At Masa Masa Bali, Kedungwuni 104/208: Tracing the Continuous Line of a Three-Generation Batik House brings four Balinese artists — I Gede Sukarya, Sarita Ibnoe, Gusti Kade, and Ni Wayan Penawati — into conversation with Oey Soe Tjoen's legacy, not by making batik, but by translating what batik has meant across three generations into cowhide, weaving, dye-soaked canvas, and textile-based visual art.

None of the four call themselves batik makers. That distance turned out to be the point.

I Gede Sukarya: A Family Table, Woven from Two Hides

Sukarya works almost exclusively in cowhide these days, a material he first approached through the Buleleng tradition of bulu geles, where stretched hide is arranged with offerings much like a Balinese caru. He came to Oey Soe Tjoen as an outsider to batik, drawn less by technique than by what he read about the house's internal life — the books on its heritage, the passing of a craft from one generation to the next inside a single family. While other artists in the exhibition were drawn to Oey Soe Tjoen's colour and form, Sukarya noticed that almost no one was looking at the family itself: the ordinary, half-important conversations that happen when relatives gather, and the quiet responsibility of being the one who keeps something going.

He built that idea into a dining table, carved from two sheets of hide joined by a traditional mat-weaving technique he picked up by watching, not learning — his grandmother once wove lontar mats, and something of that method resurfaced in his hands. The join itself became the metaphor: two pieces of leather interlaced the way a family's threads stay bound together, imperfectly, but bound.

“Family is truly significant to me. Whenever our family gathers, we talk about things that aren't actually important, and those offhand remarks spark interesting conversations. I wanted to capture that warmth in a piece of furniture”, I Gede Sukarya.

Sarita Ibnoe: The Back-and-Forth of Making

Sarita has been weaving for around eleven years, and she came into this collaboration through a memory rather than a technique — being wrapped in batik cloth as a child, the fabric present in her life long before it became a subject for her work. In Kedungwuni 104/208, she takes on a double position: weaver, and someone sketching batik motifs onto her own materials, including traces of the pagi sore pattern.

What interested her most wasn't the finished cloth but everything batik shares with weaving underneath — the trial, the failure, the returning to try again, which she considers the real substance of any craft. Her piece follows the physical logic of weaving itself: thread moving back and forth across a border, a journey told through repetition. She has also been pairing materials that read as opposites — thread and fabric against wood and wire — to talk about how contrasting things learn to hold together.

“I've been weaving for about eleven years. I believe weaving — and batik, and all crafts — are fundamentally about process. You learn from failure, from trial and error. That's why it's called a craft: you have to persevere, and through trying, you discover your own style. With this work, I wanted to highlight the process itself, not just the final result.”, Sarita Ibnoe.

Watching Oey Soe Tjoen's batik sustained across three generations, she said, is something she doesn't take lightly; a craft that demands staying alive that long deserves real respect, and collaborations like this one are one way of keeping it in circulation.

Gusti Kade: Chasing the Logic Inside a Dye

Gusti Kade's route into the exhibition ran through failure first. Early experiments with Remasol dye on polyester fell apart literally — the colour never bonded to plastic fibre and washed out in the rain — before he moved to cotton canvas, closer to his painting background, and started finding real traction stretching, sewing, and shaping fabric with foam and thread.

Preparing for Kedungwuni 104/208 sent him deep into Oey Soe Tjoen's own dye logic: Indigosol in the dry season, Naphthol in the rainy one, an unwritten rule he initially assumed was arbitrary and tried to break. It wasn't. Indigosol needs strong sun to oxidise properly and produces cool blues and purples but resists deep yellows and oranges; Naphthol, developed in two stages with a dye and a matching salt read off a reference chart, delivers the hot oranges and reds that Indigosol can't. He describes the whole process as closer to memorising a magic trick than following a recipe — and says the discovery answered questions the books alone couldn't. Rather than smoothing over what didn't work, his piece keeps the visible residue of experimentation in view, treating a dye's limitations as part of the story rather than something to hide.“That's when I understood: color isn't just aesthetic, it's a language, and it's also a story”, Gusti Kade.

Ni Wayan Penawati: Reading a Motif Sideways

Penawati has worked in textile-based visual art since 2020, focusing on the everyday labour of Balinese women. Batik was, by her own account, unfamiliar territory — she knew its roots in Java, in Pekalongan and Solo, but had never worked inside the tradition directly. What drew her to Kedungwuni 104/208 was the technical puzzle of translation: how to carry a motif's logic into her own visual language rather than reproduce it.

Preparing for Kedungwuni 104/208 sent him deep into Oey Soe Tjoen's own dye logic: Indigosol in the dry season, Naphthol in the rainy one, an unwritten rule he initially assumed was arbitrary and tried to break. It wasn't. Indigosol needs strong sun to oxidise properly and produces cool blues and purples but resists deep yellows and oranges; Naphthol, developed in two stages with a dye and a matching salt read off a reference chart, delivers the hot oranges and reds that Indigosol can't. He describes the whole process as closer to memorising a magic trick than following a recipe — and says the discovery answered questions the books alone couldn't. Rather than smoothing over what didn't work, his piece keeps the visible residue of experimentation in view, treating a dye's limitations as part of the story rather than something to hide.“That's when I understood: color isn't just aesthetic, it's a language, and it's also a story”, Gusti Kade.

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