Started back in 1979, the Yogyakarta Batik Museum is now home to a vast and precious batik collection.

A woman from Germany, Kerstin Goul, visited the Yogyakarta Batik Museum, eagerly listening to museum guide Savi Diawati’s description of its collection, of the batik-making equipment and how to use it, as well as the meaning of a beautifully crafted batik cloth.

Savi also mentioned several batik motifs especially made for royal circles like parang rusak, which is not meant for ordinary people.

“Now, I can understand that batik is made for special purposes,” said the only foreign tourist who happened to be visiting the museum on Sept. 28.

From Savi, Goul learned that batik is manually crafted in three phases: drawing motifs with wax, applying dyes and boiling the cloth to remove the wax.

She also became aware of how many printed batik cloths, instead of handmade pieces, were sold by vendors in the tourist zone of Malioboro. “The batik-making process takes three or four months; that’s why batik is very expensive,” said Savi.

The Yogyakarta Batik Museum was the first themed museum in Yogyakarta. In 1979, a married couple, Hadi Nugroho and Jumima Dewi Sukaningsih (now deceased), set up this museum at their residence in Kampung Bausasran.

It holds about 700 artifacts, 600 of which are batik cloths with various motifs like pesisiran (from Java’s coastal regions), pedalaman (Yogyakarta and Surakarta), Banyumasan, Tuban, Wonogiren and other areas of origin.

Part of the batik collection was produced by the batik company of Hadi and Dewi, named Oscar, which closed down in the 1970s because of the influx of printed products, but there is also a family collection of special batik pieces handed down through generations for more than 100 years, the oldest having been made in 1840.

At present the Yogyakarta Batik Museum is exhibiting its pesisiran batik collection. Coastal batik cloths are steeped in Chinese cultural influences as a result of Chinese traders’ frequent stopovers in Java’s coastal regions during past centuries.

The museum’s operational officer, Maria Carmelia, showed one of the coastal batik masterpieces produced in the 1890s, which is dominated by flowers in soft colors known as the buketan motif, derived from the word bouquet. It’s believed to have been made by Dutch women and the motif was later adopted by ethnic Chinese batik makers for mass trading. “This collection is priceless,” she said.

The other pesisiran motif is kumpeni (Holland), crafted in the 1870s. It has unique images resembling birds, dancing people, marching bands and coconut trees facing one another like mirror reflections. This motif is said to convey the message that truth or falsehood depends on the viewer’s perspective.

“A man from an art gallery in Singapore once came here to buy this kumpeni batik, but we couldn’t give it up,” she recalled. According to Maria, batik pieces can also serve as historical records. Batik makers once drew aircraft or automobile designs when those modes of transportation were invented.

All things batik: Visitors look through souvenirs on display at the Yogyakarta Batik Museum.

The 500-square-meter museum is made up of a display room, a workshop for training people in batik making and a souvenir shop. The batik company of Hadi and Dewi used to be adjacent to this museum, but the plot has now been converted into a hotel.

Maria said the couple, who were not quite wealthy, built the museum to acquaint the public with manual batik making and the meaning behind a piece of batik, for fear of the erosion of the valuable heritage by the cheap products of the batik printing industry.

“Pak Hadi was an ardent lover of batik and Bu Dewi had an artistic flair for creating batik motifs,” added the woman who is now engaged in batik conservation.

Maria hopes the public can benefit from the museum as a facility to learn batik making, an art practiced since the era of the Majapahit Kingdom in the 13th to 15th centuries. Indonesians, particularly the Javanese, can recognize their cultural identity through batik, which was declared by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

“Young people should learn batik making so that our hands aren’t just fiddling with smartphones. Creating batik pieces is a very awesome experience,” she said when she was a speaker at a discussion on “Batik as a cultural heritage and its philosophy” in the Yogyakarta Regional Library.

Simeon, a coffee trader from Malang, East Java, was among the museum’s visitors wishing to know more about batik and its crafting. After observing the museum exhibits and the modest building, he expressed his high appreciation of Hadi and Dewi. “They were really a couple with extraordinary dedication,” he said.

— Photos by JP/Bambang Muryanto