Wonder Lake Sentani Cultural and Art Most Popular Papua Tourism

The stillness of the water is most peaceful, evoking a peculiar wonder whether such a lake should indeed exist in paradise. The embracing Cyclops Mountains to the north and the lush vegetation as backdrop, securely protect the twenty four villages surrounding the lake. Sentani city located in Jayapura has lots of natural beauty. In order for indigenous values and culture, the art of the tribes around Lake Sentani region doesn’t come to fade, then the Sentani Cultural festival held deemed necessary. Lake Sentani Cultural Festival held each year in the kalkote Region Tourism-lake Sentani, Jayapura regency, Papua. This event is a cultural festival from several villages around Lake Sentani and several districts in Papua as an effort to support government programs to increase tourist visits Indonesia.

Oceanic art forms are extraordinarily diverse. Although particular genres, such as figurative representations of ancestors, spirits, and gods, are found across the region, and optical dynamism in seemingly abstract designs on weapons, bark cloth, and tattoos is also widely attested to, few generalizations can be made for Oceania as a whole. Neither Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the major regions into which Oceania is conventionally divided, nor significant areas, such as the Sepik River basin, are stylistically homogeneous. Such a degree of variety no doubt reflects a spirit of experimentation that led groups to differentiate themselves from their neighbours, experiment with new materials, and respond to new constraints, as they encountered and settled Oceania’s distinct environments. This voyaging orientation and spirit of experimentation survived and indeed seized upon opportunities during the colonial period, and it is evident today in the vitality of the contemporary arts of Oceania.

  
The Sentani area is located at the northern part of Irian Jaya and famous for abstract paintings written or painted on bark:
Lake Sentani barkcloth is highly distinctive, and generally took the form of maro (skirts or loincloths). Some pieces feature seemingly abstract, highly dynamic interlocked curvilinear forms, and others hybrid fish-like or lizard-like creatures, often with human faces. Almost abandoned around 1900, this art was revived in the 1930s in response to the interest of dealers and collectors, and is sustained in the present. Sentani bark
pictures use only three colors, black, white and red. Black is made from charcoal, white from sea-shell, red from Sentani soil. The bark is peeled off and flattened. Sometimes there are natural holes within the bark and the designs.

Tapa, or Bark Cloth, is a nonwoven fabric decorated with figurative and abstract designs usually applied by scratching or by painting. The basic clothlike material, produced from the inner bark, or bast, of certain trees (bark fiber), is made by stripping off the bast, soaking it, and beating it to make the fibers interlace and to reduce thickness. The most popular material is the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, although breadfruit and fig trees are also used. Hand-painted bark cloth is limited today primarily to northern Australia, the island of New Guinea, and parts of Melanesia.

Spirals symbolize the swirl of Lake Sentani itself or so some claim: Official art developers convinced tribal leaders to abolish traditional carving rights and restrictions on the use of motifs, arguing that such concerns were no longer relevant. Among contemporary bark cloth paintings produced by the Asei islanders of Lake Sentani, I noted several unusual pieces clearly combining both Asmat and Sentani motifs. The Asmat motifs were the 'bipane' (boar tusk nosepiece symbol) and hornbill head (in brown), a crocodile (either Sentani or Asmat), Asmat human figures that transform into Sentani spiral motifs called 'fouw' and Sentani fish. Such a fusion is reminiscent of Batik Irian, yet the use of Asmat motifs by Sentani people for monetary gain goes against unspoken rules of conduct among many Papuan artists.

Numerous fish, including swordfish & sea turtles, are often painted on a piece of bark cloth from Asei or an other local village from Lake Sentani : Fish and other water animals were often portrayed on bark cloth since bark cloth has traditionally been the clothing of the married woman and since, in the Sentani region, it is mostly women who catch fish. Sentani Lake was an old sea inlet which had been separated from the ocean by a volcanic eruption.

This is the reason why sea fish such as swordfish occur on the cloths. Traditionally, pieces of bark cloth were painted with patterns such as wavy lines and spirals. The current style, characterized by separate figures that seem to float freely in space, is probably a development of the 1920s and ‘30s. Women have created bark cloths paintings for centuries. The bark is first cleaned by scraping it with a shell. Thereafter, the outer bark is loosened with beaters and then cut away. The thinner, inner bark is worked with beaters until the cloth has the right thickness and dimensions. The cloth is soaked in water, wrung out, and then hung up in the sun to dry. The painting is man's work.