(b. 1997, Bali, Indonesia)
Jemana Murti’s practice navigates the shifting terrain between tradition and technological mediation. Deeply rooted in his lived experience as a Balinese, his works traverse the sacred and the synthetic, drawing from the island’s rich visual lexicon while reflecting critically on its contemporary mutations. Working across wall-based reliefs, sculptures, and immersive installations, Murti traces the evolution––and often erosion––of meaning as cultural symbols circulate through digital archives, institutional memory, and commodified space.
In 2022 and 2023, Murti participated in the National Gallery Singapore Benefit Auction and received the bronze price in the 2023 UOB Painting of the Year. His works have entered both private and institutional collections across Europe, Asia, and Australia, including at Tentrem Hotel, Louis Vuitton Jakarta, and Morgan Stanley Singapore. His first solo exhibition, Digital Echoes of the Past, was held at Gajah Gallery Jakarta in 2023.
“Secara tema besar, karyaku adalah tentang mempertanyakan preservasi dan nasib dari objek-objek budaya Bali baik itu ukiran, patung, atau gamelan.”
“At its core, my work questions the preservation and evolving fate of Balinese cultural artifacts––be they carvings, statues, or gamelan instruments.”
— Hypebeast interview, 2024
Jemana Murti
Soft Ruins
2025
3D-Printed PETG and Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
100 x 120 cm
In Soft Ruins, fragments of classical Balinese iconography emerge like half-remembered apparitions––folded, creased, and partially submerged within an iridescent terrain. These figures, sourced from non-specific Kamasan scenes, are no longer legible actors in a narrative arc but ghosts of representation. Murti replaces the sacred with the sensorial, allowing the materiality of crumpled memory to eclipse its symbolic weight. What remains is not the myth, but its trace: fragile, fractured, and strangely luminous.
Draft of Utopia
2025
3D-Printed PETG and Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
100 x 120 cm
Draft of Utopia proposes no final image. It is a speculative document––unfolding as a tension between radiant surface and structural fracture. The luminous palette suggests hope or reverie yet beneath lies a wrinkled substrate, a reminder of instability. The Kamasan figures, anonymous and directionless, no longer perform. Instead, they float in a space of suspension, stripped of sacred charge but not of affect. If this is a draft, it is one that acknowledges the impossibility of seamless futures––only partial echoes, layered and reassembled from loss.
Ctrl-V Tiger
2025
3D-Printed PETG and Acrylic
155 x 19.5 x 19.5 cm
The work stands as a vertical monolith, constructed from repeated snarling heads rendered in electric ultramarine. The form recalls the logic of mechanical reproduction where symbolic imagery is extracted from its original context and subjected to repetition. The tiger, once a figure of mythic authority and protection, appears emptied of singularity, its presence multiplied into serial form. Ctrl-V Tiger dissolves not through destruction but through overexposure; meaning gives way to surface, and ritual charge to sculptural display.
Palimpset
2025
3D-Printed PETG and Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
120 x 240 cm
A visual identity unfolds across Palimpset, where overlapping iconographies press into one another like geological strata. Murti orchestrates a surface of accumulation, where disparate Kamasan figures––lifted from varied sources––are layered into near-collapse. The legibility of any one narrative is thwarted; instead, we are left with an image of cultural sedimentation, where tradition is not remembered linearly but compressed, erratic, and imprinted with the labor of forgetting. The crumpled textures are not incidental––they are the form through which memory degrades and transforms.
Blueprint of the Future
2025
3D-Printed PETG and Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
120 x 200 cm
With its saturated hues and spectral reliefs, Blueprint of the Future reads less as a schematic than as a dissonant map––one where cultural time collapses into aesthetic sediment. Here, the notion of the “future” is speculative and unstable. Rather than a projection forward, the blueprint appears to be a feedback loop, where archaic forms––once central to Balinese ritual imagination––are rendered inert through repetition, scanning, and surface display. In Murti’s hands, these figures float like data artefacts, no longer legible but still uncannily present. Crumples, creases, and digital noise take precedence over clarity.
“I like to think of ‘Ghosts of Future’ as a visual representation of what may happen if we get so lazy that we allow technology to do our job, including preserving the culture. I consider this series an antithesis of my culture. I’m doing everything we shouldn’t do when it comes to preserving the legacy of the Balinese people.”
— NOW! Bali Magazine via Life as Art Asia, 2024
Jemana Murti
Mandala Relic
2024
3D-Printed PETG, Bronze Particles, Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
80 x 100 cm
Bronze swirls erupt across a destabilized mandala, fracturing the meditative symmetry traditionally associated with sacred diagrams. The patterns resist orientation; they spiral outward with no central axis, no visual rest. Once a site for contemplation and ritual navigation, the mandala is rendered here as fragment and relic––dislocated by reproduction, its sacred geometry refigured through algorithmic processes. In this tension between the devotional and the digital, Murti captures the moment where form begins to outlive function and presence becomes pattern.
Borrowed Reflection
2024
3D-Printed PETG, Silver Leaf and Acrylic, on PVC and Aluminium
80 x 100 cm
A bouquet of embossed flowers rests against a bed of silver, each petal rendered in exacting detail held in stasis. Borrowed Reflection recalls funerary relief, decorative bas-relief, and mass-produced ornamental panels. The reflective surface resists entry––it mirrors without absorption––while the floral forms, caught between natural elegance and metallic permanence, hovers in an uncanny stillness. No longer ephemeral offerings, these flowers become fixed tokens of aesthetic memory––preserved, polished, and estranged from time.
Enemies at Seven
2023
3D-Printed PETG, Acrylic on PVC and Aluminium
160 x 10 cm
Elongated and compressed, Enemies at Seven evokes a scan or imprint––suggesting a ceremony seen not in lived time but as a visual extraction. Removed from any narrative structure, the forms circulate as ornamental residue. Repetition and displacement render them less as participants in myth and more as figures in suspension, caught between recollection and formal pattern, aura and aesthetic code.
