Painting the Social Body of Balinese Youth Amid Simulacra: Ritual Space and the Digital Image

Abstract

The circulation of Balinese ritual imagery through digital platforms has reached a scale at which the image increasingly precedes and conditions the practice it depicts. This study asks how that condition registers on the social body of Balinese youth, and whether painting can make it visible. Adopting a practice-led research design structured in four phases and closed by a documented expert-appraisal stage, the study produced and analysed a trilogy of mixed-media paintings: Dialektika Pikiran, Fun Run With Ida, and Arus Maya. The analytical framework combines Baudrillard’s second and third orders of simulacra with sociological accounts of the social body and the Balinese cosmological pairing of bhuana alit and bhuana agung. The chosen visual idiom, Wedha’s Pop Art Portrait, is treated not as decoration but as an argument: its constitutive procedure of replacing observed colour with colour judged better than the original reproduces, at the level of technique, the very logic of simulation the paintings interrogate. Analysis proceeds from described formal features to perceptual effects to theoretical claims. The findings show the trilogy staging three distinct conditions: contested consciousness, an undecidable ritual-or-screen space, and a body reconstituted as circulating data. The study concludes that the medium’s own procedures can function as a critical instrument rather than an illustration of theory, and offers this technique-as-argument approach as a transferable method for practice-led research on cultural mediation.