Susi Johnston Bali Blog

Our gallery of ancestral arts, ornament, weapons and textiles in Seminyak has been open for more than a year. Better late than never, at long last we have our website up. At present, there are 66 pieces from our inventory shown in the “collections” area of the site. We’ll be adding more material, and improving the site on an ongoing basis, so do bookmark it, and come back often to see what’s new. Expect refinements to design, additional functionality and fresh content during the weeks and months ahead. www.iconasianarts.com.

San Francisco must be the most enthusiastic city in the world when it comes to antique textiles, rugs and tribal arts. This week sees the soukification of the retro Motel Capri by the Antique Rug & Textile Art Association. While we are primarily lovers of flat textiles, and it’s a rug-heavy event (see snapshot from last year above), it’s still a must-go show. Read more…

With museum exhibitions and fairs all over the calendar, San Francisco has no “season” for tribal arts and textiles. The most notable fall fair  Tribal SF 2010 starts later this week. It’s organised by the local independent dealer’s association, SF Tribal, and kicks off with a champagne preview reception on October 15th. The venue for this year’s fair (their sixth), is Fort Mason on the bay. Very convenient. Some of our favourite dealers will be there, including Thomas Murray, Andres Moraga, and Joe Loux. That’s Tom’s stand from a previous show above. Gorgeous. For more information click the links herein, or email Andres Moraga at moraga@lmi.net.

August and September (and now even October) are the high season in Bali and it is always hectic. Parties. Gatherings. Visitors. Vernissages. Launches. Lunches. Dinners. And all manner of special events and festivals. The huge number of visitors, both those we know and those we don’t know, makes it impossible to keep to a schedule, which is something we can’t seem to do, even in the best of circumstances. The point is, I have a bajillion blog posts lying dormant in draft form, and it’s high time to get them online, finally.  We’ll begin where we left off, in July, following the fab Yak Awards bash on the 23rd. So don’t go away. The missing posts are coming your way post haste.

We’ve been applauding the Fowler Museum at UCLA for years. They’ve shown a keen understanding of Indonesian culture, and nobody beats the Fowler at curating and hanging a great show. Their shows always balance the aesthetic and the didactic in the best possible way. Now they’ve done it again, with Nini Towok’s Spinning Wheel, an exhibition of the traditional batik of Kerek, Java (above). Hats off, once again, to the museum’s curator of Asian and Pacific collections, Roy Hamilton. Read more…

Well gosh, with traffic already gridlocked and  infrastructure overloaded, it’s hard to feel warm and fuzzy about this new 5.2 hectare mega-development in Kuta spread along 250 meters of  beach. That said, the long-disused site where Kuta Beachwalk will be built has been like the missing front tooth of Kuta’s smile for over a decade. An eyesore, in other words, soon to be replaced with this diamond-studded 24K false tooth, or should we call it an implant? Read more…

San Francisco’s De Young Museum has just opened a splendid little exhibition of selections from their tremendous collection of world textiles, entitled To Dye For: A World Saturated in Color. It focuses on various techniques used around the world to imbue plain thread with pure colour, including tie-dye, ikat, and batik. A number of important Indonesian textiles are included in the exhibition, which runs until mid-January 2011. Sadly, the De Young’s website offers little in the way of imagery or information about the textiles in this show. The site is, overall, disappointing in comparison to the websites of other museums around the world. This seems especially peculiar given that the De Young is located in a city that’s famous for tech supremacy and creativity. Go figure.

The Yak Awards is a grand orgy of self-congratulatory silliness (see acrobats at the party spelling out YAK in bodies, above), and if you understand that from the get-go, you’ll be a fan of the Yak Awards, just like we are.  It’s a small-island phenomenon that’s basically a barrel of fun, except perhaps for those who take it too seriously. The Yak Magazine itself has a certain tongue-in-cheek quality, and never actually tries to sweep its spoofiness under the rug when guests arrive. That’s very postmodern of them, and we like it. It’s downright perverse, in fact. One gloriously puffy pundit who we all know and love (no names mentioned here) failed to see the inherent irony in The Yak, and got his knickers in a terrible twist about it from the first issue. Feathers flew. He and his band of merry men have boycotted Yak-shenanigans ever since.

But never mind, there were plenty of willing punters who stumped up a stack of rupiah to join in the scrum at the Yak Awards bash on the 23rd of last month, and probably just as many who waltzed in with VIP comp tickets and sashayed themselves stupid on lashings of free champagne upstairs in the VIP roof lounge, as we did. One thing nobody can deny about The Yak is it has plenty of friends, and it treats them well.

Perhaps that is how The Yak manages to pack its ever-inflating issues chock-full of high-value ads and an oddly appealing array of quirky editorial features, funky photographs and other fine foofaraw. The whole Yak universe has an irreverant edge, and so did the Yak Awards party this year, as always.

This year’s theme “Shanghai Chic” didn’t cull popularity points, as far as themes go (nevertheless some found it inspiring, see above). The fact is, no body but a youthful Chinese body looks up to snuff in a cheongsam. Period. Most non-Sino-specific women look absolutely appalling, and most did, on the night. Shanghai David Tang can take that and toss it with chopsticks in soy honey dressing, and then perhaps he will understand why his menswear sells so much better than his ladies.

Yours truly arrived from Brussels via Paris the day before the awards bash, and high-tailed it straight to Oka Diputra’s atelier in the “Ace Hardware Mall”. Oka’s recent catwalk collections have evoked Asian dolls of the evil animé genre; irresistible, adorable, and deadly, with lots of sharp angles to poke you in the eye. So naturally Oka’s was the go-to address for Yak Awards Shanghai Chic (the Yak principals themselves were resplendent in Oka, too, and I surreptitiously pawed their hastily altered dresses before they were bundled into brown paper packets for collection at Oka’s, see below). Read more…

Sandow Birk is one of the most interesting artists working (hard) in America. I began following his work at first because our friendship is a Bali bond. Then I  continued following because it’s impossible not to once you start. There’s a plethora of plots to follow in Sandow’s work, all of them with twists. He’s prolific, proficient, precocious, provocative, and still really young (meaning under 50). By way of introduction he’s done a critically acclaimed series of epic history paintings in the grand tradition entitled “The Great War of the Californias,” and a painted restaging of Dante’s Inferno set in LA today and worthy of a spectacularly staged full-on opera to the music of Lou Reed from his Metal Machine Music period. Sandow’s speciality is making deep irony look “fun”. Devilishly smart, in other words. Read more…

The Living Room balanced the effect of KuDeTa’s annual I’m an Angel party this year by hosting a I’m a Devil party on the same night, July 31st, the last day before Bali’s official party season begins. We chose to go to the devil, since KuDeTa parties these past five years have been too packed with people we’ve never seen in our lives and aren’t likely to see again.

Over at the devil-do, house DJ Mamsa was predictably adept with his perhaps-too-set set of underground hypnosis. When Living Room pilot Daniel Vanneque joined him in the cockpit, the flight was hijacked straight to hellfire. We had a devil of a time, in other words. Living Room copilot, Dada Morabia and his clever wife Gabrielle were there, and as ever, their warmth, hospitality, and downright wholesomeness kept things on the right side of the river Styx. The Living Room can be crazy, but it somehow manages to be “good crazy”. Dada and Daniel must be doing the right offerings.