Bridging, Blurring, Unifying: I Wayan Karja

View Photos (13) Image © 2004 Joseph Foley

The worlds of art and religion share much. At a certain point, they both leave the realm of duality and logic; the mind flies off past the describable into an awareness we lack words for and so ambiguously label "truth." Ambiguous though it may be, we're happy enough with the term, for it seems the only one that comes close enough to relating the experience. Both art and religion attempt to hurl us into that world beyond so as to help us understand the world at hand. They often do this, of course, in partnership. And so it is with the work of I Wayan Karja, one of Bali's foremost artists, and the only painter in the island's long, colorful history to have received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

The central focus of Karja's work for the last few years has been to fuse not only art and spirituality, but East and West. The vessel he has chosen to carry this artistic stew is one very familiar to the Balinese -- the mandala. A mandala is a schematized representation of the cosmos, often found in Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and even in Christianity, usually in the form of stained glass windows. Its name comes from the Sanskrit word for "circle," and its design, though always primarily circular, has found many different forms in different cultures throughout the world.

The design Karja has adopted is represented as eight geometric shapes radiating from a circle much like a flower. This particular mandala represents the concept of "pengider bhvana," pengider meaning "circle" and bhvana meaning "cosmos." The concept of pengider bhvana is one of balancing nature, humanity, and God. Each of the eight geometric shapes is associated with a color, a number, a deity, qualities and aspects of life such as purity, density, danger, hope, etc., as well as parts of the body.

Karja uses the idea of the mandala as an overarching frame. He works mostly with small prints and mixed media on paper. Taken individually, each piece seems to be an abstract, or nearly abstract work of one dominant color. When arranged by the artist, however,"Any Balinese walking into the room would immediately feel right at home," he says. The color scheme follows the order prescribed by the pengider bhvana, so walking into a show by the artist you would see, beginning due east and rotating clockwise: white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, black, and blue/grey, with the center being white or multi-colored.

This simple arrangement following a predetermined scheme becomes much more involved, however, when the complexity behind the work as a whole, as well as each individual piece, is understood. A painting in the northwest corner of the room, for example, would be one of many in that area that was primarily green in color. In addition, it would somehow also incorporate the idea of the number one, the deity Sangkara, the human spleen, the qualities of growth and hope and freshness, and a weapon known as an elephant-hook. Added to all this, it would then also reflect Karja's personal influences, which include, among other things, an appreciation for Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Diebenkorn.

As Karja says, "My earlier work was totally emotional. Now it's more intellectual. But at the same time it's simpler. It's more spiritual. I spend a lot more time on one painting now. It's harder, but I enjoy it more." More intellectual, yet simpler. Less emotional, yet more spiritual. Added to that a desire to "dig into the roots of Balinese culture while exploring Western culture." It would seem that paradoxes abound. And so they do. As is the goal, the artist and viewer both have moved out of the realm of worldly logic and duality.

The road to this simple cum complex way of expression was, of course, a messy one. In hindsight, however, it now all seems to make sense. Born the son of an artist, Karja decided at the age of ten that painting would be his life's work. His father, who has given up the trade now, worked for fifteen years in the Young Artists' style. Still living, the Young Artists are a group of Balinese painters who as young boys were given supplies and encouraged to paint by the Dutch artist Arie Smit when he first came to stay on the island in 1956. The style they established is essentially naïve, the scenes typically colorful, rural Balinese life.

After the initial encouragement by Smit, the Young Artists began to grow into young men, and their style matured along with them. Local younger artists, including Karja's father, and then even Karja himself, attempted working in the new form. Soon, the Young Artists began to make a name throughout the world, and by the 1970s people began coming to Bali with the sole intent of getting a piece of this exciting new talent and its offshoots. One such visitor was an Italian in 1978. He was impressed enough with a painting by a local boy to pay 800 rupiahs for it. The boy, of course, was Karja. It was his first sale. He was thirteen years old.

At sixteen Karja entered a fine arts high school and then moved on to a degree in Fine Arts at Udayan University in Denpasar. He seemed well on his way to an art career, but then a crisis of sorts took place. After graduating university, his parents let it be known it was their wish he become a religious teacher, not an artist. Though his father had encouraged his painting as a boy, by this time he had given up art and didn't wish to see his son suffer the trials of making a living with paint and brush. Karja, however, persevered, exhibiting his work steadily for the next few years in Ubud and Denpasar.

By 1994 he had his first European show in Switzerland and within the next few years would be traveling extensively in both Europe and the U.S., exploring some of the world's greatest museums as well as conducting shows and lectures. At this time, his work was "totally emotional," as he says. It consisted mostly of representational art, lots of rice fields and exactly the kinds of things tourists come to Bali to see -- masked dancers, ceremonial processions, and the like. Though his work wasn't "tourist art", it certainly wasn't a clear indicator of things to come.

In 1997 he had no idea how much his work was about to change when he embarked on a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of South Florida in the United States. As he says, "I expected to go there for two years, maybe learn a few techniques, simply come back to Bali, and hopefully one day build a new gallery." After approximately three months in Tampa, however, it seemed his whole world was about to cave in.

Though he speaks English effortlessly now, and with a great precision when talking about his work, he admits living and working in a language not his own presented a great challenge. Added to that was simple culture shock. And on top of that something no one could have foreseen -- the Asian economic crisis of 1997, severe political turmoil in Jakarta and beyond (though not in Bali), and the near total collapse of the Indonesian rupiah. Suddenly, monies that had been promised from home by different grants had simply dried up, and the little money that somehow made it through was practically worthless inside the booming U.S. economy. All of that, however, wasn't even the worst of it.

"After about three months," he says, "I realized: I've lost the source of my work. Bali was too far away. I was used to painting rice fields, but there were no rice fields in Florida. I also realized that I couldn't really paint American subjects. I didn't have enough experience with them to really be able to paint them. Another factor was my studio. In Bali I have windows. I look out and I see beautiful rice fields and beautiful mountains. My studio in Tampa was four walls, air-conditioning, artificial light."

He worried about paying bills and feeding his family. He felt alienated in this foreign culture, pinned in by windowless walls, lost upon losing inspiration. His response was a natural one: he began looking inward. Very quickly his work turned noticeably abstract.

Though his move towards abstraction took a great leap in Florida, there are some small signs of it in his work immediately before his stay abroad. His dancers were beginning to blur more; in his landscapes the differences between foreground and background were becoming more impressionistic. A prescient nod towards what would come, perhaps, but it was in Florida he gained full consciousness of his direction. Struggling to paint rice fields where there were none, a professor noticed the increasing abstraction and suggested he simply "cut off the horizon." It was something of an epiphany. As he describes it, he began to see that "beyond the horizon is horizon . . . horizon and horizon. And above the sky is sky . . . and sky . . . and another sky." He says this with a certain glee in his voice, his eyes lighting up.

Suddenly he was experiencing a previously unfelt freedom in his work. He was beginning to see how he might move into those realms inhabited by those he admired. Yet wild nothingness wouldn't suffice; he would need a grounding mechanism, a portal. Confronted on a daily basis in this foreign culture with questions of who he was, where he had come from, where his work had come from, and where he was going, he naturally turned to the mandala. "The most universal thing in my culture is the mandala," he says. In addition to being a representation of the cosmos, mandalas are used as meditation devices. Some are meant to "broaden" consciousness, others to "focus" it. In either case, mandalas are meant to lead one on a journey that ends in peace and balance, the riotous turmoil of the world simplified and tamed. Under Karja's circumstances at the time, it is no surprise he would not only revert to his roots but to the mandala in particular.

Given the nature of the mandala and its intended purpose, it is also no surprise Karja sees his work now as a process of meditation. "Both the process and the artwork help me understand life at a deeper level," he says. "In a sense, my work takes place in the space between the physical and the spiritual world. It seems as if I can feel the spiritual phenomena of colors. Physically, the eyes are only able to see color, but in aesthetic experiences, things are perceived through our personality. Spirits contact us through color. The idea of a spiritual circle of color is so alive in Balinese culture that people make offerings based on the colors of the pengider bhvana. My work often gives me answers to my questions about the Creator."

It's obvious in talking to Karja he has found new vigor in his work. His desire, he says, is "to develop a new form of art in a universal language." This desire for universality has led him on searches into places some might deem surprising for a Balinese Hindu. The most notable of these would be the New-Age movement in America. Among the growing number of people owning Karja's work is the widely-acclaimed poet and New-Age guru Robert Bly. After spending some time with the award-winning poet, Karja says he became clearer about his work and where he wanted to go with it. He also credits Michael Rees for pushing him deeper into the idea of cross-cultural thinking. Rees' work with Shiva Natharaja (Shiva dancing), in conjunction with classical Western art, opened him up to more conscious, analytical thought about his own work.

In addition to all this, he has also found himself suddenly working with new media, most notably, printmaking. When he first took up printmaking, as with his initial steps into abstraction, he wasn't sure where he was going. "I found that I was working in two different directions, printmaking and painting. But after a while both directions naturally merged, although some works are dominated by printmaking and some by painting."

By merging contemporary Western techniques and traditional Balinese ideas, Karja has constructed a new door, a new portal for the complex, modern individual in search of simple, eternal truths. But, of course, the door's complexity belies its simplicity, as its simplicity does its complexity. Surrendering to its passageway, the modern viewer steps through, winding along a maze of his or her own making until another door emerges, which is, in fact, the same door but now without contradictions, without labels of this or that, East or West, old or new. Is this art? Is this religion? The world at hand? The world beyond? The viewer feels no need for distinctions. The self is unified, the heart and the mind at one.

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Published on 2/6/04