The vegan café in Ubud hummed with the quiet energy of midday, sunlight filtering through lush greenery that framed the open doorway. I stepped inside, the transition from Balinese humidity to shaded coolness feeling like a gentle sigh. And there she was—C., already settled at a small table near the back, a book open beside her teacup.
Her presence had a way of carving out space in a room without demanding it. Shoulder-length black hair fell around her face, strands catching the light like polished stone. Round glasses softened her gaze, and beneath them, a mouth that seemed perpetually poised between a smile and a thoughtful pause. She wore a light blue dress with delicate buttons at the collar, something that might have belonged to another era—until you noticed the heavy black boots tucked beneath the table, scuffed and decidedly present. It was a contradiction that suited her: part nostalgic daydream, part grounded reality.
She didn’t look up until I was standing right across from her. When she did, her face didn’t just register recognition—it lit, as if someone had turned on a lamp in a dim room. No hesitation, no social recalibration. Just warmth.
Some connections don’t need time to build. They arrive whole, like a sentence that doesn’t require explanation. From the moment we’d met months earlier, something in our rhythms had aligned. We never started with small talk. There was no slow excavation of personal histories, no cautious mapping of common ground. Instead, we began somewhere in the middle, as if resuming a conversation we’d left off years before.
I still don’t know whether she has siblings. I couldn’t tell you where she went to school or what her father did for a living. I don’t know if she prefers cats or dogs, or whether she’s ever broken a bone. These gaps in knowledge would normally mark the boundaries of a new friendship. But with C., they feel irrelevant.
What I do know lives deeper. I know she writes poetry that aches with quiet urgency. I know she dreams of living in an ashram in India someday, of shedding the noise of modern life like an old skin. I know her marriage exhausts her in ways she rarely speaks of directly, and that she sees menopause not as an ending but a liberation. She doesn’t care about money—not in a performative way, but with a sincerity that feels almost radical. And she knows similar things about me: my restless creativity, my fears, the parts of myself I rarely offer others.
There’s an intimacy in skipping the expected steps. It bypasses the formalities and lands directly in the human heart of the matter. We didn’t choose it; it was just there, like a shared language we’d both been waiting to use.
Not long after we met, I traveled to Jakarta to renew my passport. She invited me to a poetry reading and indie concert happening in a warehouse on the city’s outskirts. I understood almost no Indonesian. The poems would be spoken in a language whose rhythms still felt foreign on my tongue, whose meanings hovered just beyond my grasp. But I said yes without hesitation.
Maybe it was the promise of music that felt familiar in a place where so much felt new. In Bali, art is woven into the fabric of religion—elaborate paintings depicting Hindu epics, finely carved wooden figures of gods and demons, gamelan music that loops in hypnotic cycles. It’s beautiful, awe-inspiring even. But it doesn’t stir me. It doesn’t ask questions or unsettle assumptions. It comforts, explains, reinforces. There’s a sacred order to it, one I respect but can’t fully enter.
Where I come from, art is supposed to disrupt. It’s meant to challenge, provoke, rearrange something inside you. I didn’t realize how much I missed that until C. mentioned the concert. It wasn’t a rejection of Balinese culture—more a longing for a different kind of conversation, one that didn’t require me to understand its history to feel its heartbeat.
So I went, my teenage son in tow, riding through Jakarta’s tangled streets with an Uber driver who kept glancing back at us as if trying to decipher why we were heading to a warehouse at night. When we arrived, we climbed a flight of stairs and stepped into a vast, raw space with high ceilings and music already pulsing through the air.
The poetry began soon after. I stood there, surrounded by words I couldn’t comprehend, and yet—I felt them. Not their meaning, but their rhythm, the rise and fall of voices, the spaces between sounds. When the band started, guitars rough and urgent, drums pulling the room into motion, something loosened in my chest. It was grunge, poetry, rebellion—all refracted through a language I didn’t know, yet somehow recognized.
That night, I understood that art doesn’t always need translation. It can slip past language, past geography, past culture, and resonate in places deeper than understanding. Sometimes, belonging isn’t about knowing—it’s about feeling. And that feeling needs no words.
The Depth Beneath the Surface
There are friendships that begin with the usual exchange of biographical details—where you grew up, what your parents did, the names of siblings scattered across the map. And then there are friendships like the one with C., which seems to have been born in media res, skipping the prologue entirely. I couldn’t tell you if she has brothers or sisters. I don’t know the name of the city where she spent her childhood, or the schools she attended. The constellation of her social life remains a mystery to me—who she calls in moments of joy or despair, aside from the occasional hint. I’m even uncertain about the basic fabric of her daily existence: whether she shares her home with pets, the current status of her parents (though I’ve gathered her relationship with her mother is a complex tapestry of silence and tension).
Yet, I know her in ways that feel more significant than any collection of facts. I know the landscape of her dreams, not the sleeping kind but the waking ones—the ones that keep her up at night, staring at the ceiling in Jakarta. I know the rhythm of her writing, the way she wrestles with words until they surrender to her will. I know the books that live on her bedside table, the ones with dog-eared pages and margins filled with furious annotations. I know the deep, weary sigh that accompanies mentions of her husband, a sound that speaks volumes about the quiet compromises of a long marriage. I know her desire to trade the noisy chaos of the city for the silent austerity of an Indian ashram, a longing that feels both spiritual and profoundly practical. I know she sees menopause not as an ending but as a liberation, a shedding of expectations she never asked for. And I know, with absolute certainty, that money holds no allure for her; it’s a tool, not a trophy.
This inverted intimacy creates a peculiar sense of knowing and not-knowing. It’s as if we built the second floor of our friendship before laying the foundation. The result is a connection that feels both deeply solid and strangely weightless, unmoored from the usual anchors of shared history and common background. We talk about the things that usually remain unspoken for years, if they are ever spoken at all. Our conversations bypass the weather and the news, diving straight into the murky waters of fear, desire, and existential doubt.
This mode of friendship has its own unique value. It operates on a different frequency, one that prioritizes emotional and intellectual resonance over shared experience. It suggests that the core of a person isn’t found in their CV or family tree, but in the unguarded thoughts they share in a quiet café, in the dreams they confess without embarrassment. It’s a connection built on a mutual recognition of inner worlds, a silent agreement that the most interesting parts of a person are often the ones that don’t make it into a standard biography.
It makes me wonder if we rely too heavily on the superficial scaffolding of a person’s life to feel close to them. We collect facts and milestones, thinking they will lead us to understanding. But with C., I have understanding without the facts. I have a sense of her essence, her spirit, the things that make her ache and soar, all without knowing the basic plot points of her life story. It’s a testament to the idea that friendship, at its best, is less about knowing everything and more about knowing the important things—the things that truly matter.
Two Worlds of Art
In Bali, art is not something you visit in a gallery on a Sunday afternoon—it’s woven into the fabric of daily life, inseparable from the island’s spiritual heartbeat. The paintings sold in Ubud’s market stalls aren’t mere decorations; they’re visual prayers, intricate depictions of Hindu epics and Balinese myths, each brushstroke a meditation. Wood carvings of gods and demons stand guard in temple courtyards, their faces shaped by hands that have passed down techniques for generations. The masks used in Topeng and Barong dances aren’t costumes but sacred objects, each telling stories of cosmic balance between good and evil. Even the textiles have language—their patterns speak of social structures, cosmology, and devotion.
This art serves a purpose beyond aesthetics: it mirrors the world order, guides behavior, and connects the community to something larger than themselves. The music, built around the hypnotic rhythms of gamelan orchestras, doesn’t build toward a climax but loops endlessly, like breath or waves—a collective trance that binds rather than divides. There’s profound beauty here, but it’s a beauty that asks for participation, not critique.
Coming from a culture where art is often a form of rebellion—a way to question social structures, provoke thought, or express individual angst—this left me with a strange emptiness. I could admire the skill behind a detailed painting of Rangda the witch, or lose myself in the metallic shimmer of gamelan music, but I didn’t feel stirred. Not in the way a punk rock song or a confrontational modern play might shake me awake. Here, art comforts, explains, and conforms. It doesn’t seek to dismantle; it seeks to preserve.
And that’s the heart of the tension: the difference between art as ritual and art as revolution. In the West, we often expect art to disrupt—to make us see the world differently, to challenge our assumptions, to leave us emotionally rearranged. We want catharsis, not just craftsmanship. But in Bali, art is craftsmanship in service of tradition. It’s mastery without the urge to transcend.
I found myself wondering: Is it possible to truly feel art that’s rooted in a cultural context so far from your own? Or are we forever bound to the aesthetic frameworks we grew up with? It felt narrow to think so—almost like a quiet form of cultural arrogance. But the truth is, my response had less to do with the art itself and more to do with my own expectations. I was homesick for a certain kind of artistic encounter—one that shakes you, changes you, makes you want to tear down and rebuild.
That’s not what Balinese traditional art offers. Its power lies in its ability to sustain, not subvert. It doesn’t make you want to change your life; it makes you want to understand your place within a larger order. And maybe that’s its own kind of revolution—just one that operates on a different frequency.
Still, when my friend mentioned the poetry reading and indie concert in Jakarta, something in me leapt at the chance. It wasn’t a rejection of the beauty around me, but a longing for a different kind of resonance—one that felt both foreign and familiar, like a language I hadn’t spoken in years but still understood in my bones.
The Cultural Boundaries of Artistic Resonance
This brings me to a question that has been quietly nagging at me: does art require a shared cultural background to truly resonate? Can we genuinely feel art that is steeped in a heritage completely foreign to our own?
When I experience traditional Balinese art forms—the intricate paintings depicting Hindu epics, the meticulously carved wooden figures of gods and demons, the hypnotic rhythms of gamelan music—I find myself appreciating them intellectually. I recognize the incredible skill, the mastery of craft, the deep spiritual significance. But something remains distant. They don’t shake me to my core, don’t leave me with that cathartic cleansing I’ve come to expect from artistic encounters.
I wonder if this is a form of cultural homesickness. Having grown up in a postmodern Western context, I carry certain expectations about what art should do. I expect it to challenge social structures, to provoke, to confront. I expect to leave an exhibition or performance with new ways of seeing, with moments of self-insight that might even inspire life changes.
Traditional Balinese art serves a different purpose. It’s not about revolutionizing the individual but about maintaining cosmic and social order. It’s about adaptation and conformity to existing structures rather than rebellion against them. The art here explains the world rather than questions it—beautifully, skillfully, but ultimately within established frameworks.
This isn’t to say one approach is superior to the other. They simply operate within different cultural paradigms with different objectives. The traditional art here creates a trance-like state, a connection to something larger than oneself, but it doesn’t necessarily aim for the personal transformation I’ve been conditioned to expect.
Perhaps the limitation isn’t in the art itself but in my ability to receive it. My cultural framework might be filtering the experience, preventing me from accessing the full emotional depth these art forms offer to those within the culture. Or maybe art simply functions differently in different contexts, and my expectation that it should “move” me in a particular way is itself culturally specific.
What’s interesting is how this contrasts with my experience of contemporary Indonesian art forms. That indie band in Jakarta, though performing in a language I didn’t understand, tapped into something that felt familiar—not because it was Westernized, but because it operated within a globalized artistic language that transcends specific cultural boundaries while still retaining its local flavor.
This suggests that artistic resonance might exist on a spectrum rather than as a binary experience. Some art forms require deep cultural knowledge to fully appreciate, while others can communicate across boundaries through more universal elements of rhythm, emotion, and human experience.
The value of traditional art here isn’t diminished by my limited ability to connect with it emotionally. Its purpose—to maintain cultural continuity, to connect people to their heritage and to the divine—is being fulfilled beautifully for those within the culture. My experience simply highlights how art and culture are deeply intertwined, and how our responses to art are shaped by our own cultural conditioning.
Maybe the question isn’t whether art requires cultural context to resonate, but rather how we can expand our capacity to appreciate art that operates outside our familiar frames of reference. Perhaps the goal isn’t to have the same emotional response as someone from that culture, but to find new ways of connecting that honor both the art’s cultural specificity and our own position as outsiders.
This tension between cultural specificity and universal human experience lies at the heart of cross-cultural artistic engagement. It’s what makes encountering art from different traditions both challenging and profoundly enriching—even when that enrichment comes in forms we didn’t expect.
The Warehouse Resonance
So I showed up, with my teenage son in tow, at a converted warehouse on the outskirts of Jakarta after a forty-five minute Uber ride that felt like crossing into another dimension. The driver kept glancing in the rearview mirror, his questions hanging in the air between us: What were we doing here? Should he wait? Did we need a ride back? His concern felt both protective and suspicious, as if we were venturing into territory where foreigners didn’t belong.
When we arrived, the building revealed itself as one of those spaces that exist in every city’s margins – raw, unpolished, breathing with creative possibility. We climbed stairs that echoed with the sounds of our footsteps, entering a large room with high ceilings and tall windows that let in the fading afternoon light. The space felt immediately familiar, the kind of venue where underground art thrives regardless of geography.
The poetry reading had already begun, and we slipped into the back as my friend C. took the makeshift stage. She stood before the microphone, a sheet of paper trembling slightly in her hands, and began to read in Indonesian. I understood none of the words, yet something remarkable happened: language ceased to be a barrier and became instead a musical instrument. I could hear the rhythm of her delivery, the way her voice rose and fell, the pauses that held more meaning than any dictionary translation could provide. The other poets followed, each with their distinct cadence and emotional texture, and I found myself leaning into the sound patterns as if listening to a complex piece of music whose lyrics didn’t require comprehension to feel significant.
Then the band started playing, and the room transformed. Raw guitar chords cut through the air, restless beats pulsed from the drums, and the vocalist’s voice carried an urgency that needed no translation. It was grunge music filtered through an Indonesian sensibility, both utterly foreign and strangely familiar. The sound resonated somewhere deep in my bones, triggering memories of my teenage years spent listening to similar music in very different settings. Here was proof that artistic expression could transcend its cultural origins, that the emotional core of creativity could bypass intellectual understanding and speak directly to the soul.
In that warehouse, surrounded by people whose language I didn’t speak, experiencing art rooted in a culture still largely unknown to me, I felt a profound connection. The music wasn’t just sound; it was a bridge between my past and present, between my cultural references and theirs. The poetry wasn’t just words; it was emotional architecture built from rhythms and pauses that communicated beyond semantics.
This experience challenged my earlier assumptions about art and cultural belonging. Perhaps true resonance doesn’t require full comprehension. Perhaps art’s power lies precisely in its ability to communicate through channels that bypass rational understanding, reaching into that part of us that recognizes truth before the mind can articulate it. The guitars, the drums, the vocal inflections – they created a shared emotional landscape where my foreignness didn’t matter, where the music became a common language we all understood instinctively.
That evening demonstrated how globalization creates these peculiar pockets of cultural hybridity, spaces where the local and global intersect to create something new yet familiar. The Indonesian indie scene wasn’t just copying Western models; it was adapting them, infusing them with local sensibilities and experiences, creating art that belonged both here and everywhere simultaneously.
As we left the warehouse later that night, the city sounds washing over us, I realized that what I had experienced was more than just a concert. It was evidence that art can create temporary communities of feeling that transcend language barriers and cultural differences. The resonance I felt wasn’t about understanding Indonesian culture – that would take years of study and immersion. It was about recognizing the human emotions behind the art, the universal experiences of longing, rebellion, joy, and confusion that music and poetry express regardless of their cultural packaging.
This is the gift of cross-cultural artistic encounters: they remind us that beneath the surface differences of language, tradition, and expression, we share fundamental human experiences that art can communicate when words fail. The warehouse became a liminal space where geography blurred and belonging became about shared emotional response rather than shared cultural background. And in that recognition, I found a new way of thinking about what it means to connect across cultures – not through complete understanding, but through mutual resonance.
When Art Speaks Without Words
That evening in the Jakarta warehouse became something more than just a poetry reading and concert—it transformed into a quiet confirmation of something I’d felt but never articulated. As I stood there listening to words I couldn’t decode and music that somehow felt both foreign and deeply familiar, I understood that art doesn’t always need translation to resonate. Sometimes it bypasses the intellect entirely and speaks directly to something more primal, more essential.
The raw energy of the guitars, the rhythmic pulse of the poetry, the collective breathing of the audience—these elements created a bridge that language alone could never build. I realized that my initial longing for something “familiar” wasn’t about replicating my home culture here in Indonesia, but about finding those universal human frequencies that vibrate beneath the surface of any artistic expression. The grunge aesthetic of my teenage years, the beat poetry I discovered in high school—these weren’t being replicated here, but rather reinterpreted through a different cultural lens, creating something entirely new yet strangely recognizable.
This experience challenged my earlier assumptions about cultural boundaries in art. I had worried that being an outsider would forever keep me from fully experiencing Indonesian traditional arts, that my Western expectations of what art “should do” would always create distance. But in that warehouse, surrounded by Indonesian poets and musicians, I discovered that art creates its own territory—one that doesn’t require passports or language fluency, only openness to the experience.
Perhaps true cultural exchange happens not when we fully understand another’s traditions, but when we allow ourselves to be moved by them in ways we can’t entirely explain. The resonance I felt that night didn’t come from comprehending the lyrics or knowing the cultural references—it came from recognizing the human impulse behind the creation, the universal desire to express something that words alone cannot capture.
Globalization often gets criticized for homogenizing culture, but what I witnessed that night felt like something different—not dilution, but dialogue. The Indonesian indie band wasn’t copying Western music; they were conversing with it, responding to it, making it their own. And in doing so, they created something that could speak across cultural divides without erasing them.
This suggests a different way of thinking about cultural identity in an increasingly connected world. Rather than seeing ourselves as either rooted in one tradition or adrift in globalized sameness, we might instead learn to navigate multiple cultural currents simultaneously, finding resonance where we least expect it. The beauty lies not in choosing between the traditional and the contemporary, the local and the global, but in appreciating how they inform and transform each other.
That night left me with more questions than answers, and perhaps that’s exactly what good art should do. I still don’t know if art deeply rooted in a foreign cultural heritage can ever resonate as deeply as that from my own background. But I’m beginning to suspect that the question itself might be missing the point. Maybe the value isn’t in comparing depths of resonance, but in appreciating the different ways art can move us, challenge us, connect us.
The poetry reading ended, the band packed up their instruments, and my son and I found our way back through Jakarta’s evening streets. The Uber ride home was quieter than the one coming—less suspicion, more contemplation. I realized that what I had experienced wasn’t just entertainment; it was a reminder that human connection often happens in the spaces between understanding, in the shared recognition of something that transcends language and geography.
Art, at its best, creates these spaces—temporary territories where the usual rules don’t apply, where we can meet as human beings first and cultural beings second. That night in Jakarta, I didn’t need to understand the words to feel the truth behind them. The resonance was enough.