I Nyoman Adiana : The Children of Rainbow Opening Exhibition at Zinc Art Space

Art lovers, tonight Zinc Art Space will be having a small opening exhibition of the I Nyoman Adiana : The Children of Rainbow. So if you're free, pop by Zinc Art Space from 8pm to 11pm today, have some refreshments and enjoy the paintings displayed.

�Only children know what they are searching,� says the little prince. �They spend so much time playing with their dolls; and the dolls become so important staff for them that if you take the dolls away, they will cry.� �Children are lucky,� says the guardian.
� Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry

�A child has in him/her amazing things.�
� Goenawan Mohamad

Call Her Mey Mey
Her name is Zhen Xin, and her full name is Luh Made Zhen Xin Vijaya. But her family and the persons she loves sweetly call her: Mey Mey. This is the way they call their beloved daughter in the Chinese tradition. She is about to come to her three. She was born on March 5, 2007�ten months after the devastating earthquake measuring at 5.9 Richter scale happened in Yogyakarta and destroyed some parts of the ex-Mataram Kingdom�s territory.

Drawing from her name�we may speculate�that Mey Mey is a little girl who is raised in two different cultures: Bali and China. As we know, her father is a Balinese (Indonesia) and her mother is a Malaysian-Chinese. Mey Mey is the second child of artist Putu Sutawijaya, the owner of Sangkring Art Space Gallery. Mey Mey�s brother is a nine years old boy named Putu Zheng Kang Vijaya.

In the realm of Indonesian culture, a child like Mey Mey is called �Bocah Benang Raja� or, you may in a metaphoric sense call her/him �a Child of Rainbow�. �Bocah Benang
Raja� is a term that the people use to refer to a child with multicultural background�a child whose biography will be filled with ethnocultural and ethnonational elements. In
recent studies, �Bocah Benang Raja� is conceived as a symbolic materialization of what Will Kymlicka calls it as multicultural citizenship.

At this point, I can understand better of what I quoted above from the famous Indonesian poet. What is more�and this is not a coincidence�is that almost all of the latest works of I Nyoman Adiana showed in this exhibition deal with the main theme Mey Mey taken in different poses but with the same sweet and charming expression.

As far as I know, Adiana�s works have showed the artist�s ability to visualize not only important moments in Mey Mey�s life but also her close relationship with her uncle�especially her warm relationship with the uncle who is an artist named I Nyoman Adiana.

Text by Wahyudin

To find out more about Zinc, check out my previous posts, 'Kinky Blue Fairy @ Zinc Opening', 'Welcome to Zinc' and 'Zinc, The Opening'. You can also visit the website at here.