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Social Sharing
Ceremonial hanging (palepai)
Artwork Viewer
Not on view
The palepai, or ship cloth, as it is known to Westerners, has long been recognized as the pinnacle of Indonesian weaving. This palepai depicts two large red ships with sweeping oars and gracefully arching bowsprits and tails. The cloth is masterfully woven with finely detailed human figures, mythical creatures, birds, and ancestral shrines. For Indonesians inhabiting the archipelago of 17,000 islands, the sea represents their lifeblood, and ship imagery reflects their social structure, ritual life, and cosmological belief system. The ship as a recurring theme in their ritual arts may be seen as a spirit boat safely guiding the agent from one stage in life to another. In the Lampung region of south Sumatra, ship imagery permeates their woven arts, reaching its height with the palepai, the most prestigious of all their textiles. The multilayered or stratified decks lend to multiple interpretations— a representation of the upper and lower worlds, a ledger of ancestry, and a reflection of their social hierarchy. Indonesian aristocrats, the exclusive owners of palepai, hung them at rituals such as engagements, marriages, births, circumcisions, and funerals. This cloth would have been used exclusively in a marriage ceremony, with each of the double-red ships representing each clan. In the marriage rites, a single-ship palepai replaces the double-ship cloth to represent the merging of the clans. jkd
- Title
- Ceremonial hanging (palepai)
- Date
- 19th century
- Object Type
- Textile
- Medium
- Handspun cotton; plain weave with supplementary-weft patterning
- Dimensions
- 129 15/16 x 27 3/16 in., (330 x 69 cm,)
- Credit Line
- Museum Purchase, Textile Arts Council Endowment Fund and the Nasaw Family Foundation Fund
- Accession Number
- 2010.18