New Museums in Bali and Thailand Explore Cultural Identity

PHOTO: Bali’s new Kain Museum celebrates Indonesia’s signature art, Batik. (courtesy Bali Batik Museum) 

New Balinese Museum Celebrates Batik

Just as patterns on a Turkish carpet tell you what part of Turkey the carpet is from, the design of a piece of batik will tell you where it’s from in Indonesia.

Now visitors can learn to understand the secret language of batik at a new museum on Bali. Josephine “Obin” Komara opened Bali’s first museum dedicated to batik. The Museum Kain is situated on the third floor of Beachwalk, an upscale mall in Kuta.

Komara has been a one woman voice for the legacy of batik. In 1986 she founded BIN House, which creates beautiful batiks and sells them in its high end galleries in Bali, Jakarta, Singapore and Tokyo. BIN house fabrics are hand-spun and hand-woven by Indonesian artisans.

A piece of cloth can take up to a year to produce. The patterns depicting ancient and near-extinct motifs are results of complex methods of fabric weaving and batik dyeing that takes decades to master.

The museum uses high-tech interactive displays, including touch-screen consoles in front of each piece of exhibited cloth which enables visitors to access information about each motif including the materials used.

Menariknya Sentuhan Multimedia di Museum Kain http://t.co/kuuK51lA9Q lewat @NGIndonesia pic.twitter.com/ezPGfTGzdY

— Feri (@feri_latief) January 13, 2014

An abundance of rare pieces of batik are on display and copper batik printing blocks, canting wax pens and more are displayed in glass cases. The collection will be rotated every six months to accommodate Komara’s extensive collection of over 600 rare batik pieces.

Museums of Thai Identity Take Center Stage in the Kingdom 

Even as Thailand undergoes a struggle that will determine what kind of country it will be going forward politically, the country is examining its history to better understand its cultural roots.

Several existing museums in the kingdom, and several more to come, are examining Thai history in order to reveal Thai identity. Several more so-called “discovery museums” are being planned that hope to examine the real social, economic, ethnic and cultural history of the country, but even now Thailand has several museums that help provide a deeper understanding of Thailand.

Bangkok’s Museum of Siam tells the history of the kingdom from the dawn of time to the present. The museum explores the groups who played such a huge role in the development of the nation including native farming communities, Muslim settlers, Indian traders, Chinese migrants and ethnic hill tribes.

Sections cover the mapping of the land, religion, street culture and foreign influences.

There was a time not too long ago when the largest buildings in Bangkok were the temples and, of course, the Oriental Hotel. Like most modern cities, Bangkok got very busy building itself up in the last few decades and today most people can’t remember the city of canals and candle light of just a few decades ago.

The Bangkok Folk Museum, situated just off the oldest road in Bangkok, Charoen Krung Road, which was built in 1860, is there to remind visitors of the lifestyle of early Bangkok and the history of the Bangrak district.

Built in 1937, the museum was once the home of the Surawadee family. The influence of Western culture on Bangkok can be seen in such artefacts as the grandfather clock, the gramophone, the European-style dressing room, as well as a bedroom that features a wooden four-poster, canopy-draped bed.

No object will jump out at you, but the overall atmosphere provides an intimate glimpse of a Thai family in the 1930s.

Chiang Rai’s Mae Fah Luang Art and Cultural Park was launched in 1977 as a training camp for hill tribe youths. It was all part of a program to help young people in an area that had been big in the Golden Triangle’s illicit poppy trade to find other means of economic sustenance.

The camp was later turned into an art and culture park to house Thailand’s largest collections of ancient Lanna culture artefacts. The Lanna Kingdom was essentially a kingdom caught between the more powerful Burmese kingdom to the north and the Siamese kingdom to the south.

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