Batuan Interactive, is a multi-modal website intended to widen access to and provide an engagement with the Mead/Bateson collection of paintings and their legacy while amplifying the voices of Balinese painters and visually connecting the artwork to ongoing ethnographic explorations of Bali.

We invite viewers to explore the visual, narrative, cultural, artistic, and personal or idiosyncratic elements of the paintings, connect them to content in other works of art, and compare them to present-day Balinese life. The abundant cultural and psychocultural references in the paintings are not just analyzed by anthropologists and scholars, but unpacked with visual ethnography of contemporary Bali, including short films on major life cycle rituals, healing traditions, family life, social activity, personal experience and belief, and more. 

Interviews with painters represented in the Mead/Bateson collection and ensuing generations provide Balinese perspectives on intercultural artistic exchange, anthropology, tourism, and the art market while master painters offer live demonstrations and reflect on their style, content, craft, influences, and personal creativity.

In this way we hope to scaffold a context for the original works and bring their classic and enduring symbolism and iconography alive. By tracing continuity and change in social life, spiritual belief, material culture, and its visual representation across genres of film and painting, we investigate the lasting impact of this historic period on Balinese art and the anthropological study of Bali.

DIRECTOR/ COLLECTOR

DESIGNER
Modern Bali/ Anatomy of a Painting EDITOR

Batuan and Exhibit Docs, Modern Bali WRITER
Anatomy of a Painting VOICEOVER

Exhibit Doc/Trailer/Gamelan PM EDITOR
Exhibit Doc/ Gamelan CAMERA

Batuan Doc EDITOR
Gamelan Morning Performance EDITOR
Gamelan CAMERA
Exhibit Doc CAMERA
Batuan Doc CAMERA
USC Pacific Asia Museum CURATOR

Robert Lemelson

Yee Ie


Annie Tucker


Robert Carleton-Chhaing


Chisako Yokoyama
Briana Young
Joseph Bollinger, Wing Ko
Robert Chhaing-Carleton
Indra Kusuma, Carolyn Rouse
Rebecca Hall

Meanwhile, the incredible archive of original commissions remained in storage, largely unseen for decades.

In the 1970’s, the anthropologist Hildred Geertz asked Mead for access to the collection. She began an intensive study of the paintings and went to Bali to conduct her own fieldwork in Batuan, interviewing those painters who were still alive. She ultimately published three books on the paintings, giving new articulation to their significance as at once an “ethnography of the Balinese imagination” and “bicultural products, bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.” In other words, the paintings were produced within Western pictorial conventions, but their imagery was drawn  from Balinese culture.  

Drawn to its significance to the study of Bali and the history of visual psychological anthropology,  anthropologist Robert Lemelson ultimately acquired half the collection in 2010. In 2022, Lemelson partnered with curator Rebecca Hall at the USC Pacific Asia Museum to bring a selection of them to the general public for the very first time–situating them as the original collectors did, within the cultural beliefs, worldview, and daily lives of their makers for the exhibit Bali: Power and Agency in Southeast Asia.

Some of these paintings, along with other Balinese paintings, are also available to view online, as part of the Virtual Museum of Balinese Painting, by historian Adrian Vickers working with the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum.

CONFERENCES

• Visual Research Conference, Seattle, WA 2022