Bahasa I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih
The vast body of paintings completed by Balinese painter I Gusti Ayu Kadek (IGAK) Murniasih (Murni) before her untimely death in 2006 is unique in contemporary Indonesian art. Exploring themes of sex, sexuality and the body, her work tempers graphic representation with humour and whimsy to challenge social and sexual norms. Although referencing the Pengosekan style of Balinese painting—bold outlines on simplified, monochromatic forms—her often explicit subject matter and unusual colour palette go well beyond tradition.
The grotesque forms seen in many of Murni’s works, while often confronting in their graphic depiction of energetic co-joining and enormous sexual organs, are oddly charming and amusing. Distorted melanges of body parts, animals, appendages and accessories are painted with cartoon-like simplicity and clarity, smoothly coloured in candy hues within clear outlines. Murni’s imaginings lull the viewer into a charmed dream world, in which accepted social conventions, taboos and stereotypes of beauty are toppled and robbed of their power and dominance through playfulness rather than confrontation. The power of the giant penis is subverted in Untitled 2003 by its iridescent bubblegum colour and the sheer size of the appendage which seems to have pinned its owner to the floor. Similarly, the depiction of copulation is desexualised in My garden 3 2003 by the portrayal of female and male forms as slender, multi-eyed, wormlike monopods, their co-joined bodies gracefully wriggling like amoeba in a petri dish.
As noted by art historian Dr Wulan Dirgantoro, the disembodied and misshapen female bodies in Murni’s paintings cannot function as prescribed in Suharto’s New Order Indonesia, the period during which the artist lived and worked. Women’s roles in the state-defined Five Duties of Women (Panca Dharma Wanita) were based on traditional notions of womanhood centred on family and motherhood, and were restricted to the domestic sphere. In contrast, the metamorphosed bodies depicted in Berpesta di Bangkok (Party in Bangkok) 2003 and Kebayangin 2002 are unpredictable, extraordinary and free, ripe with possibilities and defiantly existing outside the domestic realm.
Murni’s luminous paintings repeatedly challenge the viewer with imagined prospects of alternate existences, ways of seeing and ways of being, her humorous and provocative images consistent in their intent to playfully subvert entrenched orthodoxies.
Carol Cains
