Then, I saw “Indonesia” in the Lotus Market at Houhai: bars linked together, “Lotus”, “Buddha”, “Face”, inside the giant windows were piled high with Bali style furniture, Buddha statues, masks, door hangings; under the glaring lights inside, the floors were covered in cobblestones and sea shells, tropical plants in the greenhouse…

Does coming to this bar count as going to Bali? to Sumatra?!

Then I thought of Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid, an artist couple living in Bali who I’d met when I was in Indonesia. I know those bars on the shore of Houhai have no connection with them. But with the “Bali craze” and “Southeast Asia craze” that have swept through Chinese city life on a massive scale in recent years, the Bali style and the Southeast Asian culture have been depicted and defined as a kind of fossilized cultural essence and have been turned into a kind of consumer product. People’s experience and imaginings of Bali, aside from the much lauded heavenly beauty of the island, are really nothing at all. But must “heaven” always voluntarily extend its beauty for outsiders and tourists to see? It was coming to know Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid, understanding their art and their almost legendary careers that gave such a know-nothing as myself a glimpse into the conundrum that is the reality behind Bali’s heavenly halo.

One evening two years ago I went to visit Astari Rasjid and Pintor Sirait’s studio. It was a lovely wooden cottage in a picturesque garden. A warm evening breeze blew, whistling through the grass. The ground was shaking with the sound of frog calls. The edges of the sky cut into the moon like a knife. We chatted all night on the veranda, enjoying the elegant music and the wonderful wine in our cups as I listened to this couple narrating their romantic love and their legendary experiences. That gathering gave me an unexpected artistic shock which was only outstripped by their thriving creativity and sizzling passion. The seemingly gentlemanly Pintor Sirait was full of inexhaustible explosive power. His works are made on sheets of stainless steel. He marks them by shooting them with a gun to create a strong, piercing visual effect. The bullet holes on stainless steel are like the flowers of life in bloom, coldly beautiful and grievous. The lovely hostess’s works seem to be the opposite of her elegant appearance: her self-portrait disguises a cold-blooded killer; the violent posture is covered over by lovely advertisement packaging. Obviously, their art has surpassed the idealized rural scenes and odes to the beauty of the tropics that I’ve gotten used to seeing around Southeast Asia. Pintor Sirait believes that most traditional Indonesian artistic expressions are beautiful and romantic, like heaven. Everything is peaceful and good. This kind of art has only one meaning: it is for foreigners and tourists. If we were to continue down this set path, there will be limitations. There’s no way to express the true self and the reality in which it resides. I don’t know much about Indonesian culture and history, much less the artworks of these two. But I can still feel them trying, through these kinds of creations, to express their strong sentiments for the world and society, to examine their own passionate feelings and their burning desire to enter into international artistic discussion as Indonesian contemporary artists. Just like the reality that art expresses, the repeated explosions and terrorist attacks that have rocked this island and the 9-11 tragedy in America have truly changed the tides in the world. After a long period of peace and prosperity, one surprise disaster after another have forced us to say goodbye to our wistful, simplistic, idealized and whitewashed understanding. Meanwhile it has piqued the artists’ curiosity towards the world. The heavenly world of Bali is not just made up of the fame and lives of those core colonizers of days past, the tourists and consumers; it also implies the pained faces of the Arabs, Javans and indigenous peoples. Oftentimes we are using our observations of others to understand ourselves. The world has already undergone sea change. Artists are also discovering that the self in those images has also gone through important changes, and those traditional limiting elements have evaporated with new questions emerging rapidly in their place.

Vanessa told me early this year that Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid would be coming to Beijing this summer to hold an exhibition at her 798 space. Their recent works are even more of a meditation on the globalized and post-colonial context of real society in Indonesia: in Pintor’s