Southeast Asian artist to achieve a worldwide reputation, is considered the father of modern painting in Indonesia. His Expressionist style of portraiture is characterized by a thick impasto built up of paint applied with his fingers. Gunawan painted scenes of everyday life using swirling brushstrokes, brilliant hues, and elongated figures in sensual poses.
In the mid-1970s the New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru) was established by a group of young conceptual artists to challenge the established order and the conservatism of older artists. This led the way in the 1980s and ’90s to an internationalization of Indonesian art with photorealism, Islamic painting, activist art, installation, and performance art, all marked by greater regional engagement.
Singapore and Malaysia: 20th and 21st centuries
Despite Britain’s gradual colonization of Malaysia in the 18th and 19th centuries, 19th-century British landscape conventions had only a limited impact on the country’s artists and was largely ignored by the chroniclers of modern Malaysian art history. Between 1920 and 1939 in Penang, such artists as Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff, and Chuah Thean Teng mainly produced representational works interpreting national identity. At the end of World War II, the Nanyang School, based in Singapore, made a conscious effort to fuse Western techniques with Eastern aesthetic principles. Well known among this group are Georgette Chen, Cheong Soo Pieng, and Lim Yew Kuan.
Following Malaysian independence (1963), artists principally expressed their newfound freedom with landscapes. Malay artists such as Ariff set about developing a repertoire of imagery embodying ideal worlds in which nature and humans are unified, while Chinese artists such as Teng attempted to convey a more cosmopolitan impression of the region using traditional batik techniques. In the late 1950s and ’60s the return of the first generation of artists who had trained overseas led to the development of a distinctly Malaysian aesthetic that encapsulated inherited tradition with a cosmopolitan appeal. Later acknowledged as the founding fathers of Malaysian Abstract Espressionism, this group included Latiff Mohidin, Syed Ahmad Jamal, Jolly Koh, Ibrahim Hussein, Joseph Tan, and Yeoh Jin Leng. The works of these artists experimented with geometric lines and symmetry representative of classical Islamic art methods. Their efforts and approaches came to fuel a considerable debate about Malaysian national and Islamic identity and the future direction of contemporary art. A dominant trend to emerge was the exploration of Islamic consciousness, signaling a reexamination of medium and representation.
The Philippines
The population of this island group contains a number of different ethnic strata, the oldest of which shares in the general folk culture and its associated folk arts of the islands of Southeast Asia (see above Indonesia), with an emphasis on geometric simplification. An element in the Tagalog (a people of central Luzon) is perhaps descended from the oldest level of immigrants with a Paleolithic background. The Moro are Muslims who converted to Islam during the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 21st century they produced a decorative art in which old Muslim geometric motifs were combined with strong Chinese decorative influences (from Song times, when Chinese ceramics and textiles were imported). The decoration is applied primarily to textiles, weapons, and containers to hold the betel nuts that are chewed throughout Southeast Asia. The traditional motifs (okir) used in wood carving by the Maranao peoples on Mindanao were replicated in the 20th and 21st centuries in their brass wares. The Maranao were the largest manufacturers of brass wares, an art that can be traced to early Chinese contacts before the arrival of the Spanish.
The most important departure in Philippine art was the result of the Spanish conquest of 1571. Thereafter, the bishopric of Manila and all of Luzon became the focus for an elaborate development of Spanish colonial art, primarily devoted to the construction and decoration of Roman Catholic churches in the highly ornate and colourful colonial style. There is good colonial architecture on other islands, including Bohol and Cebu. A large quantity of religious sculpture of the canonical Christian subjects was imported from Mexico and from Spain itself. Sculptors and missionary painters also immigrated, and a powerful local school developed under the direct influence of the 17th-century Spanish artists Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Alonso Cano. Local arts were encouraged in 1785 by the remission of taxes for religious artists. Because of the close colonial ties, the stylistic developments corresponded substantially with those elsewhere in the Spanish empire, and European prints served as models for local artists. Of the major early churches for which this sculpture and painting was executed, only San Agustin (1599–1614), in Manila, still stood in the 21st century. It was designed by Fray Antonio de Herrera, son or nephew of the great Spanish architect Juan de Herrera. During the 19th century the Neo-Gothic style was imported, mainly through the Philippine architect Felipe Roxas, who had traveled in Europe and England. San Sebastian in Manila is a notable example of this style. The Spaniard Juan Hervas, Manila’s municipal architect from 1887 to 1893, favoured neo-Byzantine forms—e.g., Manila Cathedral (1878–79).
Until the 19th century the Spanish friars enforced strict supervision of artistic production and its use. By the mid-19th century a new elite economic and social class—the illustrados—emerged as the new patrons of the arts. This later led to more secular subjects, including portraiture and the unique letras y figuras—a style developed by José Honorato Lonzano, which combines ornamental figures forming the letters of the patron’s name with familial motifs and a personalized background landscape. Schools of fine art modeled on the European academies were set up from 1821. Throughout the 19th century, painters such as Simon Flores, Lorenzo Guerrero, Juan Luna, Felix Resurrección Hidalgo, Antonio Malantic, and Fabián de la Rosa secured fame and patronage with such popular subject matter as portraiture, genre, landscape, and still life.
At the end of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, the United States acquired the Philippines as a territory. Following two years of insurgency, the U.S. federal government sought to impose its authority through such efforts as remaking Manila, the country’s capital, according to Western ideals. It commissioned architect and city planner Daniel Burnham, but only some of his extensive plans were realized. With the end of World War II, the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed, but the war’s devastation required that Manila and other cities be rebuilt, virtually anew. The architects who set about the task, including Pablo Antonio, Carlos Arguelles, Cesar Concio, Juan Nakpil, and Leandro Locsin, embraced modern international styles combined with a Filipino aesthetic.
In 20th-century Philippine art, the influence of painter Fernando Cueto Amorsolo was immense. His romanticized scenes of Filipino landscape and rural life were so popular that they were copied by younger artists, giving rise to the so-called Amorsolo school. In the 1920s Victorio Edades, Galo Ocampo, and Carlos V. Francisco formed the Triumvirate group, which used modernist techniques and themes drawn from a Filipino cultural perspective. The Triumvirate’s staunch advocacy of modern art led to the formation of a core group of artists known as the Thirteen Moderns, whose adoption of abstract and Expressionist styles laid down the principles for those who followed. In sculpture, the classical and romantic style of Guillermo Tolentino runs antecedent to the Modernist agenda set by Napoleon Abueva, whose works have widespread international recognition—e.g., The Sculpture (1984) at the United Nations building in New York City.