BATIK

Third floor galleries explore the theme “STYLE”, through batik, decorative textiles, fashion, and jewellery. Together, the galleries celebrate craftsmanship and design from both the perspective of the maker and wearer. The galleries also provide glimpses into the constructed world of fashion, adornment, and decoration as expressed by the public and private lives of Peranakans.

In the gallery on batik, visitors can follow how the growing Peranakan communities — Chinese, Dutch-Eurasian, Arabic — in Java, as well as the fashion for wearing batik, contributed to the need for a greater variety of designs and motifs. Batik centres mushroomed in the north-coast towns of Java from the mid-19th century. Batiks were exported all over Southeast Asia, as far as Myanmar in the north and the eastern Indonesian islands to the east. In particular, the Peranakan communities in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore were some of the keenest wearers of north-coast Javanese batik.