Old art or fashion forward? Both, says a top batik designer

Josephine Komara was depressed. She was recently divorced. She had moved into a small house. Her business supplying fabrics for lampshades was lucrative but unsatisfactory. Mrs. Komara sipped her wine and smoked a cigarette. She sank to the ground and dipped her hands into two wooden boxes filled with antique Indonesian textiles.

In one box, Mrs. Komara recently found batik designs from the island of Java, among the other elaborate weaves of Indonesia’s outer islands. She gulped more wine, inhaled clove-scented smoke from an Indonesian cigarette, and pondered how she could enrich the heritage of a nation of more than 17,000 islands.

Since that melancholic night nearly four decades ago, Ms. Komara has reimagined an ancient art by intertwining disparate textile traditions with an aesthetic all her own to create a modern Indonesian silhouette. Her batik and other designs for her fashion house, BINhouse, transformed a cultural expression that was intricate and lovely, but so wrapped up in tradition that it bordered on sedate.

Mrs. Komara, known by her nickname Obin, no longer depends on lampshades for her livelihood as BINhouse has become a global force in spreading the beauty of batik.

“I don’t like Indonesia. I’m in love with Indonesia,’ said Mrs. Komara, clinging to the ‘in’ with the passion of a soap actor. “For me, the Indonesian fabric we make is alive, it speaks, it expresses itself about this country, this beautiful country, which has a certain pulse and smell that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Ms. Komara, 67, speaks like an unashamed Indonesian supercharger, determined to raise awareness of the world’s most populous Muslim nation and the world’s largest archipelago country.

Superlatives aside, Ms. Komara’s homeland has a slight international feel to it, despite its population of over 275 million. The country has no globally iconic brands. If any part of Indonesia is known abroad, it is Bali, a Hindu holiday island, as if Hawaii were to replace the entire United States.

While a few words from this part of Southeast Asia have taken root in English – rice “paddy”, “gecko” and “run amok” – “batik” is rare because it is both a local word and also an expression of Indigenous people. culture.

In a form of batik-making popular in Java, artisans apply wax to cloth with pointillist precision, the dye-resistant liquid dripping from a narrow copper vessel. The patterns they create are oozing with nature’s exuberance: intricate florals, mythical beasts and tropical foliage.

Some of batik’s greatest promoters, as far back as the mid-19th century, were female entrepreneurs. Women also dominated the wax-drip process.

In 2009, UNESCO declared Indonesian batik an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”. That recognition is intended to preserve a nation’s cultural heritage, but it can also calcify traditions. And when Ms. Komara turned her attention to batik, despite being intertwined with Indonesian society, it threatened to do just that.

The square cut of batik shirts worn by officials may have cleverly camouflaged desk-bound physiques, but they evoked the fashions of a bygone generation. Much of the cotton used for batik was not grown in Indonesia, which dilutes the authenticity of the art form. Also restrictive were the customs that stipulated that certain patterns could only be worn by a privileged few. For example, a dagger-like diagonal and the lone wing of a mythical bird were reserved for royals.

Mrs. Komara did not observe such taboos.

Ms. Komara, along with a few other Indonesian designers, reimagined the art form without erasing its indigenous character, said Thomas Murray, a researcher and art dealer who is a lead author of the book “Textiles of Indonesia.” “It’s a cross-cultural, cross-time pollination that’s exciting.”

Ms. Komara is ethnic Chinese and part of a minority group that, among many other companies, designed and produced batik. Chinese Indonesians have suffered waves of persecution in Indonesia, including murderous outbursts in the 1960s and 1990s. Many have left the country.

Ms. Komara’s father worked for a travel agency, and he moved his family to Hong Kong when she was 4 years old. She attended a Catholic school, but the discipline of the Maryknoll sisters did not agree with her. They called her “cheeky” for questioning how the world could be created in less than seven days, she said.

When she was still a teenager, Ms. Komara said, she’d dropped out of school and wandered the back alleys of Hong Kong, with their topless bars luring sailors and congee lapping into diners. She ate at Jimmy’s Kitchen, a European-esque institution with an emphasis on the -ish, and listened to blind men coax nostalgia from the erhu, a Chinese string instrument.

“I was galloping,” she said. “I took in all the sights and smells.”

When Mrs. Komara was 12, her father died. The family moved back to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. She wandered there too, especially Chinatown, with its jumble of antique shops. The occasional violence against Chinese Indonesians, who were seen as monopolizing economic interests, did not frighten her, she said.

Her mother was born the daughter of a Methodist schoolmaster, but was orphaned and taken in by a Muslim man who prayed five times a day. When Mrs. Komara grew up, riots threatened, her mother cooked large pots of food as a peace offering.

Indonesia, located on the so-called ring of fire where tectonic plates collide, also has other fault lines.

“We are in the land of natural disasters: volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, you name it, we’ve got it,” Ms. Komara said. ‘But we are also a country of diversity that no one can understand, because you drive an hour by car and people already speak a different dialect, eat a different sauce. You enjoy and absorb.”

Ms. Komara was married to an archaeologist and anthropologist, who helped turn her textile collection into an academic interest and a professional one.

Batik, she learned, was produced in the 13th century, when the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire ruled an oceanic kingdom from Java and sent boats as far as Madagascar. She collected textiles from all over the archipelago and enjoyed the richness of the rainforest producing natural dyes.

She befriended old textile makers who were concerned about the longevity of their craft. She now employs hundreds of artisans for BINhouse, including weavers, batik makers, seamstresses and fiber workers.

Some of the best fabrics BINhouse sells, including batik applied to silk, take over a year to make by hand and cost thousands of dollars. Traditionally, such hand-woven fabric would be part of a woman’s dowry. These textiles should not be cut up, said Ms. Komara, any more than a living body should be dissected. They can be used as decorative wall hangings, scarves or sarongs, which are made from a single piece of fabric.

Mrs. Komara’s designs for BINhouse stem from a variety of inspirations: the impression left by a wave on a beach or the halo of a streetlight seen during one of Jakarta’s many traffic jams. Her palette is tropical.

“As an art historian, I see people who don’t like change at all, but I think we need more people like Obin who understand that textiles are a living tradition,” said Sandra Sardjono, a textile historian who founded the Tracing Patterns Foundation. in Berkeley, California, to examine traditional textile practices.

Ms Komara said she has spent half a century designing and redesigning the kebaya, a fitted blouse worn with a sarong in parts of Southeast Asia. The figure-grazing outfit, in a way, embodies the syncretic form of Islam that developed in Indonesia, in which an Arab faith brought by traders mixed with animist, Hindu, Buddhist and other influences. For Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda Indonesia, Ms. Komara created a kebaya uniform for flight attendants.

“It’s the sexiest and most sensual attire,” Ms. Komara said.

More than 85 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, and in recent years women have begun to embrace conservative dress and the headscarf, called the jilbab in Indonesia. Mrs. Komara has expanded her collection with the current preference for loose-fitting tunics and head coverings.

“Tradition is the way we are, and modern is the way we think,” she said. “Each canvas tells a living story.”