I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (more popularly known as Murni) was a former domestic helper and factory worker who in the early 1990s turned to art and took lessons from Balinese painter I Dewa Putu Mokoh in Ubud. Unlike Mokoh’s naïve stylization of Balinese life, Murni used abstracted but stark images of the female body to depict and document (often with surrealistic and sexualised humour) her journey of personal discovery as a woman, of her lived experiences as well as her imaginary worlds. Initially criticized for being perverse and immoral, what Murni showed us was in fact all aspects of her femininity and her environment, both the pleasures and the pain. She painted an ordinary world in an extraordinary way and transmuted her experiences with violence (rape by father), social taboos (childlessness and divorce) and illness (ovarian cancer) into vividly coloured paintings that are replete with metaphors and symbols. Since 1995, Murni’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions in Indonesia and abroad, and she is now regarded as one of the most important Indonesian female artists of her generation and part of the expanded field of contemporary Balinese art. She passed away on 11 January 2006 just shy of 40.
