By Jean Couteau
In the Indonesian cultural world, there are (too) few things to remind us the country is not simply an Asian country, but also one in the Pacific.
Indeed, even though Indonesia shares common cultural ground with states in the Pacific, and even though Eastern Indonesia is doubtless closer — ethnically and linguistically — to the Pacific than to mainland Asia, few people in Indonesia are ready to define their country as a link, actually as “the” link, between Asia and the Pacific.
By a twist of fate, one of the main institutions linking Indonesia to both Asia and the Pacific is not the brain child of an Indonesian, but a Frenchman, Philippe Augier.
The former head of an international catering company with branches from China to Timor Leste, Philippe naturally “saw’’ the link that so many missed.
Hence, his fortune made in the catering business, he decided to set up the Pasifika Museum, now standing in Nusa Dua, Bali, an island whose culture combines open air temples, like in the traditional religions of the Pacific; Hinduism, a religion originating in India, and cult of ancestors very similar to that found throughout Eastern Asia. Bali is indeed a jewel of cultural syncretism.
Yet, even though the island was so obviously the ideal place to set up a museum symbolizing the link(s) between Asia and the Pacific, the Pasifika “museum” idea was a totally new concept not easily accepted.
Museums in Bali have all been established with a single purpose: to enhance the image of Bali to the eyes of its visitors, as if museums were only meant for foreigners to get to know Bali, and not for the Balinese and Indonesians to discover about Asia and the Pacific.
Well-travelled Philippe intuitively understood the role he could play. He had a big collection of art from Asia and the Pacific.
Through the museum, he would exhibit this collection, as well as loans from other collectors, so that Balinese and Indonesians in general would be able to access new and different kind of knowledge about their Asian partners as well as their Polynesian and Melanesian cousins.
Imagine a French businessman turned art collector, wanting to set up a museum in which would co-exist art from and about Asia, the Pacific and Indonesia!! It sounds surreal, like a post-modern dream of cultural co-existence and cultural complementarity! But this dream has now for four years become reality.
Not everyone is happy about it, of course. Especially when politics are involved. Apart from the Pacific collection, difficult to date, most of the works are 20th century paintings made by European travelling painters through Asian and Southeast Asian countries then under the yoke of Western colonization. The most sensitive period of Asian history. Yes, it is a historical fact. Traditional cultures of Asia were then quickly disintegrating under the dual thrust of foreign occupation and capitalistic modernization.
Local Asian artists usually did not have the material tools to highlight in their artworks what was happening to them, a transformation of their cultural paradigms. It was European artists, often in ideological connivance with colonial powers, who painted the changing societies they were “discovering”.
Of course, their art had an Orientalist flavor: it was a Westerner’s vision, which objectified non-European societies on the basis of their own Western assumptions. European painters documented not only historical monuments they had recently re-discovered, the Borobudur, Angkor, but daily life scenes and bodily behaviors typical of Asia in a wide range of styles and attitudes ranging from the academic to the modern, and from the exotic to the personal.
What they made was nevertheless “art” that interpreted Asian reality — or better realities — in heretofore unknown ways. And, anyway, the Orientalist epithet one might attach to these works does not lessen their legitimacy as art, and the fact that some are true masterpieces.
So for whoever wishes to get an artistic representation of Asian societies in the 20th century, a visit of the Pasifika Museum in Bali is a must.
It provides interesting, and little known visual perspectives on Asian societies at a key historical period.
An interesting aspect in the painting department of the Museum is its classification of artists by their country of origin. So there are Dutch, Italian and French rooms in which one can see at work the “national spirit” of the artists. One notices in particular the more daring spirit of the French and cultural neighbors — the Belgian Le Mayeur and the Swiss Theo Meier in particular — than of the Italians and others.
In the early 20th century, the wind of modernism was indeed blowing stronger in France than anywhere else.
Not to be missed too is the big room holding the Pacific collection, with pieces from all over Polynesia and Melanesia. The collection, on loan, is huge, probably the richest in Asia, with hundreds of pieces on show. There are few explanations on the historical and anthropological background, though. Is it going to be Philippe’s next task, hopefully.
Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com
