Bark Cloth of Island Southeast Asia in Global Museum Collections

Kenyah Ceremonial Jacket
© Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen | The Netherlands

Bark Cloth of Island Southeast Asia in Global Museum Collections

Curated by Steven G. Alpert

This month, Art of the Ancestors celebrates often-lesser-known bark cloth or tapa traditions from Island Southeast Asia. The word ‘tapa’ is of Tahitian origin for smoothly beaten bark cloth. Tapa were often decorated with stamped and stenciled designs. At their most aesthetic height, the applied motifs were freely drawn by the makers. Items made from bark cloth were once created over a wide swath of geography ranging from Africa to South America, Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and New Guinea, as well as numerous areas in Island Southeast Asia.

The beating of bark into sheets and the creation of tapa is an ancient, time-honored craft that predates the development of the backstrap loom in Asia. Its origins may lie somewhere in what is today Southern China and its surrounding environs. Distinctive grooved flat stones from wooden handled beaters that were used to create tapa were archaeologically excavated at Guangxi and have been dated to ca. 8,700 BC. Tapa making is also deeply associated with Austronesian-speaking peoples and their remarkable far-flung diaspora. By the third millennium BC, the use of beaten bark cloth for clothing and ceremonial use was becoming well-established. By the first millennium AD, tapa (kapa) making had reached as far as Hawaii, where it flourished, and to areas like New Zealand, where it soon became an extinct practice.

In Asia, while other trees and woody vines from the Ficus (fig) or the Artocarpus family were used to make cloth, it is the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) that was most highly prized for this process. It has been suggested that this ‘super tree’ contained the most highly transported fiber crop of prehistory. Paper mulberry not only produces bark cloth and paper but also edible food, wood for carving utensils, an excellent fibrous rope, a yellowish dye, unguents, laxatives, and other efficacious medicines.

To make bark cloth, uniquely shaped scrapers, stone-encased or oblong square-headed wooden beaters, mallets, and anvils were used to extract the vascular plant tissue material or ‘bast’ from under the bark’s cambium. This material must then be soaked, fermented, and laboriously pounded to stretch, shape, and adhere new strips of tapa to reach a cloth’s intended dimensions and desired level of fineness.

In contradistinction to modern weaving, which is generally identified as a female preoccupation, the labor to create and decorate tapa was often a communal activity that might include both male and female participation. In Indonesia, bark cloth is referred to as ‘kulit kayu.’ Kayu translates as “wood.” However, the word ‘kulit’ is quite malleable as it relates not only to the outer bark or covering of trees or animal hides but also to describe our skin.

While everyday worn tapa was largely undecorated, items for ceremonial wear developed their own lexicon of designs primarily based on social status and individual achievement. Tapa was often associated with aristocrats and warriors, a priestly class, or given in dowries and dispensed as gifts of affection and honor. As with textiles in more modern times and terms, an amassment of tapa was one measurement of a family’s or house’s wealth and prestige.

Many of the items illustrated below were worn during festivals and rites of passage ceremonies. Seldom-seen finely decorated jackets of high artistic distinction are illustrated here from the islands of Enggano, Halmahera, and Borneo. From Central Sulawesi, spanning the northern regencies of West to East Toraja, including the Kulawi, Bada, and Poso, there are examples of brightly decorated ceremonial sarongs and flared tunics. The latter are still being created and worn. Torajan men also ceremonially don distinctive tapa headcloths known as siga. These are rhomboid-shaped and wrapped in a particular manner that allows two ends to dramatically stick out as if mimicking the ‘ears’ of the Asiatic buffalo. The buffalo is the Toraja people’s most highly revered animal, and as a symbol of status and wealth, they are routinely sacrificed. Their meat is distributed at funerals and on other major ritual occasions. The depiction of buffalo horns is an important, oft-repeated motif in the region’s art. From this area, there is also a finely painted sirih bag for carrying betel nuts displayed below. Each side panel depicts four florets composed of stylized buffalo horns, leaf tips, and carefully placed dots. Bags such as this one were worn at ritual functions. They could also be exchanged as tokens of affection between amorous couples.

Behind the designs or compositions on many of the items illustrated here, there is a raison d’etre, a reason why it was placed there that often is not only decorative but purposeful. The drawings on a pair of pages from a Batak book or pustaha are illustrated with visual keys to the surrounding text. While each pustaha is different, its subject matter was often related to calendric cycles or the casting of powerful spells and incantations. Batak priests (datu) employed a secret language (hata poda) to initiate, convey, inform, and properly fulfill one’s ritual life. Inside its wooden covers, Datu recorded their knowledge and recipes for mastery on folding pages fashioned from the inner bark (cambium) of the alim tree or agarwood (Aquilaria malaccensis).

In another example of retaining cultural knowledge while broadcasting a message, there are the design clusters on two cidako from the island of Ceram. Worn like a high-waisted cumberbund, the designs (oyale) on the most finely decorated warrior belts refer to an individual’s martial prowess and correspond to the number of human heads previously taken by its owner.

The more one examines these older works, the variation of ideas, themes, and designs in traditional Indonesian tapa seem remarkably diverse and inventive. These rare items are often buried deep within the vaults or storage depots of older museums that house Indonesian material.

As our readers generally know, bark cloth was superseded by the loom, as weaving could produce items with technology, providing its makers with a more durable commodity that could be manufactured in large numbers and last for a longer period. The addition of imported trade cloth or factory-woven fabric supplanted or affected many island weaving and bark cloth-making traditions before their current revival. Colonial administrations and conversion to world religions further constrained the production and use of emblematic bark cloth. Tapa is no longer commonly made, and production is nowadays confined to just a few locales in Indonesia. In Sulawesi and Papua, illustrated tapa is reemerging in new forms and palettes largely for tourist consumption. A by-product of outside enthusiasm for this art form is the intriguing re-introduction of bark cloth items into the cultural practices and ceremonial cycles, particularly in these two areas.

No mention of Indonesian-painted bark cloth would be complete without honoring the famous maro paintings of Lake Sentani. With their mélange of asymmetrical and symmetrical designs, they are among the finest renderings on tapa extant. The highly imaginative anthropomorphic figures that often cover these tapas were said to represent spirit beings, helpers, and folkloric heroes that dwell deep within the lake. They could become briefly visible (for those who could see them) within the fleeting arcs of rainbows and at dusk along the shoreline.

In their immediacy and fluidness, the beauty of Lake Sentani line drawing is, in a sense, the modern artistic heir to ancient illustrative pre-Austronesian cave paintings found in many parts of the archipelago. In recent years, the scientific world was astonished to discover exquisitely painted images of animals dating back some 45,000 years. These were located within a cave known as Leang Tedongnge in a remote valley dotted with karst formations on the island of Sulawesi. While the history of humanity is ever-unfolding, these are, to date, the oldest known figurative images ever found. Apprising the imagery on bark cloth underscores the impression that, geographically, Indonesia has always been and still is one of the world’s greatest wellsprings for enduring artistic expression.

— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors