The exhibition’s title Luar Negery is something that Oototol wrote on many of his artworks, either in full or as the acronym “LNY.” Below his signature, he commonly added his village, island and country, followed by this misspelled Indonesian phrase, which translates as  “overseas.”

Although little is known about Oototol’s early life, the twentieth century’s political upheavals clearly left their mark. He was born in Pengosekan, near Ubud, at the tail end of Dutch  colonial rule. His given name, Dewa Raram, was allegedly inspired by the rattle of warplanes over his village during the Japanese occupation (1942–45). Japan’s World War II surrender on August 15, 1945 led to Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, with vice-president Mohammad Hatta, declaring his nation’s independence two days later. The Dutch fought to reclaim the islands, but were defeated in 1949 after a bitter guerrilla war.

In recent years, art historians have sought to revise Eurocentric accounts of modern art,  moving beyond the view of modernism as a movement sparked by Rousseau’s latenineteenth-century contemporaries in Paris and other European cities, which then elicited  brave new vocabularies elsewhere. Oototol’s output offers an opportunity to reframe it as  emerging across many continents. To what extent might Balinese painting, with its roots in  ancient China and India, command its own chapter in the history of modern art? And how  does an artist like Oototol, in tandem with Mokoh and Murni, reinvent this lineage at the turn  of the millennium? Such questions paint a picture of multiple modernisms—none entirely  “Western” in origin—coming into being through a global web of exchanges and  interconnected art histories.

Just when we think we are getting to know Oototol’s artworks, they surprise us. In a large sketch of a uniformed figure holding a wheelbarrow, the figure’s left waistline juts out wider than their jacket. In a portrait of a kneeling figure, the hands pose like those of a Balinese  legong dancer, and the rear leg is unnaturally long. These distortions speak to the  relationship between art and modernity in Asia, in the sense that things often don’t fit the conventional frame, and only for the best. Moreover, they also show an artist having fun.  Oototol frequently experiments with doubling: In one painting, two soldiers mount a horned  bull while harvesting melons, their legs truncated by the basket they sit in; in another, the  relationship is inverted, with the bull riding in the wheelbarrow. Through these refrains and  others, such as animals butting heads and soldiers’ knees bucking outwards, Oototol  presents us a world that is whimsical, poignant and unapologetically alive.