Today turned out to be a cultural super-Saturday. This is just Part 1...

The Yu Lin Art Gallery is a private collection of Sarawak-related art, featuring work collected over a period of three decades by Chai Chin Khiong. Launched in 2010, and now displaying more than 200 pieces, the gallery opens just a few times a year.




Courtesy of the Sarawak Heritage Society, we had the chance not only to view the art work, but also to see the huge collection of slides Mr Chai has built up from personal visits over many years to an indigenous Bornean people group known as the Penan. Traditionally self-sufficient and nomadic, they were noted for their symbiotic relationship with the forest.

Mr Chai's presentation was essentially ethnographic, but over the years he has seen much change. There is simply not enough rainforest for the Penan to continue their age-old lifestyle, and many have turned to agriculture, fish-farming, and a more settled way of life.

A big question, of course, hovers over the extent to which they wanted that change.

Beneath the beauty of the landscape and people, and the pathos of their evolving situation, a morass of economic, political, developmental, social, and cultural considerations lies in wait for the unwary. It's complicated, and I don't feel at all qualified to pick apart the various strands and interests in the situation, but you can read some of the competing perspectives here, here, here, here, and here.






So that was all very interesting, as was the photomontage from the Borneo Highlands area.

And we loved the gallery. Fascinating to see so many styles of painting represented -- Japanese, Chinese, European -- yet brought together by the theme of Sarawak.




There are also many beautiful artefacts:








We felt very privileged to experience all this.

Yet the day held MORE...