The land of Hyangs

“The Land of Hyangs” was created during the month long Bali Art Residency, November 2025.

The series consists of three self-portrait photography works created on the volcanic shores, forests, and riverbeds of Bali – landscapes long understood by local tradition as being alive with spirit. The Balinese concept of Hyang is an unseen, sacred presence: an ancestral force, a guardian of place, or a form of natural divinity. These works explore an intimate, physical conversation with that unseen world.

Across the three images, the human body becomes a site of devotion, surrender, and porousness. Rather than standing apart from the environment, the figure folds into stone, wood, and sky, dissolving boundaries between self and landscape.

Each photograph stages a state of transformation: a bending toward the earth, an opening to the heavens, a merging with weathered driftwood as though with an ancient spirit. Through gesture and vulnerability, the body becomes an instrument for sensing the numinous.

By using self-portraiture, the artist inhabits both subject and vessel, embodying the reciprocal relationship between people and the natural world that animism describes. The series reflects a reverence central to Balinese spiritual life: that the land is not merely scenery, but a living realm of presences with whom one is in constant dialogue.

The Land of Hyangs invites viewers into that dialogue, into a world where stone remembers, trees watch, and every element of the landscape carries its own quiet, powerful breath.