I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (1966–2006)

This essay is part of Is it Morning for You Yet? 58th Carnegie International.

In 1966, the year the artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (Murni) was born in Bali, Suharto came to power following political maneuvers to oust Indonesia’s independence leader Sukarno. President Suharto coined his thirty-year rule the “New Order,” as opposed to Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy.” In an effort to sustain political stability and economic growth after the purge of communists in 1965, Suharto’s regime evolved into a hierarchical affair, characterized by tight centralized control, including censorship and the banning of political organizations. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s long-term authoritarian regime, Murni developed a bold and distinctive corpus of paintings that manifested her own story and rebelled against the repressive gender and cultural norms that shaped life in the New Order era.

Over the course of Murni’s career, she produced numerous of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. The subject matter ranges from observations of daily life to meditations on violence and sex that can be traced back to her traumatic childhood experiences. This potent combination is evidenced in her distinctive style of painting, with graphic sexual themes, delivered in bright colors and simplified forms, that are regarded as a celebration of female desire as well as an expression of deep personal trauma. 

When she was still young, Murni’s family moved to South Sulawesi as part of the government’s Transmigration Program, initiated by the Dutch colonial government in the early nineteenth century and later continued under Suharto’s New Order. The program was designed to relieve population pressure and secure economic development in the outer islands, as well as to increase cultural assimilation and political integration with the aim of developing a single national identity.

With a childhood marked by poverty and pain, Murni left her family at the age of ten and spent her adolescence as a domestic worker for a Chinese-Indonesian family, following them to Jakarta. In 1987, Murni returned to Bali, where she married a man she met while working in a jewelry factory. She soon ended what was an abusive marriage and moved to Ubud, where she learned the Pengosekan style of painting from the artist I Dewa Putu Mokoh and began a whole new chapter of her life as an artist.

Pengosekan is a village in the south of Ubud, an important town for medicinal herbs and plants in the late nineteenth century that later became the cultural center of Bali when tourism developed and international artists began to arrive. In the 1960s and 1970s, many men in the village became painters as a way of joining the booming arts economy. They developed a unique style featuring a pale, earthy palette and figures rendered in flat perspective with thick black outlines. Departing from the typical Pengosekan paintings favored by Western tourists, Murni forged her own aesthetic, deploying brighter colors and depicting simplified subjects against plain backgrounds.

Murni’s work not only expressed her painful struggles within a repressive patriarchal society but also featured bold depictions of sensual experience of sexual desire, often depicting women with their heads cut off by the frame, rendering them anonymous. Figures are constantly morphing into various objects, such as legs that turn into a pair of high-heeled shoes. Exaggerated and disproportionate body parts are fused with half-animal, half-object hybrids. Though some of these paintings are in an elongated vertical format (two meters high by a half meter wide) that evokes sacred or visionary art, her depictions of a tall, humanoid female figure in pastel colors are less about conveying the aura of sacred icons than connoting the erotic and emphasizing disorder. Tsunami Disaster (2004), for example, which she painted after the devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that struck the region of Southeast Asia, combines reference to an Egyptian goddess figure and her own high-heeled shoes with a giant linga, which represents the out-of-control ejaculation of a divine spirit.

Another shamanistic motif is the artist’s communion with animals and other nonhuman creatures in a various mind states and situations. Murni’s paintings are often full of strange figures, and these images are narratives captured from her dreams and subconscious. Elements of Balinese wood carving can be seen in some of her works, particularly in paintings where she presents herself as an animal (a cat or a dragon) or as a human morphing into an animal.

Murni’s positive depiction of female and male genitalia can be seen as a liberation from cultural trappings, including the internalization of emotional impulse. It opens an essential reading that glorifies feminine power and offers a forceful statement about women’s ownership of their body and spirit. But the work contains both pleasure and pain. In addition to the feminist perspective that celebrates women’s full agency of themselves, Murni’s paintings communicate and resonate with the trauma experienced in daily activities, especially for people of her generation living under the New Order regime.

Over the past several years, Murni’s work has started to receive greater attention from international art institutions as well as the contemporary art market in Southeast Asia. Beyond the success attached to the work’s commercial value, it is imperative to remember the legacy of Murni’s art. Whether speaking from her personal trauma or addressing a larger collective experience, her work reveals the social violence and hypocrisy that serve to repress innately natural connections to a wide range of pleasurable relations. She opened up the ideas of beauty and truth, of inclusiveness and the interwoven associations of all life-forms and all layers of living experiences. She demonstrated tremendous courage by taking heroic stands against patriarchy, rendering a powerful feminist intervention into the politics of trauma, its representations, and the production of cultural memory and identity. She refused to surrender her agency while seeking to heal by regaining control of her body. Murni’s work, rooted in her life, unveiled its capacity to extend beyond her life—connecting to the struggles and strengths of those who transcend her place and time.