Indonesia: Bali – Setia Darma House of Mask and Puppets

🎭 Hidden in the Rice Fields: The Setia Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Kemenuh, Bali

There are moments when you stumble onto something genuinely extraordinary, and your first thought is: why on earth doesn’t everyone know about this? The Setia Darma House of Masks and Puppets, tucked into the quiet village of Kemenuh about fifteen minutes southeast of central Ubud, was one of those moments for us. It sits on a site of over one hectare, surrounded by rice fields and traditional Balinese family compounds, and it is not — we want to be very clear about this — anywhere near the main tourist trail. The tuk-tuks and tour buses do not come here. The Instagram crowd has, for once, not found it yet.

This turned out to be entirely to our advantage.

We arrived on a hot early afternoon feeling slightly wilted, as one tends to be in Bali by the middle of the day, and made straight for the small café beside the car park. We ordered Balinese coffee — a rich, earthy brew with a depth of flavour that instant coffee can spend its entire existence trying to imagine and never quite get there. We sat and drank it and watched a couple of dragonflies doing whatever dragonflies do in Bali, which appeared to be very little but with great decorative effect. Then we went to pay. The young man behind the counter smiled pleasantly and informed us, with a perfectly cheerful matter-of-factness, that the coffee was complimentary. We blinked at him. He continued to smile. Free coffee. Just like that.

We hadn’t even got to the museum yet, and already it was better than most places we’d been.

The entry turned out to be free as well. Donations are warmly welcomed and, given what you’re about to spend the next couple of hours looking at, are the least you can do. But there is no ticket desk, no laminated sign explaining how much things cost in four currencies, and no particular fuss of any kind. We walked in, and we essentially had the whole place to ourselves.

🏛️ The Man Behind the Masks

The museum was founded in 2006, though the story begins considerably earlier than that. Hadi Sunyoto — a businessman, a collector, and by all appearances a man of serious dedication to Indonesian cultural heritage — had been travelling the archipelago since the late 1980s, quietly rescuing masks and puppets that were gradually falling out of use. Indonesia is an enormous and extraordinarily diverse country: seventeen thousand islands, over three hundred distinct ethnic groups, and a performing arts tradition of staggering complexity and depth. But traditions erode. Ceremonies fade. The old village performances that once marked the agricultural calendar, the festivals, the rites of passage — these were slowly disappearing from everyday life, and along with them the objects central to those performances.

Sunyoto bought them, catalogued them, and kept buying them for the better part of two decades before the collection became large enough — and important enough — to need a proper home. By the time we visited, the collection had grown to over seven thousand pieces: approximately 1,300 masks and more than 5,700 puppets. They come from Bali and Java, from across the wider Indonesian archipelago, and then beyond — from Japan, China, Thailand, Mexico, Italy, and a number of countries in Africa. It is, to use a word we don’t like overusing, remarkable.

🪵 The Houses Themselves

The collection is displayed in a series of traditional Javanese Joglo houses, and this is where the place starts to feel genuinely unlike anywhere else. Joglo houses are antique teak structures — some of the ones here date from the 1920s — characterised by their high tiered roofs, beautifully carved wooden pillars, and open central halls. They were carefully dismantled in Java, transported across the water to Bali, and then painstakingly rebuilt here on the museum grounds. Whether you know anything about Indonesian architecture or not, you feel the age and the weight of these buildings the moment you step inside one.

The light inside them does something strange and rather wonderful. It comes in through latticed windows and woven panels in shifting, dappled patterns, and in that light the masks and puppets have a presence that is — we hesitate slightly here because it sounds dramatic — genuinely unsettling in the best possible sense. You are aware, without quite being able to explain why, that these objects were not made to sit in glass cases. They were made to be worn, to be held, to be animated by the human body and the flickering light of oil lamps at three in the morning while a village gathered round.

🎭 The Balinese Masks: Topeng and Barong Landung

The Balinese ceremonial masks are a world in themselves. The Topeng masks are among the most striking in the collection: elaborate, painted, sometimes frightening, sometimes almost comedic, these are the masks of the Topeng dance tradition, used in Hindu ritual performance and strongly linked to the telling of royal genealogies and historical narratives. Topeng, which comes from a Javanese word meaning “pressed against the face,” has roots going back at least to the fourteenth century and the Majapahit empire, which once dominated much of what is now Indonesia. The performers — often a single male dancer moving through multiple characters — use the masks not just as costume but as a kind of sacred vessel, taking on the character and sometimes the spiritual force of whatever figure the mask represents.

Standing before a case of Topeng masks in the quiet of a teak Joglo house, you got a reasonable sense of why.

The Barong Landung figures are something else entirely. These are enormous — genuinely large — puppet costumes representing the ancestral spirits of a giant man and a giant woman, and they are among the more unusual objects in Balinese religious life. The tradition is thought to date back to the eleventh century, linked to the story of a Chinese princess who came to Bali and whose spirit, alongside that of her Balinese royal husband, is said to protect village communities from harm. The figures are danced through the streets in certain ceremonies, their vast cloth bodies swaying, and they are both slightly comic — the man is usually dark-faced and a little fearsome, the woman lighter-skinned and smiling — and entirely serious in their ritual purpose. Seeing them up close, standing still and tall in the museum’s Joglo halls, had a certain weight to it.

🌿 The Wayang Kulit: Theatre in Leather and Shadow

If the Balinese masks are the theatrical heart of the collection, the wayang kulit shadow puppets from Java are its spine. Wayang kulit — shadow puppet theatre — is one of the oldest continuous performance traditions in the world, and it was designated by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity back in 2003. The puppets are made from buffalo hide, cut and then painstakingly pierced with tiny tools to create intricate silhouettes — figures of gods, heroes, demons, clowns and kings, rendered in extraordinary detail. When held behind a lit screen, their shadows become the performance.

The person doing the holding — and the speaking, and the singing, and the narrating, and the orchestrating of the entire gamelan musical accompaniment — is the dalang, the puppet master. A dalang must command not just the technical skill of manipulating dozens of different puppet characters simultaneously but an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hindu epics — primarily the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — from which the stories are drawn. A full wayang kulit performance runs for eight hours or more, typically through the night, and a dalang performs alone. The training takes years. The tradition, in its full form, is extraordinary.

There is a democratic, slightly anarchic quality to wayang kulit that we found rather appealing. Alongside the great heroes of the epics — Arjuna, Bhima, Rama — there are always the clown-servants, the Punakawan, who comment on events in a broadly comic and often politically pointed way, speaking to the common people in the vernacular while the noble characters speak in elevated Javanese. They are, in essence, the voice of the audience, and they have been doing this for the better part of a thousand years.

🌍 The Wider World in a Village in Bali

One of the pleasures of Setia Darma is that it doesn’t stop at Indonesia. The collection fans out across Asia and then further still — Japanese Noh masks, Chinese opera pieces, Thai ceremonial figures, African masks from traditions as varied as those you’ll find across the Indonesian archipelago. The museum doesn’t make a great theoretical noise about this, which we appreciated. It simply displays the objects and trusts you to look.

Among the more unexpected items in the collection is a puppet made in the likeness of Barack Obama, commissioned during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. We stood in front of it for a moment. We did not pursue further enquiry into the symbolism there.

🌾 The Grounds and the Silence

Between the Joglo houses, the museum grounds open up into gardens and pathways running through the rice fields, and the silence — real silence, apart from birds and the occasional distant motorbike — is itself part of the experience. Kemenuh is a traditional Balinese village, and the compounds around the museum are lived-in family places, with their shrines and offerings and the faint sound of gamelan practice drifting over from somewhere in the middle distance. You feel embedded in Bali in a way that the busy centre of Ubud, for all its considerable charms, rarely permits.

We spent a couple of hours here without once feeling hurried or crowded or as if we were being managed through an experience. It was, in the plainest sense, a pleasure.

💭 Reflections

We have been to a fair number of museums over the years. Some are magnificent and exhausting. Some are well-intentioned and dull. The Setia Darma House of Masks and Puppets is neither of those things. It is a place with a genuine point of view — the view, essentially, of one man who spent twenty years driving around Indonesia rescuing things that other people were forgetting — and that conviction shows in every room.

The objects are extraordinary in themselves. But the setting — those ancient teak houses, that light, those rice fields beyond the windows — gives them something a modern purpose-built gallery never quite could. You are looking at objects that were always meant to exist in exactly this kind of place: old wood, warm air, the smell of incense somewhere not too far away.

It is entirely unclear to us why it is not more widely visited. We suspect part of it is simply that it’s slightly out of the way and doesn’t advertise itself aggressively, which in our experience tends to be a promising sign about a place rather than a concerning one. If you find yourself in Ubud with a morning free and the usual choices feeling slightly familiar, head southeast to Kemenuh. Take a donation. Have the coffee. It’s very good.

People are genuinely missing a treat.