Inspired by the book Warna Bali, the second chapter of Ubud Art Ground explores how colors moves across tradition and contemporary art. Beyond fixed symbolism, colors becomes a space for perception, expression, influence, and hybridity, within Bali and beyond.
What happens when artists stop simply using color and begin writing to it?
In Bali, color has long carried meaning. It lives in ritual, architecture, textiles, dance, masks, and painting, linked to cosmology and spiritual life. Gurat Institute's research, published in the book Warna Bali (2025), revisits this knowledge and opens the way for a new conversation.
Surat-Surat kepada Warna begins there. The first part of the exhibition presents Gurat Institute's archive, tracing color through Balinese cultural practice, from the seen world (sekala) to the unseen (niskala).
The second part brings us into the present. Artists from Bali and beyond were invited to write a letter to color. Some look back to what they inherited: a grandmother's palette, natural dyes, the remnants of ritual. Others write from the noise of the city, the weight of materials, or the limits of language. In their hands, color is no longer only a symbol to be read. It is something remembered, chosen, and made.
Together, these letters form a conversation across time, between tradition and the present, and between each artist and the color that has shaped them.
Curated collectively by writers, researchers, and Ubud Art Ground.
Letters from the Artists
Gede Mahendra Yasa paints a tronie, a close study of the human face, entirely in aerosol spray, sculpting weight and volume through broken color and dramatic glazing.
Valasara treats canvas as material rather than surface, stitching and shaping it before finishing it in white gesso. Raised amid Bali's vivid rituals, he turns to white to quiet the noise and search for clarity.
NPAAW writes to the bright, warm colors of ceremony and custom, exploring how opaque layers stop light while transparent ones let it pass through, creating space within space.
Dede Eri Supria writes from Jakarta, where traffic, pollution, and crowded streets become pastel cardboard labyrinths and bursts of orange, blue, and magenta against the gray of the city.
Gusti Kade, in Vertical Intercourse: Nature, Industry, Waste, brings together sappan wood, indigo, coconut fiber, and bamboo with industrial and ritual remnants, asking what it means to be a conscious Balinese today.
Mohammad Akbar works with cinema and moving image, using satire and dark humor to explore the gaze between subject and object, set within dystopian and utopian worlds.
Arin Dwihartanto's Curry Chilli for Two begins with a bowl of instant noodles on a rainy afternoon and follows flavor and color through the body, from comfort to the traces it leaves behind.
I Wayan Arnata lets ochre, brown, and gray hold memory, while white, blue, and violet invite stillness. Through thread and color, he reads Bali as a reality still in motion.
Melati Suryodarmo's I Love You is a five-hour durational performance in which she carries a large pane of glass while repeating a single phrase, testing the weight and fragility of language and love.
Kadek Armika imagines Mother Earth and the human brain as mirrored networks of rivers, roots, and neurons, suggesting that the damage to nature begins in the human mind.
Ichwan Noor presents bodiless garments that reflect how identity is put on and taken off like clothing, shifting with every encounter.
Irfan Hendrian writes two texts: a risograph manifesto for fluorescent pink, purple, and orange colliding imperfectly, and a reflection on imitation gold foil, burned in Chinese rituals and cast onto Chinese Indonesian identity.
Tara Kasenda's pastel palette, inherited from her mother and grandmother and shaped by Impressionism, contains no black. It has followed her from Indonesia to France, a constant that feels like home.
Sarita Ibnoe's Expanding the Breath of Colour knots discarded yarn ends into one continuous thread, extending the life of color. Her letter thanks natural dyes such as indigo, turmeric, and sappan for their quiet imperfection.