The clarity that we seek may also be extremely personal, established by our own life experience and unique perspective. This is so that we may appraise the Wianta quality outside the perimeters of aesthetics, conceptual and occidental formalities of academically trained translators. One needs to read Wianta, then, reread him once and twice again. We need to read his works while keeping our present and fast evolving social predicaments within peripheral view. After all, just like Wianta’s, our universe is one that continues to expand. And as Wianta himself have said, “All my forms are in constant flux and change the way life and humanity change. Times, places and situation change, and that’s the way new forms of expression come about. There’s no standing still in life and in art.” [2]

The emphatic journey of Made Wianta is consistently embedded with calls for open dialogue and affirmative action. In 1986, after a visit to Fukuoka, Japan, on the invitation of Ida Bagus Mantra, then governor of Bali, Wianta developed a series of calligraphic pictographs. His cryptic calligraphy engages us in what appears like a meta-language, created after sessions in deep meditation. Through Art and Peace, performed in 1999 at Padang Galak, a beach in Sanur, Bali, Wianta orchestrated a monumental theatre with 2000 performers, featuring a 2000-meter long calligraphic painting, together with two helicopters. This was his a universal call for peace at the end of the millennium. In 2002, at Crossing Lines, an exhibition with Stephan Spicher at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland, Wianta engaged with ideas concerning post-modern constructs of physical, philosophical and cultural borders. This was also inspired by the transient nature of his existence as an artist, one who finds himself on a chain of unending travel and work arrangements. In 2003, at the 50th Venice Biennale, he presented the daring and confrontational installation titled Dreamland. Dreamland, amongst other materials, consisted of photographs of mutilated human bodies, actual blood of cows, rice, bamboo shrines, driftwood and human skeletons. Both works were urgent and almost desperate calls for introspection and discourse on the reality surrounding tragedies. This was primarily in response to the horrors of the civil unrest and race based attacks of May 1998 that exploded in various cities across Indonesia, and of course, the unforgivable terrorist attacks that were the bombings of Bali in 2002.

Wianta’s drive for dialogue could be traced all the way back to his body of ‘concrete poems’. The first, consisting of written works from 1975 to 1995, were bound in together in a book titled Korek Api Membakar Lemari Es, translated The Cigarette Lighter that Burns the Fridge, published in 1996. In the year 2000, he published another body of poetry through 2 ½ Menit or 2 ½ Minutes, a collection of 153 poems composed from 1977 to 2000. This was then followed by the publication of 262 poems as Kitab Suci Digantung di Pinggir Jalan New York or A Bible Hung on a Side Street in New York, published in 2003. For me, his poems and written works are like soliloquies, the reading of which are often both abstract and esoteric, with words sometimes laid out in patterns and deliberate visual formations. While a soliloquy could be described as the act of talking while alone, or speaking as if one was alone, I believe that Wianta was never alone and always connected. Collectively, his works suggest that Wianta has manifested episodes from a multitude of conversations, where whenever he is not in the company of another person, they would have taken place in the presence of the cosmic kind, which is not uncommon for a Balinese.