Kemalezedine’s interest in developing contemporary Balinese painting stems from his concern over its position in Indonesian art. He was born in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, the only surviving sultanate in modern Indonesia, and trained as an artist at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). When he moved to Bali in 2012, he found the reception of local art was separate from “Indonesian” art. Balinese painting, with its complex history of indigenous and exoticised influences, remained under the influence of foreign artists living and working in Bali since the 1930s with little to no acknowledgement from art critics writing on Indonesian mod- ern and contemporary art. Recognising this situation as untenable, Kemalezedine co-founded Neopitamaha with a few other Balinese and non-Balinese painters as an avant-garde proposal for contemporary Balinese art.
Neopitamaha interrogates Balinese visual history and its relevance to contemporary art and Indonesia. Kemalezedine’s strategy was a critical deconstruction of specific Balinese visual iconography in a variety of genres, from street art to landscape, while honouring and acknowl- edging its complex history. Our Existence within a Scene (2020 onward) is one series of land- scapes by Kemalezedine.