American Batik Design Competition

Indonesia's first president, Soekarno introduced his concept that the artistic and cultural merit of batik should be a mark of national identity and simultaneously expressed the message of Indonesian unity: batik in the future would no longer be known as coming from a specific batik-producing area but would reflect Indonesian unity in its elements, both design and colors.

As the first step in turning this concept into a reality, Soekarno brought together traditional court batik designs and the coastal batik process. This was followed up with the development of designs drawn from woven ornamentation on textiles throughout Indonesia, for example Bali, the Dayak people, and Papua. Thus, there came into being a batik style that he dubbed "batik Indonesia", which to this day still serves as inspiration for batik artists and entrepreneurs in creating their works.

Firstly developed by batik artists as K.P.T. Hardjonagoro and Ibu Bintang Soedibjo, Batik Indonesia blended classical batik designs and ethnic dress ornamentation from Indonesia's various regions with the north coast batik color system then inspired the genesis of innumerable creations that greatly extended the horizon of batik in the archipelago.

The most popular Batik Indonesia are terang bulan of Ibu Bintang Soedibjo (Ibu Soed) and sekar kenanga of K.P.T. Hardjonagoro. The organization of the terang bulan batik design is unique: the center of the cloth is a wide monocolored field that may be randomly scattered with small ornaments drawn from the pinggiran design, while the edges of the cloth are decorated with a traditional design or a floral arrangement, both enhanced with and also without isen tanahan.

Today, batik Indonesia is widely developed as a modern-fashion material, for both daily and high-fashion dress, made of diverse raw materials and decorated with designs deriving from court batik as well as other types of batik and regional ornamentation. This type of batik is the result of the involvement of such batik maestros as Iwan Tirta of Jakarta, Ardiyanto Pranata of Yogyakarta, and Batik Danar Hadi of Surakarta.

Source : http://americanbatik.embassyofindonesia.org/gallery/indonesian_batik/index.htm