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span class="inline inline-left">Indigenous: Arianna Toft created Batik Totem with motifs that harken to Native American imagery.Totems? Can do. Buffaloes? Just as well. Cowboys? Well, why not?

But an exhibition of American folk art it is not.

In fact, the images were depicted on cloth decorated using a traditional dying technique popular in a country thousands of miles away from the land of cowboys and Indians.

Enthusiasm among Indonesians to promote batik has been on the rise for the past few years, especially after UNESCO officially recognized it as an intangible cultural heritage back in 2009.

Since then, the country has seen various batik-related joys such as National Batik Day on Oct. 2, a plan to have a “Batik Village” at Borobudur in Central Java, and perhaps the public still remembers how former finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who is currently working for the World Bank, constantly made appearances wearing sassy outfits of batik cloth.

The Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC, in cooperation with consulate generals of Indonesia in the US, recently made their own effort to support batik, this time through the American Batik Design Competition that kicked off in April of last year.

The competition was one of the embassy’s cultural diplomacy efforts. Last November, it succeeded in organizing a record-breaking ensemble of angklung, a traditional bamboo musical instrument of West Java. The event involved people of various nationalities and was held at the National Mall near the White House.

Indonesian Ambassador to the US Dino Patti Jalal said the embassy is also preparing for a reality show involving dangdut music, considered an Indonesian original. The show will involve Indonesian dangdut singers visiting the states to perform in front of people who have likely never heard the music before.

According to Dino, the batik competition, aside from being a method of “soft” diplomacy, was also an effective way to internationalize batik.

“It seems that all this time [the effort to] promote batik has been too defensive and protective, when in fact the process has to be tolerant. It has to be a process in which people can place our culture in the context of their own … that is the background of the American Batik Design Competition,” he said last week in Jakarta.

What the embassy received in the form of submissions, were, happily enough, mostly beautiful designs, he added. The committee received around 100 submissions from the contestants, who had to be American and over 16 years old, and a final nine were selected as the first, second and third place winners.

Unity: Elizabeth Urabe poses with her prize-winning batik design filled with color and vibrancy.Those nine designs, which then materialized into actual batik cloth from their digital formats by the Brahma Tirta Sari Batik Studio in Yogyakarta, are on display from Feb. 22 to March 4 at Grand Indonesia in Central Jakarta, and from March 6 to 31 at the Jakarta Textile Museum in West Jakarta.

“We emphasized not only the patterns of the batik but also the stories [behind the designs],” Dino said.

For Elizabeth R Urabe, the artist who bagged one of the first place awards, the message behind her design, called Divine Unity, was likely love.

“The title ‘Divine Unity’ is here to remind us that we are different people, different countries, different languages but we all have one heart and … we are all here to remember how to love each other,” she said.

Urabe, who is from Ash Fork, Arizona, said the captivating element of batik lies in its marriage of “external beauty and internal power”.

Kelly Cobb, a designer and lecturer from Philadelphia who also received a first place award, mixed high-tech and aesthetics in her design, which includes QR codes.  The codes, when scanned using a mobile device scanner, serve as a gateway to a website describing batik, Indonesia and her art.

“It’s a page that talks about batik. It’s a page that talks about Indonesia. So someone in the US could scan this batik and learn about batik,” she said.

Cobb said that while some Americans might be familiar with batik, they have still yet to understand the complexity of the art.

“I really want to come back here and work with people who do batik … I would need to come back and stay for three months to really work hard every day to make a complex textile,” she said.

Another first place winner, Joanne Gigliotti, inserted symbols in her design called Sun Rises from the East and Lights the West that, according to her, correspond to values such as entrepreneurialism, innovation and freedom. Among those symbols are bees, scales and an airplane.

Gigliotti said she has been familiar with batik since her days as an undergraduate at Carnagie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her works include batik tile designs.

“The influence of the East on the West is as strong and beneficial to all of us as the sun, shown rising and reflected in the ocean we share,” the explanation for her design said.

Nia Fliam from the Brahma Tirta Sari studio said that the studio had trouble creating one of the finalists’ designs due to it using a particularly powerful symbol. “We were baffled, why did it fail over and over again. We finally had to hold a ceremony [to make it],” she said.

Fliam added that all the displayed works were “100 percent batik” because the production process still involves the usage of lilin (wax). The patterns could vary as long as the production included wax.

“But if we want to talk about modern batik, traditional batik, that’s another story. It doesn’t touch the subject of the definition of batik,” she said.

Roaming: Jennifer Doheny created this batik featuring buffalo for the American Design Batik Competition.Designer Tuty Cholid,  who was one of the competition’s jury members, said entries that featured distinctively Indonesian designs were, in fact, dropped from the judging process because the purpose was to look for designs with an American touch.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in September last year that batik sales in Indonesia had reached Rp 3.9 trillion (US$425 million) in 2010, increasing from Rp 2.5 trillion in 2006. The value of batik exports increased from $14.3 million in 2006 to $22.3 million in 2010.

Thus, he said, batik holds potential to boost the local economy.

Fliam mentioned the art’s other charm. “What is interesting from batik is that it has magic … it has a mystery. For instance, when we create [a new batik] we never know whether it will turn out good. Sometimes we are disappointed, and sometimes we are surprised … The batik has a deep concept and it is addictive,” she said.

— Photos by
JP/Wendra Ajistyatama