The art at Hotel Pondok Tingal

The inner courtyard of Hotel Pondok Tingal

This’ll be a short post. I’m writing from our hotel, Pondok Tingal, which is remarkable because 1) we can afford HOTELS here, and 2) this place has some WEIRD art. I can’t say our hotel room is the most luxurious thing ever, but it’s private and accompanied by a verdant courtyard below and a good restaurant in-house.

The morning view from our balcony.

But THE ART. I don’t know where these folks got their stuff from, but it’s bizarre and amazing. Some of it’s more traditional:

Faces of Wayang dolls punched and painted into a buffalo hide.

Then there’s this stuff:

This face of a man, made from a dew-glazed leaf, overlooks Borobudur. I have no idea who this guy is–only that it doesn’t look like Sukarno or Suharto (to me).

And then there’s this sci-fi Indonesian tribal painting.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on in that last one, but I’m pretty sure it’s a sci-fi resurrection of an Indonesian robo-tribal chieftain. A hundred questions about this painting remain, but the most important is: where can I buy one?