Aug/Sept, 1998
No. 036/VI/98
Young Guns
Bali's Generation X speak out
Bali-Sumbawa Surfari
Gone Surfin",
by boat
Imagining the Soul
Health and Beauty
Which Doctor?
Food
Something Fishy
Fiction
Womb by Cok Sawitri
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Many
of Agung Mangu’s works, be they abstract, impressionistic, surreal, realist or simple
sketches, pertain to his responses to nature. In his (mixed media) ‘Ikan Biru’
(Blue Fish) for example, Agung Mangu composes colour and lines in an orderly fashion to
portray the shape of a fish as well as other more abstract, surreal images. It is pieces
like this that make it so hard for critics to place him. “For me, to follow one
particular style is to lock up one’s creative urges. Say if I were to comit to the
realist camp, and all of a sudden one day wanted to paint an abstract? Then I would have
to go against my initial comitment... Anyway, I’m just the painter. Let the viewer
categorise me however they choose,” he adds, shrugging his shoulders fatalistically.
For Agung Mangu, personal liberation is integral to his
journeyings as an artist. It is his artistic mission, he claims, to find himself by
learning from nature and other people. “My painting is instinctive. When I paint, I
follow my intuition and I listen to my soul. I am attempting to channel the images brewing
within me, to transpose nature onto canvas, and when that creative process is taking place
I need to be completely alone, uninterrupted my telephones ringing and knocks at the
door,” he confides.
It is Agung Mangu’s eclectic individualism that has cut him loose from the symbology and imagery commonly seen as ‘typically Balinese’. Hardly any of his works portray the rerajahan (Balinese characters imbued with magical meaning), artistically rendered bebantenan (offerings to the Almighty) or other such ceremonial imagery such as umbul-umbul, meru, kober, ider-ider or penjor. For Agung Mangu feels that the artistic legacy he bears need not be so obviously exhibited in religious imagery, and takes pride in the fact that “you have to take time to look at my work to get a sense of my Balinese-ness.”
Without
meaning to belittle the great contribution of Balinese tradition and religion to the
development of art, Agung Mangu still prefers his own choices of colour, lines and
intellectual wanderings. “There’s so many kinds of beauty that demand
interpretation. Why should we always be going back to the same old ‘local
cultural’ aesthetic?”
Naturally then, Agung Mangu’s works are far from predictable. They offer both glimpses of his soul, as well as more ephemeral images that may pass him by in a flash. At the moment he happens to be bored with the fish theme portrayed in works such as ‘Abstraksi Ikan II’ (Fish Abstraction II), ‘Ikan Purba’ (Prehistoric Fish), ‘Ikan Biru’ (Blue Fish), and ‘Imajinasi Bawah Laut’ (Imagination under the sea). And when the inevitable ‘what’s next’ question is posed, he answers: “I don’t really understand myself. I’m new to the art world, and that novelty gives me energy to keep painting and, by extension, to continue the search.”
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photos by Ari Basuki
Above:
1. 'Abstraksi Ikan' (Fish abstraction). Acrylic and oil on canvas
2. 'Vas' (Vase). Acrylic and oil on canvas
3. Agung Mangu in his Denpasar studio
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