Interview with Peter Lee & Resource Spotlight | “Batik Nyonyas: Three Generations of Art and Entrepreneurship — Nyonya Oeij Soen King, Nyonya Oeij Kok Sing, Jane Hendromartono”
Batik Nyonyas
Three Generations of Art and Entrepreneurship
Nyonya Oeij Soen King, Nyonya Oeij Kok Sing, Jane Hendromartono
by Barbara Watson Andaya, Darryl Lim, Didi Kwartanada, Lynn Chua, Miki Komatsu, Naomi Wang, Peter Lee, and Seng GuoQuan
Family, art, and entrepreneurship converge in the story of three visionary Peranakan women from Indonesia — Nyonya Oeij Soen King, her daughter-in-law Nyonya Oeij Kok Sing, and her granddaughter Jane Hendromartono. From the 1890s to the 1980s, they produced impressive batiks in the renowned batik centre of Pekalongan on Java’s north coast.
Their lives and works reveal how each woman became a batik master in her own right, and how they ingeniously responded to the rapid political, cultural, and economic changes of their times to run a business that produced great art.
Interview with Peter Lee
'Batik Nyonyas' traces and articulates the long-term, multi-generational trajectories of Peranakan Chinese artists and entrepreneurs in the batik world of Pekalongan. What inspired you to spearhead this project, and what was your most enjoyable discovery during its creation?
Many understand that Batik, at its highest level, is an art form. And the word tulis (to write or draw) has been associated with it for a very long time. I have also often heard the remark that they really seem like paintings. Yet we understand so little about Batik as art, let alone about Batik artists and their relationships with their works. In this respect, the gift of a hundred examples by the Hendromartono family provided us with a golden opportunity. We did not just have a couple of pieces to represent a maker; we had a career's worth of works that allowed us to see the creative trajectories of each maker against the backdrop of their lives. We were happily able to dive into documenting microhistories.
What was a huge discovery for me was the diversity of each person's approach to Batik. The artists of the first two generations worked for a significant part of their adult lives until their 50s, spending two to three decades in retirement, while that of the third generation carried on creating Batik right until she passed away in her mid-60s. It was also a big surprise that they also had a hand in other businesses. Nyonya Oeij Kok Sing, for example, was not only a batik maker; she also produced herbal medicine and farmed birds' nests in the family home in Pekalongan. This dynamic combination of art and enterprise was an exciting revelation.
We (myself plus co-curators Naomi Wang and Darryl Lim) did not just have a couple of pieces to represent a maker; we had a career’s worth of works that allowed us to see the creative trajectories of each maker against the backdrop of their lives. We were happily able to dive into documenting microhistories.
For readers of this work and visitors to the exhibition of the same name, what do you feel is most important to pay special attention to?
I would say it is most important to just look at the textiles. The exhibition's narratives and the essays in the catalogue all help to provide some perspective, but still, the superstars of the show are the batiks.
This book focuses on important figures and developments within the Peranakan batik-making world in an intimate and personal fashion. What is your deepest connection to this tradition of experimental innovation that resembles in some sense ideas of 'variation within identity' often associated with jazz, or keroncong, or perhaps with a modern Indonesian sense of national identity?
I think documenting microhistories allows us to contour the past and ultimately understand it in a more organic way. With literature, we can delve into the nuances of human nature and all its paradoxes, while history is trapped by rigid theoretical constructs. Looking so closely at these family stories and the way its members made art resonates so deeply with me as it allows us to think of the past in this much more holistic, naturalistic, and ultimately, amorphous and "fuzzy" way.
As for "tradition" and "identity," these, therefore, become more indistinct the more we produce this kind of work. The term nyonya in the exhibition's title expresses this idea very aptly: it can mean a Peranakan woman, an honorific equivalent of Mrs., or a general term for Peranakan.
For more than a century and a half, Batik has been deeply implicated in the Island Southeast Asian fashion system. How has the past informed the present time? How has the art of Batik retained its shape-shifting dynamism?
We owe it to the many Indonesian batik champions who keep flying the flag there. Our show ends with an epilogue featuring some extraordinary Indonesian women who are reshaping what Batik can mean in contemporary culture, such as Carmanita, Insana Habibie, Mariana Sutandi of Parang Kencana, and Widianti Widjaja.
In your opinion, how can one best attain the ability to interpret the motifs and stories within the medium of Batik?
The classic Javanese court patterns are, in a way, critical to understanding Batik from the 19th century because through this, you can see how batiks of the pesisir or Javanese north coast have designs that are only very loosely based on these patterns. It is truly astonishing how bold their makers were to veer so freely from them and to jumble their meaning. They are, therefore, very powerful social statements.
When it comes to batiks from the pesisir, I would be wary of attaching too much meaning to the motifs. The top pieces were made-to-order, and the complexities of the relationship between maker and patron resulted in bespoke designs, which means we cannot really be sure what was on their minds. Twentieth-century Batik from the north coast can be described as artistic mayhem. Like the best modern art, the designs on the batiks invite the free speculation of the viewer. In a way, the batiks from the pesisir were conceptually the precursor of Batik Indonesia, which also began to freely reinterpret the patterns of the central Javanese royal courts.
Please explain prominent markers or emblematic tropes that permit the identification of “Peranakan aesthetics”? What sets apart Peranakan batik from the larger batik industry in Java and beyond?
I am not certain there were such tropes. I think we can loosely confine, through a broad spectrum of responses, the consumption habits of a community, but I am extremely wary of looking at the creation of art and fashion through ethnicity. The late Harmen Veldhuisen, a very dear and much-missed friend, produced a seminal study on Batik Belanda. This was an influential batik style initiated by some European and Eurasian women in the pesisir in the second half of the 19th century. It was just unfortunate that Harmen considered only those makers who had full or partial European blood, even though this style quickly went viral. Every commercial batik maker in Java, be they European, Eurasian, Javanese, Arab, or Chinese, started madly copying their designs and inventing new ones of their own.
Peranakan batik makers catered to diverse markets and basically produced anything that could sell.
Hybridity and heterogeneity are hallmarks of the batik tradition. You have a decades-long, ongoing love affair with this topic and body of material. What are your next projects?
I have just completed a chapter for the upcoming Cambridge History of Southeast Asia on ethnicity and identity, and of course, it is all about how gloriously mixed up everyone and everything really was in the early modern period. My life's mission is to get everyone to let their "Peranakan-ness" out of their closets. Haha! Everyone is peranakan!
The publication's general editor is the phenomenal Barbara Andaya. The editors for the individual volumes are also stellar: Miriam Stark (volume 1), Leonard Andaya (volume 2), and Robert Cribb (volume 3). If I am not mistaken, the publishers aim to have the volumes out by the end of 2025.
To explore more about Peranakan traditions, where else in Singapore beyond the Peranakan Museum do you recommend visiting?
This is totally biased, as I am its founding curator, but I would certainly recommend NUS Baba House.
Peter Lee
Courtesy of Subject
Peter Lee is an independent researcher, and the Honorary Curator of the NUS Baba House — a historical house museum managed by the National University of Singapore.
He co-authored The Straits Chinese House with Jennifer Chen, published by the National Museum of Singapore in 1998 and 2006. In 2008, he produced Junk to Jewels — The Things that Peranakans Value, an exhibition and catalogue for the Peranakan Museum. He co-curated Sarong Kebaya, which opened in April 2011 at the same museum and a book he wrote on the subject was published in 2014. In 2018 this book was shortlisted for the Singapore History Prize. The 2013 exhibition Inherited and Salvaged: Family Portraits from the NUS Museum Straits Chinese Collection was comprised largely of portrait paintings he had assembled. He also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue that was published in 2015. In 2016, he co-curated Singapore, Sarong Kebaya and Style at the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Shoto Museum in Tokyo. He was the guest curator of Port Cities: Multicultural Emporiums of Asia, 1500-1900 at ACM, which opened in November 2016, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue. In 2017, he was the historical consultant for a Peranakan-themed short film launched at the Singapore Changi Airport Terminal 4. Peter was also the guest curator of Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography, an exhibition held at the Peranakan Museum from 2018 to 2019. In 2020, The Mark of Empire, a four-part documentary in which he features as the series’ host, was broadcast regionally by Channel News Asia, Singapore, and uploaded on YouTube.
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