Art of the Ancestors Lampung Gallery Renovation
Lampung is situated at the southern tip of Sumatra, where the Sunda Strait meets the Java Sea. This area was once a notable crossroad for trade and cultural exchanges for more than a thousand years. As one of the world's main regions for pepper cultivation, and as late as the end of the colonial period under the Dutch in the 1930s, as much as thirty percent of this essential spice's output came from Lampung. The nexus of trade is reflected in the wide range of artistic influences culled from cultural practices and trade items from India, other areas in Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. As new repertoires of artistic sensibilities were introduced, they often became commingled with animistically oriented motifs that were deeply rooted in the region's antiquity and local cosmogony.
Historically, this region was under the suzerainty of Srivijaya, Indonesia's first powerful maritime empire that once stretched over a large portion of Southeast Asia. Due to Lampung's proximity and economic importance, local traditions there were exposed over a long time to Buddhistic, Hindu, Islamic, and European goods and concepts. Starting in the 16th century as a coastal maritime religion, Islam began to spread into the interior of South Sumatra. However, headhunting rituals associated with raising one's rank and status persisted and were still being practiced into the 19th century in the interior (Marsden).
As the impact of courtly Islamic culture rose and Dutch hegemony grew, feasts of merit where largesse was displayed and dispensed evolved and then slowly diminished in their importance. Very few three-dimensional heirloom items stored in rumah pojang or traditional treasure houses that were not perceived as consistent with the values of these two external forces have survived. What has been handed down to posterity is a surprisingly large number of ceremonial textiles. In contradistinction, only a few singular examples of floral or figurative carving in wood from Lampung exist, and most are now in museum collections.
We invite our readers to read, explore and enjoy our revamped and expanded Lampung gallery. There, one can experience the richness of the area's carving traditions that survive in the form of rarely seen sesako or ritual seats, panels from ceremonial gates, and fragments from ritual conveyances that once bore witness to grand status raising and rite of passage ceremonies. Our expanded gallery is replete with a fine array of ceremonial banners, tampan or square woven wrappers, mats, and the sarongs of aristocratic women that attest to the region's rich history and vanished ceremonies.