The Language of Cloth

Often cloth printed with batik images is mistakenly called “batik”. In the west, most people don’t realize that batik is not a printed cloth at all, but something much more specific and complex. Batik is a process in which designs are applied to cloth by hand with melted wax, then immersed in a dye bath, after which the wax is removed to reveal the design on the areas of the cloth that resisted the color because of the wax. This is called a wax resist and it is an ancient form of decorating cloth. It has reached it’s highest artistic achievement however in Java during the last several centuries.

Recently I commissioned my friend Cecile Gady at Cakework who has been making beautiful cakes that have achieved a very high level of artistic creativity for over 25 years to create a cake decorated with batik images. Of course it is not really a batik cake as there was no wax resist process used to create it, just as there is no wax resist used to make most cloth that is commonly called batik. Cecile uses a technique that reproduces digital images in edible food coloring on a thin flat sheet of rolled white chocolate. The cake is then wrapped with this edible “material”.

The images were taken from a very special batik from the workshop of Oey Siok Kiem, a Pernakan, or Chinese-Indonesian  batik-maker whose workshop was in Pekalongan on the north coast of Java in the 1950’s. The style is called pesisir or coastal, because of the influence that coastal trade had on design elements of batik from that area. The bouquet motif was very popular in this type of batik and demonstrates a European influence. It works quite well on a cake too!

(Click on this photo to see more.)

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum http://www.asianart.org/storeevents.htm is presenting a Trunk Show and Sale of my batik collection on Friday and Saturday, July 15th and 16th from 10 to 5. There are many new designs from all over Java. It’s free and you don’t need admission to the museum to come. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see and touch some of the finest batik silk scarves and shawls in the US. There will be many affordable pieces as well as masterpieces of the art of batik.

CLICK ON THIS PHOTO TO SEE OTHER EXAMPLES OF BATIK IN THE SHOW:

Mega mendung is the name of a batik pattern which originates in Cirebon on the north coast of Java. The name refers to clouds. The origin is Chinese, probably influenced by cloud decoration on 7th century Chinese bronze vessels. It is characterized by a gradation of color from light to dark. The effect is achieved by the batik process by applying successive lines of wax next to each other, with a dye bath of the same color after each application. When the wax is removed the successive lines of color from light to dark create the distinctive gradation that makes this pattern so appealing.

The mega mendung motif in this kain panjang (hip wrapper) batik os adapted to illustrate the carbon monoxide emissions in factory smokestacks.

Detail

This is the final dye bath. At this point 5 successive adjacent lines of wax have been applied, with a dye bath after each one. The entire area of the cloth has been covered with wax except the central area of each cloud. It was not covered with wax during the entire process and consequently received all the successive dye baths, so it is the darkest color in the gradation. After this dye bath the wax will be removed by immersing the cloth in a vat of boiling water.