THE REFLECTION OF A PERSONAL PASSION
Dr. Peter ten Hoopen, author, ethnographer, consultant
Exhibition at Museu do Oriente, Lisbon, 2014/2015.
Love at first sight
I first awoke to the unique beauty of ikat textiles in the mid 1970s, when a friend showed me some cloths she brought along from a stay in Indonesia. Most were batik, a type of textile with which I had been familiar since my youth, growing up in the Netherlands, Indonesia's former colonial ruler. Nearly all returning colonials had brought some batik cloths, used mostly as table cloths, beadspreads or sideboard runners. But one of my friend's cloths was strikingly different. It had a shimmering, almost psychedelic design that was remarkably alive, and a haunting beauty. My friend said that this was an ikat from the island of Sumba, and explained how it was made: that the design was created on the warp threads before they were woven, by binding off certain sections to prevent them from being coloured, then taking the skeins of threads off the loom and immersing them in dye baths, stringing them back up on the loom and realigning them, cutting open the bindings, and making new bindings for the next bath. This to be repeated four or five times.Instantly realizing how maddeningly complex the process was, and how immensely time consuming, I developed great awe for this type of textile and its 'primitive' creators. I also realized that an art form so labour-intensive would be dying out soon. When I first arrived in Indonesia myself a few months later, in a Yogyakarta that, pretensions of royal grandeur notwithstanding, was still a small, provincial town ruled by tradition, I began hunting and bought my first few ikat cloths from a Chinese merchant of old furniture and bric-à-brac. I used them to decorate my Amsterdam apartment, enjoyed friends' universal admiration for them and started reading up.
The passion deepens
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The collector as steward To introduce the subject of collecting, a paragraph from an article by Gully Wells in the November 2015 New York Times Style Magazine re the collection of Sir John Soane that is highly pertinent to our own: "It's easy to assume [..] that he possessed a great fortune. He didn't. What he had instead was a deep and abiding sense of passion, a hunger for knowledge and an infallible eye for quality. Together, these qualities — not money — are what define a true connoisseur. A connoisseur, in the old sense of the term, was less a shopper than a historian. To collect meant to connect yourself to the myriad of civilizations that preceded your own; accumulating objects was a way of placing yourself in a historical continuum, of assuming temporary ownership of something that once belonged to someone else and, after your death, would belong to someone else still. It was an act of humility: It meant educating yourself about a tradition, while also realizing that your education would never be complete. Assuming the mantle of stewardship. [..] It meant devotion. It meant obsession. And as often, collecting was a private pursuit, along with a lifelong one. You spent 20 or 30 years, more, searching for and buying — and, let's not forget, maintaining — art or objects." |
In the early 1990s we moved to Bali for a year, and spent most of the time the kids were in school checking out the collectible textile dealers on the island — of which there were still several — in most cases combing through their entire inventory carefully, and often somewhat feverishly.
I ended up spending much more than foreseen, but fortunately my wife bought my argument that if I did not snap up the good pieces right away, next time they'd be gone or much more expensive — which proved correct. From Bali we moved to New York for a few years, where we made a few acquisitions on the Asian Arts Show and Tribal Arts shows, and then back to Europe, where we bought the occasional collectable piece that came on our path, plus the core of Amsterdam based Dayak Gallery's stock when they went out of business in the late 1980s. The majority of our Iban pua were acquired in this purchase.
Since then many pieces have been bought at on-line auctions and from dealers around the world, mostly field-collectors with more taste than name, and generous rather than greedy. Some very fine pieces were acquired from friendly fellow collectors; more often by trade than by purchase. Several were offered via this website, some bought from established dealers, a few generously donated by people seeking a good home for their loved ones.
Exhibitions, catalogues
From 2014 onwards, the collection began to go public. In 2014/15 Museu do Oriente in Lisbon organised Woven Languages/Linguagens Tecidas, the world's first ikat exhibition that covered most of the Indonesian archipelago, and published the eponymous catalogue which quickly sold out and is now a rare collector's item. In 2017-2018 followed the large exhibition 'Fibres of Life' at Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Hong Kong, which showed more than 100 textiles, again spanning the entire archipelago. The catalogue, a 604 page tome with 240 illustrations was the first systematic reference work on the subject. It showed examples from half a dozen ikat regions and islands which had never been described before. (To place the effort in perspective perspective: Barnes and Kahlenberg's Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles shows only about 40 ikat textiles.) In 2019-2020 Museu do Oriente, recognizing the uncommon strength of the Timor section of the Pusaka Collection — especially in terms of the average age of the specimens — organized the exhibition Timor:Totems and Tokens/Timor: Totems e Tokens, and published the eponymous catalogue, edited by the present author, with contributions from Jill Forshee, Pierre Dugard, Linda S. McIntosh and Georges Breguet. One of the book's strengths is that it shows more than twenty early East Timorese ikat textiles of high quality, including horse blankets, a category never shown before.
Continued research at Leiden University
On the strength of Ikat Textiles of the Indonesian Archipelago in 2018 I was invited to pursue further studies at Leiden University's Archaeology Faculty (ranked 8th in the world), and under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Raymond Corbey and Prof. Dr. Pieter ter Keurs produced the dissertation Ikat from Timor and its Outer Islands: Insular and Interwoven, which studies material from the region in a novel, highly technical way (including microscopy), with a focus on development of yarn over time, weave types in use across the archipelago (21 different weaves types could be differentiated in 41 ikat producing regions), and asymmetry, a phenomenon that is widely distributed in the region but so far received scant attention. This latter study showed up seven different techniques to produce asymmetry, including those on Sumba which involves the creative use of clever visual devices, hidden keys, that were never noticed before. The PhD track was concluded with the thesis's succesful defence on 1 September 2021 in the 441 year old university's ancient academic sanctum. The trade edition of the dissertation may be ordered directly from the academic publisher Sidestone Press. Order your copy here. An authorized summery of the contents is provided on the book's blurb.
For an in-depth look at what is shaping this collection, refer to the page on Collecting Philosophy and an interview by Sandra Sardjono that sheds light on Peter ten Hoopen's motivation for his dedicated documentation of the ikat culture.
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