Folk arts

The arts of many regions in Southeast Asia remained either untouched or only slightly influenced by the Indianized arts of other regions. Such influence is found especially in regions where the gold trade flourished. In Sarawak (Bonkisam), for example, the remains of buildings similar to late Vajrayana east Javanese candis have been discovered. Among a few people—e.g., the Hmong of highland Vietnam—vestiges of Indian erotic temple imagery were adapted to local fertility ceremonies, and most of the religious ideas of the region showed at least faint traces of Indian influence.

Save for the megaliths and Dong Son bronzes, most of the known folk art objects are relatively recent, although their inspiration and types belong to traditions far older and geographically more far-reaching than the Indianized traditions.

The two main non-Indian art styles in the whole region have been provisionally named the “monumental” and the “ornamental-fanciful.” They coexist virtually everywhere, though they probably represent two evolutionary phases. The principal manifestations of the monumental style are the megalithic monuments, although there is great variety among the megalithic customs of the many different populations in Sumatra, Laos, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. The influence of the ornamental-fanciful style, which is characterized especially by the scrolled spiral, insinuates itself even into many of the decorative arts, particularly in the curvilinear inflection given to ornamental motives in the major Indianizing styles.

The link between the two styles is probably the ubiquitous squatting ancestor figure, cocked knees supporting elbows, carved in soft wood or woven in cane or fibre. These figures may be either male or female. From about the 19th century, under special social circumstances, very large wooden versions of the figure were used as substitutes for more conventional, standing megalithic ancestral monuments (Sumatra and Sabah). The custom is probably an old one. There can be little doubt, for example, that the Theravada Buddhist images of Burma, Thailand, and Laos were accepted as special modifications of the ancestor image. The transition from revering numinous ancestor images whose identity had been forgotten to worshipping an Indianizing icon was easy for the native populations.

The complex significance of the original squatting ancestor figure enabled it to be used in a variety of contexts. It might have combined associations of the fetus, the fetal burial position, and female birth and intercourse positions, as well as a ceremonial posture assumed by the living. It came to be used primarily in wooden sculpture on all scales, but also in woven textiles (e.g., Iban), to represent the continuing power informing human existence, both in the purely ancestral sense of family continuity and identity and in the sense of the fertility of the land. Its earliest recorded appearance may be on Chinese Yangshao painted pottery (c. 2000 bce), but it appears in essentially the same form over a range of territory including Sumatra, Nias and Sunda islands, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and out into northern Australia and Melanesia. It may be used purely as an ancestral image in a family shrine house or as a motif added to any one of a variety of implements to potentiate them—for example, large bowls (Sumatra), kris or sword handles (Java, Sumatra, and Borneo), spoons (Timor and the Philippines), musical instruments (Borneo), and magicians’ staves (Borneo).

The treatment of such figures may be invested with more or fewer of the characteristics of the ornamental-fanciful style in those regions where this style prevails—e.g., Batak, Dayak. There are also special versions of the squatting figure that seem to belong especially to important magical crafts, such as the Javanese kris handle, on which miniature carvings can give an extraordinarily monumental effect. Sumatran Dayak hereditary magical staves may be carved with a “tower” or “tree” of such ancestor figures. On Nias, for example, along with the squatting figure, a standing figure in the bent-knee posture common in Polynesia also appears as a variant. In the Philippines similar variants are sometimes interpreted as vestiges from a remote Indian mythology, adopted probably for the sake of their cultural prestige. In southern Borneo the figure appears carved in the full round and as a pattern for woven textiles. It often has a protruding tongue and sometimes antlers—a combined motif known in the Changsha art of southern China (c. 300 bce). Antlers also appear on certain Sumatran knife hilt figures. A variety of designs, some of them abstract, are based on this figure. Among the Jarai of Vietnam, for example, a pattern of lozenges represents an abstraction from a group of these figures. Especially in the textiles of Sumba and other Indonesian islands, similar patterns, often referred to as decorated triangles, represent the same phenomenon. When, as in textiles, the anthropomorphic reference of the abstract pattern is lost, the male genitals may remain to assert the ancestor significance.

The association between the squatting figure and the widely practiced cult of the skull is manifested in the combined cult of ancestors, headhunting, and head worship. Among the Wa of Burma, for example, the squatting figure in a lozenge abstraction decorates the chests in which the severed heads of enemies are stored. Virtually everywhere among the early farmers of Southeast Asia, such heads were regarded as repositories of great spiritual power. The cult of the skull has produced a version of the squatting figure that is commonly known by the Indonesian word korvar. It is a figure with an ancestral skull in place of a carved head. Such figures are especially common in the more easterly island cultures. The ghostly power of the deceased ancestor can thus become present and available to the descendants—to give oracular advice, for example. A related idea is incorporated in the masks used in a wide variety of rituals and dance-dramas throughout Southeast Asia—for example, among the Batak of Sumatra and the Dayak of Borneo, where especially fine examples are made. There can be little doubt that the same idea (blended with imagery from the imported Hindu epics) underlies the range of elaborate masks that were once used in the Javanese and now can be seen in the Balinese wayang dances. It is possible that the flame skull protuberances and winglike flanges ornamenting the head in so much of the Buddhist art produced in Burma and Thailand reflect a persistent but submerged interest in the cult of the skull.

Another major motif is the snake, which (even in areas where direct Indianizing influence was not strong) is frequently combined with imagery derived from the cult of the powerful, magical Hindu naga. Often many-headed, this serpent is the patron and guardian of water and treasure, both material and spiritual. The snake motif has also been blended with images of the Chinese dragon, going back perhaps to Chinese Han ornamental designs. Outstanding examples are found on the elaborate relief-carved doors of Sumatran Batak houses; “flying” roof finials in many parts of Indonesia; and in much Borneo Dayak ornament, from tattoos to carved bamboos and bronze body ornaments. The snake is the magico-mythical creature that gives both its bodily shape (either straight or undulant) and its metaphysical power to the kris. Distributed from Malacca to Celebes, these swords (the earliest known dated 1342) reached their high point of artistic development in Java. A variety of other motifs originating on the mainland of Asia is found in many of the surviving folk arts of Indonesia. Among them are the “man in the embrace of an animal” (Dayak kris handles) and animals “stacked” one above the other (Timor and Indonesia).

The ornamental-fantastic style

The styles in which these variations on basic motifs are carried out vary principally according to the preponderance of the sinuous curves and spirals of the ornamental-fantastic style. This style serves as the basis for decoration and as a method of artistic phrasing. It may have made its way into Southeast Asia as late as the 1st millennium bce, being formally related to the spirals used in Chinese Neolithic, Shang, and Zhou bronze art. Probably connoting spirituality, the spiral imagery appears in Southeast Asian magical art at all levels, from the textiles of Java and the incised bamboo implements or carved doors of Dayak Borneo to the ornament on the costumes of sculptured dancers or deities at every major city site. Given a fiery upward inflection, it appears in the finials on major Indianized stone architecture and on the carved wooden gables of Burmese and Thai Buddhist halls. There is not always complete stylistic consistency within any one cultural group. For example, the fantastic snake-dragon creatures carved in deep relief on the house doors of the Batak may be extravagantly sinuous, with many spirals, while their figure sculpture adheres to the sterner plastic idiom, virtually without any linear sinuosity. Among the Dayak of Borneo the fantastic style may be confined entirely to surface ornament. On Indonesian islands, ancestral figures may be relatively static and foursquare, while the decorative carving and textiles may display considerable linear fantasy. A special version of the ornamental-fantastic style characterizes the surviving Indianized arts of Bali and Java, intruding even into sculptural inventions derived from strongly three-dimensional medieval Indianizing patterns. Thus, the decoration on the wayang cutout leather puppets, with its somewhat stereotyped curlicues, has proliferated at the expense of the three-dimensional sense (see above Indonesia). Balinese wayang masks may be carved entirely out of curling surfaces and completed in paint with sinuous eyebrows and mustaches. In many parts of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Sumatra, and Indonesia, designs originally based upon Indian flowering-scroll patterns can be found in architecture, textiles, theatre costumes, musical instruments, and wooden utensils, all efflorescing with extravagant curling ornament. In its most serious manifestations this kind of ornament displays substantial artistic invention, with carefully varied, asymmetrical, complementary, and counterchanged curves.