Creating a batik pulse..

The momentum is growing and members of local batik industries are not allowing a depressed economy to get them down. Instead; artists, musicians, writers and fashion designers are banding together to collaborate and brainstorm about how to strengthen our local industry.

Some ideas for batik practitioners to keep batik alive. It is our hope to see amateurs and professional artists from various backgrounds practise their social responsibility to develop their local communities, capitalizing on the learned values of tolerance, peaceful co-existence, and social cohesion through artistic expression and teamwork.

The strategies are as follows:

• Become an umbrella for artists through facilitating camps, forums, seminars, and meetings to help artists realize the value of their talents and encourage usage of their talents, and also to motivate the public to understand the real value of arts and media.
• Facilitate art workshops for talented people to learn how to create batik in a creative manner.
• Prepare and arrange two libraries (physical and electronic) to be available for the artists.
• Facilitate Art Reach trips to different countries, where arts play a role in community development and building different kinds of bridges.
• Support the use of artistic multimedia at workshops
• Establish arts centers in different cities which will provide academic artistic teaching for artists and help build bridges between the artists and their communities.

We invite you to submit your thoughts and ideas on how to keep batik alive.