T

ourists take pictures of historic landmarks and poets pen lyrical ballads of majestic landscapes to immortalize their encounters with new, foreign countries.

Japanese-born artist Rie Mandala has a rather less obvious way of commemorating those encounters: She takes a shred of paper or fabric, found discarded in the alleys or sidewalks of those foreign lands, and uses it to create beautiful pieces of art.

Mandala describes her creative process as "a transformation of the materials that would have been otherwise forgotten". To some extent, that process underlines her refusal to forget. It is her deliberate and conscious effort to remember the places she has visited and the cultures she has encountered and embraced.

Her art works, therefore, are the aesthetic remembrances of her nomadic heart. They serve as a collection of personal notes as well as a public invitation that beckons others to see the world through Rie Mandala's eyes.

Her solo exhibit "Wandering Ripples" is an invitation that is too difficult to pass up. The array of some 20 pieces speaks highly of her skills in manipulating colors and compositions. The rich textures and overlapping shades enrich the simple shapes of circles, half-circles and arched lines that frequently appear in her works.

To Mandala, each new country is a new body of water and her ensuing encounter with it creates a new ripple. In a note hung on a wall of the exhibit, the artists sums up her aesthetic credo in two brief paragraphs.

"Leaving my country where I grew up and hopping from water to water. Mixing the cultures with my own and concentrating the elements with pure water," she writes.

"At this period of my life, I am going through many big doors that are showing up without notice. How I open these doors and appreciate the worlds within is stamped directly on the art pieces which are created with found materials from each ripple."

Beside the note is her work Wandering Ripples. First sketched in India, the piece was completed in Bali in 2009 and created using found paper, rice paper and kimono fabric. The materials used and the process involved are an obvious testament to her aesthetic credo.

Born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1978, Rie Mandala studied design at Okinawa University. She first visited Bali in 1999 and instantly fell in love with the island. She eventually lived in Indonesia for a few years, first moving to Ubud in 2001, then Yogyakarta, where she enrolled at the Indonesia Arts Institute.

Mandala's preferred medium is collage, using paper and materials she collects on her travels, particularly printed matter. She has exhibited her works in 15 solo and group exhibitions in Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Indonesia and the US.

In her current exhibit, the pieces were made using the paper and fabric she found during her journeys in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Canada and India.

She mixes these objects from foreign lands with kimono fabric and traditional patterns of her native Japan, a conscious act of constructing an uninterrupted line of memory that connects her nomadic present with her deeply entrenched Japanese identity.

This act finds its most obvious manifestation in her work An Old Memory, a piece she created in 2007 in Kyoto and made using rice paper, found paper, batik and kimono fabric.

The figure of a little girl, Japanese kanji characters and ornamental seals, the pieces of batik that divide the space, the dragonfly and the silver vine flowers work in unison to narrate a story about a girl who left her native culture to explore other cultures. The dragonfly immediately evokes an image of Rie Mandala as she goes "hopping from water to water". The silver vine flowers, according to the artist, are called matatabi in Japanese, a word that also literally means "travel again".

The exhibit, which also features several woodblock print, is held at Alila Ubud, a tranquil and secluded hillside retreat that sits high up on the edge of the rich green Ayung River valley in Bali's central foothills, only a few minutes' drive from Ubud, the island's artistic center.