Introduction: Of/Towards Balinese Aesthetic(s)
What do we mean when we speak of a Balinese aesthetic? To date, little has been endeavored to formulate aesthetic theories behind the principles that govern the arrangement and composition of Balinese art. Given both its syncretism and resistance to change, the art of Bali is typified by its reciprocal adaptation of Western forms and its openness to the international art market. However, the dynastic tendency of Balinese art coupled with its intimacy with religion and life have led to a sizeable resistance to any dramatic effacement of pre-colonial aesthetics even during Dutch colonization. It has taken a longer time for a non- traditional or ‘modern’ art to emerge in Bali as compared to Java[1], and even if one were to trace the aesthetic trajectory of Balinese art from the pre-colonial to the contemporary, its ritual roots which embody the power and complexities of indigenous beliefs would be immutably apparent. In other words, as far as colonial Balinese art in the early 20th-century is concerned, contradictions abound: emerging art styles that arose from Dutch colonial administration assimilated many foreign elements that were readily adopted by the Balinese, yet Westerners wanted to preserve a ‘purer’ Bali with its storied fables and ‘unspoiled’ landscapes[2]. Euphemistic labels of ‘naturalism’ rather than ‘Westernization’ were used, paintings during this time were judged based on a European anatomical and compositional principle rather than a conventionally Balinese one. Balinese artists under Western teachers had their works coloured in “to make [them] more marketable”[3], yet these same teachers began art schools and cultural guilds dedicated, at least in principle, to “combat [the] commercial degradation of [Balinese] art”[4] through a preservation and promulgation of a ‘traditional’ Balinese aesthetic. Historically, the study of Indonesian art history has been delineated on categorical terms that distinguished the boundaries that were constructed around painting (seni lukis), performing arts (seni pertunjukan), and Hindu-Javanese or Hindu-Balinese architecture[5]. Further distinctions were espoused between an art history of traditional Indonesia prior to the modern nationalist resurgence in the first half of the 20th-century and the emergence of a modern Indonesian art birthed out of the contradictions between conservative colonial perceptions and the influence of European realism[6]. In reality, however, these distinctions do not necessarily work in constructing an art history outside of a Euro-American framework. This is because although modern Indonesian art was privy to the changing international artistic landscape of the West, and certainly artists did respond by adopting similar aesthetic sensibilities to their work, the aesthetics of Balinese modern painting during the colonial period was a hybrid development between local and international paradigms.
Founded in 1936 by Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet as an association for artists, Pita Maha became a primary point of convergence between Western aesthetic sensibilities and Balinese artists. This paper examines the changes in Balinese aesthetics in the age of Dutch colonialism by bringing into focus the relationship between ‘coloniality’ and Balinese spirituality. The theoretical concepts of ‘otherness’ and ‘coloniality’ explicated by Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano and Thomas McEvilley, can be used to consider how the pedagogy at Pita Maha played a key role in modernizing ritual folk scenes in Balinese art. Through the case study of Anak Agung Gde Sobrat’s Taksu Baris (1960), this paper looks at the transference, adaptation and integration of early 20th-century Western aesthetics on colonial Balinese art. As one of two artists who first came into contact with Walter Spies and who worked with him and Bonnet, Sobrat was considered to be the most talented Balinese artist of the period. His art, particularly ones pertaining to Balinese dance (tarian legong), deserve a more robust theoretical undertaking and can be read as a metonym for the constant interplay between East and West, the seen and unseen, the past and present. Ultimately, I consider how, unlike colonial Javanese art that focused on responses to Mooi-Indie paintings, ethnographic documentation and which was concerned with the rise of social realism, colonial Balinese art preoccupied itself with new ways of representing invisible spirituality and traditional mysticism that had already existed long before the island’s colonization.
‘Coloniality’, ‘Spirituality’ and Aesthetics in Balinese Modernism
It is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to speak of Balinese art that is areligious because for the Balinese, religion is not only inseparable from life, it is integrated within it. It should be remembered that Bali comprises a group of refugees who fled the establishment of Islam in Java. As such, Balinese Hinduism is not only an amalgam with syncretic roots, it has caused traditional art to become “closely connected to and supportive of local custom and belief”[7]. Several considerations ought to be made: firstly, that Balinese art and aesthetics is monolithic and definitive is an illusion, its heterogeneity cannot be more pronounced especially because art was perceived as much as an innovation that draws from different facets and peoples as it was a project of communalism that was so integral to Balinese life in general[8]. Secondly, I use the term ‘traditional’ as an approximate term derived from Thomas Cooper to mean art that derives its subject matter from a communal body of narrative, manifests a communal vision of the unseen (niskala) world, serves a religious purpose, is regarded as sacred, adheres to a style that is related to shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) and is regarded as art with a defined use, not as an objet d’art[9]. Although Balinese paintings that emerged from Pita Maha seem to adhere only to some of these definitions while deviating from others, Spies, Bonnet and the two princes from Ubud’s royal family established Pita Maha as an organization whose goals were to “guarantee the artists’ livelihoods and enable them to develop their talents by maintaining certain standards and providing guidance.”[10] Additionally, Pita Maha sought to combat the mounting anxiety regarding Western commercialism’s exploitation of personal skill which began in the 1930s. What then do we make of this paradoxical hybridity that marked an aesthetic which preserved tradition while seeking to elevate the status of Balinese art in the eyes of the West?
What is termed ‘coloniality’ in Southeast Asian Art is the culmination of an essentializing Eurocentric worldview that modelled power structures with a social classification of local art forms and aesthetics ranked beneath that of the West[11]. As the dark side of modernism, coloniality found new technologies of categorization in Bali based on differences in aesthetics. That is, what was local was wild, untamed, energetic, pure, and in perpetual excess. Abundance stood in direct contrast to the rules of anatomy, composition and a more realist style that Western art represented. What the pedagogical approach at Pita Maha enacted then was enigmatically contradictory, in that the artificial ‘Balinization’ which “consciously kept out apparent Western influences and ideas in education, government, society, and religion” were in fact imposed by Westerners[12]—Spies was German and Bonnet Dutch. Moreover, despite Bonnet’s realization that he had failed in his direct attempts at teaching Western aesthetics, various Balinese painters began copying aspects of his stylistic oeuvre[13]. As part of the colonizing mission, even the more benign term of ‘protecting’ Balinese art concealed a paternalistic approach against modernization. Furthermore, pre- colonial ‘traditional’ Balinese art was not without its rules of harmony and movement as we shall see. Finally, in the development of a Balinese aesthetic during Dutch colonial administration, artists did not directly resist Western aesthetics. On the contrary, Bonnet observed that Balinese painters did their “best work [...] while they were mastering a new technique”[14], a process of emic assimilation through indirect means rather than an etic imposition through a more explicit teaching.
According to curator Meta Knol, long colonized countries would often enforce a violent break with the past if this was deemed necessary as a logical step to establish and develop an independent cultural and national identity[15]. However, this is not the case for Balinese art at all. Instead, artists continued to create in accordance to classical visual forms and styles while simultaneously integrating new visual markers that were exposed to them by foreign painters. To be Balinese is to partake in a continual enactment of tradition that is inherently ritualistic because of its historical ties to Hindu spirituality, but to be Balinese during the age of Dutch colonialism is to recognize that ‘local’ rituals and art related to rituals and ritual-making would be considered ‘traditional’. This means that Balinese artists had to negotiate the place of ‘local’ spirituality within the ‘modern’ colonial matrix of power. For without such a consideration, Bali could and would not modernize.
To understand this negotiation, one must consider the logic of coloniality and otherness in relation to the island’s colonial history. Bali was colonized by the Dutch at a relatively late stage compared to the rest of Indonesia. More specifically, Balinese kingdoms maintained their independence into the early 20th-century, long after the arrival of Dutch East Indies ships in 1597. The Netherlands then finally gained complete authority and control over Bali in 1908 after the final battle in Klungkung was waged. Known also as Bali’s mass ritual suicide (puputan), this colonial wound emphasizes the level of resistance that Dutch colonizers faced at the outset of their invasion on the island[16]. What the Balinese were confronted with was a violent reorganization and reorientation of society on a large scale, one which relegated control of authority, knowledge and subjectivity to the Dutch. Court culture with its patronage of traditional Balinese art was effectively eliminated and new sources of support were located in pandering to foreign tourists who, though predominantly unschooled in Balinese aesthetics and style, were drawn to the fabled eclecticism of Indonesia’s last standing kingdom. Capitalism in the form of commercialism took root and foreign artists created “an exaggerated and rather fictitious opposition between what they saw as a stagnant and conventionalized style of painting versus a modern and creative form which they had instigated.”[17] Furthermore, imperial discourses that began to segregate Western aesthetics and tastes from that of the Balinese emerged. This phenomenon resulted in changes to the (in)visibility of Balinese identity in art. The status of various ritual images, objects and arts including folk crafts, utilitarian wares, architectural forms, and religious artifacts were reconfigured as souvenirs suited to visiting foreigners reveals a shifting valuation of the Other in the West. Not only was Balinese art devalued, it was also relocated in historic chronology, in that art of a colonized people was based on the “European colonial myth [...] that those people were outside of history” and, by extension, the Western narrative of communal memory[18]. The ahistoricity of Balinese art suggests that it is unchanging and its identity lies in being ‘natural’, untouched and unspoiled. This stood in stark contrast to Western art which was ‘cultured’ and thus, Balinese art was perceived as a colonial culture that ultimately required the tutelage and guidance of Western tutors. Here, McEvilley observes another shift in colonial mindsets when the art of the ‘Other’ becomes ‘modern’ in the ‘European’ regard. He remarks that “when colonized peoples started making objects like [the Europeans, it] would indicate that they had been drawn into history” and thus remember their true identity as human[19]. In theory, these power relationships that center on the Dutch in colonial Bali are present in the form of mass commercialization of art, the establishment of Pita Maha by two Western artists, and the shift from two-dimensional representations in pre- colonial Balinese art to representations that employed chiaroscuro, photographic realism, realistic anatomy and shading techniques to a certain degree. However, in practice, the ‘artistic legacy’ of Pita Maha is not as uniocular as the colonial gaze makes it out to be.
When considering the colonial impact on Balinese aesthetics, one rarely considers that “the first impulse [for change] came from the Balinese themselves”[20] and that Western painters were as much inspired by the ‘spirit’ of Bali, rather than its form or style. To this end, while Balinese painters adopted new perspectives on subject matter, turning to scenes of daily folk life, integrated Western perspective, anatomy, and shading, Western painters developed an alternative spiritual and symbolic depth through their interactions with local Balinese painters. The ‘coloniality’ explicated by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova amalgamates imperialism and capitalism while also signaling a shift towards globalization within the colonial matrix of power. Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet differed in their personalities and art styles but “both shared a rather patronizing, colonial attitude to Bali”, seeing the land as an ‘Other’[21]. Whether the art that emerged from Pita Maha was birthed from the impulse to protect it from modernization or to shape it towards a more Western taste does not ultimately negate the fact that Bali was a paradisial concept. One whose ornamental, decorative style, spiritual eclecticism, and ‘oriental’ representation (as opposed to an occidental Western one) could not be completely overhauled and effaced in favor of a more European aesthetic, neither could it remain unchanged as a timeless and ahistorical Eden that remained unmoved while the rest of Indonesia marched along.
Spirituality clearly forms a major tenet in Balinese art and, by association, the unseen realm (niskala) is the Balinese artist’s predominant preoccupation. Here, the question of representation arises: how does one accurately represent the unseen? More importantly, what exactly is being represented when scenes of Bali are being depicted? The meaning of Balinese art depends as much on the viewer as it does on the artist; a tourist may view a mountain as a naturalistic vignette of the romance of Bali while a Balinese may view the same object as the home of the gods. Naturalism and folk life in colonial Balinese art coalesce and are synonymous with the concept of the oriental. That is, the mountain, dance, ritual objects are all visual signifiers of an alternative lifestyle and source of knowledge.
Taksu Baris (1960): A Case Study
A case study which best illustrates this phenomenon that resulted from the intermingling of Balinese taste and Western tutelage is Anak Agung Gde Sobrat’s (1911- 1992) Taksu Baris (1960) (Fig. 1), which employs a largely European color palette to a local subject matter. A word must be said about the medium of modern Balinese painting because oil painting did not have an artistic legacy in Indonesia. Instead, this very medium of oil painting through which different Balinese artists would continue to favor in different ways was a product of the Dutch colonial project. Simply on the basis of materiality, the painting is already accorded a valuation that is far more elevated than the original status of ritual art objects, sculptures and even architecture of pre-colonial Bali—a valuation symptomatic of the colonial hangover that privileged oil painting as superior because of the way it could capture light in a Western Realist sense. Yet, I contend that the point of Sobrat’s painting has never been to replicate lived reality in perfect verisimilitude. Rather, this painting uses the innovative colonial imports of technique and medium to revive and strengthen the Balinese aesthetic of harmony, energy and the power of the unseen world.
Sobrat’s eye for a more natural representation of light and shadow is immediately apparent, especially with the central glow of the dancer against a more muted and darker back and foreground. The painting which delineates a typical Balinese dancer in media res, surrounded by Balinese ritual objects and local flora, itself constitutes a sort of ethnography—capturing ritualistic practice, Balinese wood carvings unique to Ubud, Balinese ethnic costume, and a deliberately local setting. The image is bound to a specific place and time, and yet it is timeless because the subject is not the dancer but the dance. Performance arts in Bali symbolically represent the cosmos and the complementary balance between good and evil. They also act as ritual offerings to the gods and ancestors[22]. The costumes, adornments and even movement of the dancer replicate the accoutrements and movements of the deities. When one speaks of Balinese performance arts, one must necessarily consider the condition of taksu which may be translated to mean the spiritual inspiration and energy within a ritual object or character. However, in the visual arts, this takes on another meaning—one that gestures towards “unity and balance between elements and form, along with technical excellence, and the bond between art and life or nature”[23]. Thus, spiritual traits were also in need of representation and thus this accounts for the more two-dimensional, wayang style that is so integral to Balinese aesthetics because stylization replicated energies and internal essences rather than external appearances. Unlike a more Western approach to art at the time which prioritized naturalism, closeness to real life in Balinese art was not determined by verisimilitude that realism so typified.
Concomitant to taksu is the infusion of life into art, which means movement. Sobrat’s painting exemplifies this constant movement as a ritual act that symbolizes both the cosmological and social orders of the seen (sekala) and unseen (niskala) worlds. In his painting, performance is related to energy that overflows in the evocative movement of the dance and the lighting of space. Although the fire on the right side of the painting is the main source of physical fire, there is a glow radiating from the center of the painting. In other words, an inner, unseen light emanates from the dancer through the ritual dance out beyond the picture plane. Additionally, the Balinese dislike blank space which extended from a predilection that “acknowledges the fecundity of the tropical environment in which they live”[24]. The decorative style that Balinese artists gravitated towards stemmed from a compelling desire to be one with nature. Nature here included not only the bucolic and pastoral, but also the ‘natural’ localized practices of performance as ritual.
Stylistic and Technical Transformations in Balinese Aesthetics
Neither traditional dance scenes nor the filling of space was uncommon, even to the Western founders of Pita Maha. In fact, both Spies and Bonnet adopted these stylistic characteristics in their own paintings (Figs. 3 & 4) as an appropriate visual lexicon that represents an(other) culture—one that was so tightly fused with nature that it conveniently served to reinforce the colonial dichotomy between a ‘cultured’ West and a ‘natural’ Orient. Another consideration is the selection of subject matter that best suited the image of Bali that artists from Pita Maha sought to preserve: one that was aligned to Western realism with its emphasis on the working class engaged in everyday life. This modernization in Western realist art indicated a critical shift away from tradition to one that elevated the rural layperson, his practices, habits and aesthetics while celebrating it as remarkable in its own right. Nevertheless, the large canon of modern Balinese art engaged not with the island’s violent colonial history but with adapting realist techniques to promote a modernized visual culture of Balinese spirituality. This included a great number of paintings of barong dances, colorful festivals, legong dances (Fig. 2), narrative scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics, and tranquil yet complex scenes of a rural Bali where Man is not only at peace with fellow Man but also with his environment. This is not to say that the Balinese artists were not acquainted with modern Dutch art for Asian modern artists have always critically engaged with the Western canon of modern art. Rather, what I am suggesting is that although the colonial mentality Dutch painters employed at Pita Maha sought to bring Balinese subject matter and aesthetics to a point of convergence with the West, what it fought against was precisely the same Western colonial gaze that continually fed the mass commercialization of art in Bali.
Initially at the outset of this paper, I contended that Balinese art developed on a different plane than Javanese art and their respective preoccupations differed in the sense that Javanese schools were engaged more readily and expressly with social realism while Bali focused on finding new expressions for old spiritual thought. In practice, however, both Javanese and Balinese art can be said to have undergone a transformation of self-reflexivity towards realism. While this took the form of rougher brushwork and subject matter that engaged with the changing political climate in Java under Dutch colonial administration in Javanese art, self-consciousness in Balinese art came in the form of resistance to an absolute adoption of Western concepts of beauty. Elongated forms reminiscent of wayang kulit figures, crowded picture planes, the centrality of flowing energy or taksu, representations of niskala are but a few key examples of what artists continually and, I argue, consciously chose to retain. Nonetheless, the most effective mode of reclaiming the power of the ‘Other’ in Balinese art emerges when artists continued to paint everyday scenes. Even though these subjects continued to feed the colonial tourist gaze, they continued to keep the ‘spirit’ of Bali alive. It was the ‘traditional’ performance arts that continued to fascinate foreign viewers and which dominated modern Balinese paintings. To acknowledge the changes in ‘traditional’ Balinese art alone is to blindly emphasize Western aesthetic influence without actually considering that Balinese creativity, virtuosity and spirituality had in turn been absorbed into the art of Spies, Bonnet and the likes. What I am suggesting is that the style and techniques of Balinese aesthetics were not just transformed by the West, but in turn they too transformed Western aesthetics. As Davies concludes:
“Balinese artists imitate indigenous Pacific, Australasian, and African styles as effortlessly as they do their traditional ones [...] Yet they also illustrate pervasive aspects of the Balinese aesthetic, such as the supposition that art should be practically useful. Innovation, appropriation, adaptation, and fusion have not been adopted from the postmodern West but are, instead, thoroughly Balinese ways of approaching the arts.”[25]
The Balinese attitude towards art can then be placed in dialogue with that of the West, where the subjectivity of Europe and its identity, instead of Bali’s, is jettisoned into a state of fetishization. Given the common social functions of art that “presents communally generated and communally received objects” which facilitate “a bonding of communal identification around a shared understanding of their meaning”[26], Pita Maha was well positioned to introduce to the Balinese an opportunity to learn from the West and adopt a new range of aesthetical instruments. For instance, where Walter Spies is concerned, his early formative years in the Hellerau school in Dresden shaped his approach to Balinese art-making. That is, the spirit of Pita Maha championed the unity of life on intermedial terms but also emphasized “the importance of multi-faceted local skills (i.e. the unity of mind, body, spirituality and aesthetics)”[27]—skills that were in no part Western imports but already existent traditional norms in Bali. I propose therefore, an alternative reading of colonial Balinese art and aesthetics that centers on the Balinese identity as evolving through integration rather than being effaced through assimilation. Where Sobrat, Spies and Bonnet’s paintings of a pastoral, local and traditional Bali are concerned, coloniality has proven that there is no uniocular way to impose an aesthetic on art. Precisely because “art has the ability to sever as well as to bond, and to rebond in new associations of cultural pastiche”[28], one cannot help but notice that Western artists fascinated and enthralled by the bewitching communalism and mysticism of Bali could not definitely maintain an essentializing hold on its aesthetic sensibilities. Instead, a more nuanced, heterogenous and developmental aesthetic of mutual benefit surfaced—one of commercial success and personal conviction; international recognition and local flavor.
The question this paper proposed should thus be reframed for Balinese aesthetics should be historicized in the plural. Returning to Sobrat’s Taksu Baris, the painting is both Western in technique and local in style and subject matter. It is both spiritual and worldly, and is as much about a single dancer embodying taksu and engaging with niskala as it is about reinvigorating an ancient practice and thought system through a fresh colonial gaze. It captures the art of the ritual, which is necessarily premised on community. What then consolidated and formalized Balinese aesthetics during the colonial period was the constant vacillating dialogue between two different worldviews in an attempt to modernize one while inspiring the other. In this way, Balinese painting not only became the visible ground on which oriental and occidental aesthetics co-existed, it also acted as a mediator between the invisible (niskala) and the visible (sekala) worlds; between the art of resistance and the art of integration.
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[1] Joseph Fischer, “Problems and Realities of Modern Balinese Art” in Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change, 1945-1990 (Singapore: Singapore National Printers Ltd, 1990), 104. [2] Garrett Kam, “Cultural Colonialism” in Perceptions of Paradise: Images of Bali in the Arts (Indonesia: Yayasan Dharma Seni Museum Neka, 1999), 49. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid, 43. [5] Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981) [6] Jim Supangkat, “The Emergence of Indonesian Modern Art” in Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (Jakarta, Indonesia: Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation, 1997), 31–64. [7] Fischer, 104. [8] Stephen Davies, “Balinese Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007): pp. 21-29, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594x.2007.00234.x, 25-26. [9] Thomas Cooper, Sacred Painting in Bali: Tradition in Transition (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2005), 5. [10] Kam, 42. [11] Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000), 533. [12] Kam, 49. [13] Ibid., 48. [14] Jane Belo, “Balinese Children’s Drawing,” Traditional Balinese Culture, 1970, pp. 240-259, https://doi.org/10.7312/belo94434-013, 258. [15] Meta Knol et al., “They Are Beyond the Dutch,” in Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the Visual Arts from 1900 until Now (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2009), 16. [16] Astara Light, Longing for the Unseen: Connecting to a Balinese Imagined Community through Offerings and Contemporary Art, Fall 2019, vol. 3 (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: ARTiculate, 2019), 64. [17] Kam, 42. [18] Thomas McEvilley, “The Selfhood of the Other,” in Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1999), 87. [19] Ibid., 88. [20] Hans Rhodius et al., “The Context of Bali,” in Walter Spies and Balinese Art (Zutphen Netherlands: Published under the auspices of the Tropical Museum, Amsterdam, by Terra, 1980), 67. [21] Kam, 49. [22] Robyn Maxwell, Bali: Island of the Gods (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2014), 163. [23] Davies, 21. [24] Davies, 22. [25] Davies, 27. [26] McEvilley, 103. [27] Simone Wesner, Michael Hitchcock, and I Nyoman Darma Putra, “Walter Spies and Dresden: The Early Formative Years of Bali's Renowned Artist, Author and Tourism Icon,” Indonesia and the Malay World 35, no. 102 (2007): pp. 211-230, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639810701440640, 228. [28] Ibid.
References & Bibliography
Belo, Jane. “Balinese Children’s Drawing.” Traditional Balinese Culture, 1970, 240–59. https://doi.org/10.7312/belo94434-013.
Cooper, Thomas. Sacred Painting in Bali: Tradition in Transition. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2005.
Davies, Stephen. “Balinese Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007): 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594x.2007.00234.x.
Fischer, Joseph, and Joseph Fischer. “Problems and Realities of Modern Balinese Art.” Essay. In Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change, 1945- 1990, 90–105. Singapore: Printed by Singapore National Printers, Ltd., 1990.
Holt, Claire. Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Kam, Garrett. Perceptions of Paradise: Images of Bali in the Arts. Ubud, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia: Yayasan Dharma Seni Museum Neka, 1993.
Knol, Meta, R. Raben, Kitty Zijlmans, and Meta Knol. “They Are Beyond the Dutch.” Essay. In Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the Visual Arts from 1900 until Now, 11–23. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2009.
Light, Astara. Longing for the Unseen: Connecting to a Balinese Imagined Community through Offerings and Contemporary Art. 3. Fall 2019ed. Vol. 3. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: ARTiculate, 2019.
Maxwell, Robyn J., Van den Heuvel Niki, Melanie Eastburn, and Lucie Folan. Bali: Island of the Gods. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2014.
McEvilley, Thomas. “The Selfhood of the Other.” Essay. In Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, 85–108. Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1999.
Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533-580. muse.jhu.edu/article/23906.
Rhodius, Hans, John Darling, John Stowell, Walter Spies, and John Darling. “The Context of Bali.” Essay. In Walter Spies and Balinese Art, 51–93. Zutphen Netherlands: Published under the auspices of the Tropical Museum, Amsterdam, by Terra, 1980.
Supangkat, Jim. “The Emergence of Indonesian Modern Art.” Essay. In Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond, 31–64. Jakarta, Indonesia: Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation, 1997.
Wesner, Simone, Michael Hitchcock, and I Nyoman Darma Putra. “Walter Spies and Dresden: The Early Formative Years of Bali's Renowned Artist, Author and Tourism Icon.” Indonesia and the Malay World 35, no. 102 (2007): 211–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639810701440640.
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