By the 1930s, German painter Walter Spies had moved from the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, where he conducted orchestras in the sultan’s palace, to Ubud, a village in Bali’s dense, shaded uplands. Here, in 1936, along with Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet and a cohort of local artists, princes, ritualists, he co-founded Pita Maha, an artists’ association that forged a market for figures like I Gusti Nyoman Lempad and Ida Bagus Made Togog. Spies put up friends and fellow travelers at his bungalow, which later became the Hotel Tjampuhan, a riverside retreat with a spa that features psychedelic stone carvings of spirits and monkeys playing in trees.

In the same decade, Californians Bob and Louise Koke, a painter and photographer touring Asia, came to Bali. They fell in love with a stretch of sun-beaten coastline to the west of Denpasar and, with the help of Scotswoman Muriel Pearson, who went by Manx or the local name of K’tut Tantri, opened the Kuta Beach Hotel in 1936. Disagreements led K’tut Tantri to start her own premises next door, known as Suara Segara, or Manx’s Rooms and Bungalows. At Kuta Beach Hotel, Bob Koke, who worked on the 1932 film Bird of Paradise in Hawai’i, taught guests and staff how to surf. The hotel closed after the outbreak of World War II, with Koke later joining the CIA, and K’tut Tantri, as she records in her memoir Revolt in Paradise (1960), aiding the Indonesian nationalist cause as a radio broadcaster in Surabaya. These guesthouses, and the homes of the island’s émigré elite, set the terms for what would become known as the Bali Style, a genre of resort design featuring secluded villas made with natural materials. The style’s history speaks to the entwinement of art, tourism, and colonialism on the volcanic island located just east of Java. Its influence can be glimpsed across Bali and in tropical resorts the world over.

On August 17, 1945, Indonesia declared its freedom from the Netherlands after three years of Japanese occupation during World War II. The young nation, led by its charismatic first president Sukarno, sought to chart an independent path for itself, unshackled from foreign capital. But in the mid-1960s, tragedy struck. During the night of September 30, 1965, an army lieutenant and six generals were taken from their Jakarta homes and killed. Sidestepping the president’s authority, the Javanese general Suharto proclaimed that this was a coup d’état staged by the Communist Party of Indonesia. The statement became the pretext for one of the 20th century’s most chilling genocides, in which the military, extensively aided by nationalist paramilitaries, imprisoned or murdered anywhere between 500,000 to 2 million leftists. By March 1967, Sukarno had resigned, and Suharto was president, a role he would cling to for over 30 years.

Suharto reopened the doors to overseas investment, and Bali, where the Communist Party had led a determined land reform campaign just a few years prior, was again promoted as Indonesia’s most attractive vacation destination. International consortiums built hotels over mass graves, making ideal sites for Suharto to woo visiting heads of state such as Ronald Reagan with lavish banquets, while enriching himself and his family through nepotistic state agencies like the Bali Tourism Development Corporation. By the time he was booted from power in 1998, his family’s net worth was valued in the billions of dollars.

The serene Bali Style, however, was a counterpoint to showy design. In 1963, Sukarno, whose mother was Balinese, began construction on the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur, financed by Japanese war reparations. A proud art collector interested in forward-thinking architecture (he wanted it to compete with “the modern best of Miami or San Juan”), his 10-story internationalist experiment angered locals, who claimed it strayed too far from traditional design ethics. After its completion, the local government ruled that no buildings should rise higher than 15 meters, approximately the height of a coconut tree.

These overlapping histories of art, architecture, and hospitality were recently probed in Repurposing: Paradise, a group exhibition mounted by Ubud-based gallery Nonfrasa at Amandari, an understated sanctuary built in the late 1980s. It included the likes of Balinese multidisciplinary artist Citra Sasmita, whose oxblood braid—a reference to the Mahābhārata’s protagonist Draupadi washing her hair with her enemies’ blood—fell from the ceiling of the library, and the Yogyakarta-based weaver Faelerie, whose frayed, crocheted tapestry hung nearby. The show, curated by gallery director Krisna Sudharma, integrated artworks throughout the hotel—Balinese video artist Pande Wardina’s glitchy, multiscreen installation looped in a pavilion by the pool—to make the point, voiced by sociologist Michel Picard in his book Kebalian: The Dialogic Construction of Balinese Identity (2024), that local culture “actively engages with and shapes the tourist gaze.” The exhibition considered the power relations underpinning tourism’s astounding growth on the island, exposing shared interests and inimical desires.

While Repurposing: Paradise uses art to inquire into the cultural imprint of Bali Style resorts, a more recent hotel in Seminyak, just north of Kuta, departs from this style’s exclusivity while platforming contemporary creative practices by local and international artists—so much so that it essentially moonlights as a small arts institution. Desa Potato Head seeks to institute a new hotel model rooted in community and sustainability, and an innovative, less romanticized orientation to design.

When I visit Desa Potato Head, one of the first things I notice is the scent of incense. Incense is burned across Bali in the daily offerings that express gratitude to the Balinese Hindu gods. At Potato Head, chunky sticks of it are placed in inconspicuous corners throughout the buildings and grounds. Their aroma dances with the salt in the air.

Potato Head began life in 2009 as a brasserie with creative cocktails in Jakarta’s Pacific Place mall. Owner Ronald Akili, an Indonesian art collector and the founder of the now-closed Akili Museum of Art in Jakarta, opened a beach club in Bali a year later, around which the rest of the desa—this is the Indonesian word for village, and is how Potato Head describes itself—sprouted.

Jakarta-based architect Andra Matin’s firm andramatin designed Potato Head’s beach club, a distinctive, Colosseum-like amphitheater that incorporates a few thousand antique windows and shutters collected from all over Indonesia. Matin also masterminded the luscious Potato Head Suites, the resort’s first hotel building, with 58 suites, which opened in 2016 (initially under the name of Katamama). Tracing the design’s angular, intersecting lines is like watching one of the island’s many kites, which appear in flocks on blustery days, dip and dart in the sky. The structure’s made of nearly 2 million multi-tonal, hand-pressed bricks traditionally used in Balinese temples, while its proportions are inspired by rules related to the island’s three-tiered tri angga cosmos. Inside, the bricks’ warm, earthy hues are complemented by natural-dyed ikat tapestries made by local workshop Tarum and items from Akili’s handsome collection of Indonesian mid-century modern jengki furniture.

Potato Head Studios followed in 2021 and contributes another 168 bedrooms, which float on columns around a large piazza. It was designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s practice OMA, with David Gianotten leading the project and Matin also collaborating. The brief, as Akili has shared in an interview, was “Imagine MoMA PS1, but with [guest] rooms.” OMA is known for its experimental use of materials; this building’s façade features terracotta-colored breeze blocks patterned with symbols from Bali’s non-astronomical tika calendar, which, Gianotten informs me, “allow for natural ventilation in the corridors.” The courtyard’s stocky, umber columns provide a passage to the beach and a frame for its amber sunsets, while also encouraging encounters between guests and other visitors.

The open design doesn’t just cool the desa but suggests a parallel for its cultural aspirations. Potato Head can be tricky to define, which is something that Pete Pepper Keen, its regional creative director, brings up when I chat with him, noting that terms like “hotel” and even “desa” are “limiting.” But, as he unpacks with me, it’s kind of the point of the project, given that this in-betweenness can spark fresh ideas.

Keen’s commissioned a series of short films exploring stories that align with the desa’s mission, including After the Flags (2024), a video poem directed by Jakarta-based filmmaker Kathleen Malay that responds to Indonesian artist Arahmaiani’s Flag Project (2006–). A participatory artwork, Flag Project sees Arahmaiani stage community workshops in which words are chosen and then stitched onto colorful flags that are waved in choreographic performances. In Bali, she worked with Sanggar Paripurna, an organization she has collaborated with since the 1980s. Malay’s short shows flags bearing words like “taksu”—this divine, ephemeral energy, often likened to “charisma,” is a vital concept in Balinese aesthetics—held aloft on beaches and in forests, alongside a montage of images revealing the island’s natural and spiritual riches. The flags now hang underneath a walkway in Potato Head Studios, where they ripple in the wind.

Grace Jones and Peggy Gou have staged shows at the beach club, and this past June, Erykah Badu performed and curated Merasa, a week of “regeneration” featuring talks, aura readings, a fire ceremony, and even nipple castings (for “fostering self-awareness”). Klymax Discotheque, a sleek subterranean nightclub with a sound system matching any in the archipelago, opened at the start of this year. DJs like Detroit techno spearhead Carl Craig and MARICAS co-founder ISAbella have made stops here.

Waves of hippies found their way to Bali in the ’60s and ’70s, often lodging in homestays near Kuta beach, then brimming with palms. Potato Head’s New Age flirtations evoke this era. During my stay, I’m up at dawn for a sunrise activation and oracle card reading—plump, warm raindrops are falling, so we’re guided through breathing exercises and tai chi in a sheltered corner of the courtyard rather than on the rooftop. As the session ends, I draw a card calling me to “surrender.” Dome, a restaurant in a low, spaceship-like dome, is inspired by hippie folk hero R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic home in Carbondale, Illinois. Diego Recarte, the head chef, cooks up left field takes on Indonesian tastes, such as baby corn and crumb potato in Hollandaise sauce. There’s also natural wine and other home-cultured “funky ferments,” as well as foraging dinners, jazz and tarot evenings, and discussions with the likes of Bali-based regenerative travel and farming initiative Astungkara Way.

The desa, which communicates its ethos with the tagline “good times, do good,” strives to be zero waste, and currently less than three percent of its refuse goes to landfill. (The team has yet to find solutions for things like cigarette butts and diapers.) Tucked away behind a jamu bar—jamu is an Indonesian herbal medicine—is a busy waste center, where a team transforms empty beer bottles into water glasses and wine bottles into vessels for candles made with recycled cooking oils. Food leftovers are composted or given to a pig farm. With discarded, high-density polyethylene, they make chairs inspired by prototypes dreamed up by British furniture designer Max Lamb, a frequent collaborator. Tours of the facilities, open to all, are fascinating. This fall, they’re launching Wasted Suwung, an offsite waste center, with other local businesses.

They hope it might become a model throughout Bali, where plastic accumulates on beaches and in rivers.

Environmental health and inner wellbeing come together at (farm)acy, an apothecary steered by Korean artist and herbalist Dambi Kim. It stocks homemade balms and herbal teas, and hosts workshops such as incense making—making use of flower waste. The initiative is a “conversation with plants,” Kim explains, in which plants can teach us “how to learn from each other.”

Similar principles animate Sweet Potato Project, Potato Head’s picturesque farm cocooned in a sea of rice fields an hour’s drive north. Each week, Sweet Potato Project harvests a modest haul of vegetables for the desa, but just as importantly, it receives hundreds of kilos of food waste with which it produces maggots sold to local eel farmers. Iwan Kurniawan, Potato Head’s sustainability director, laughs as he tells me that it’s “good business actually.”

The late Fuller, an outspoken environmental activist, warned that “the alternative to utopia is oblivion.” To look at Bali through its local philosophical frameworks, however, is to embrace a more nuanced, though no less urgent, outlook. Here, concepts like rwa bhineda are the bedrock of a worldview in which good and evil coexist, with the role of humans being to balance these forces. The daily offerings of flowers, food, and incense, visible across the island, are reminders of this—their beauty is devotional. To really appreciate this beauty, it helps to see it within the cosmology as a whole.

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The Dutch only gained full control of Bali in the early 1900s, after a lengthy campaign ending in horrifying massacres. Following an outcry in Europe’s liberal presses, they changed tactics. The occupiers established Indonesia’s first tourism bureau in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1908, the year of the last Balinese massacre. From then on, they advocated for the policy of Baliseering, or the “Balinization of Bali,” claiming that the island’s distinctive culture, exemplified by its photogenic temples and ceremonies, needed preserving, and that tourism could facilitate this. As historian Geoffrey Robinson argues, the image of a “harmonious, exotic, and apolitical Bali” that drives the island’s visitor economy is a product of colonial propaganda.

The Pita Maha group, the artists’ association founded in the ’30s, came about thanks to these circumstances. But their work, which they sold to foreigners, shielded the island’s traditions from the outside gaze. As artist and ritual practitioner Ida Bagus Made Togog tells scholar Hildred Geertz in Tales from a Charmed Life (2005), his paintings were made for tourists, and were distinct from his spiritual practice. Relatedly, dances like the kecak, invented in the same decade by local dancer I Wayan Limbak with contributions from Spies, were staged for visitors during dinner at hotels, while sacred choreographies were reserved for religious rituals.

Galleries like Nonfrasa, which opened in 2021, are breaking apart this binary of tourist commodity and ritual practice, which some argue has come to overdetermine Balinese art. Sudharma, who formerly worked as a creative director at Potato Head, tells me that the gallery hopes to question “the conformity that often accompanies historical influence.” The outlooks of architects like Andra Matin and the ideas behind the most compelling programs at Potato Head—to my eye, these are those spotlighting local practitioners—are similarly catechistic. In July, London-based platform NTS organized an evening of music at the beach club. As the sun dropped into the ocean, Dewa Alit, a composer from Pengosekan village, near Ubud, performed with his ensemble, Gamelan Salukat. The group pushes gamelan—a percussive orchestra of gongs, drums, and metallophones hit with mallets—to its edge, infusing spacey bleeps and sparse, echoey textures, coaxed out of analog instruments, into this Indonesian tradition. Alit tunes his self-made instruments to his own 10-note scale. Gamelan Salukat’s rapid-fire flurries of syncopated call-and-response are astonishing.

Balinese gamelan expresses the island’s cosmos. The composition of instruments and scores reflects the tri angga universe, while the music’s frenetic, interlocking rhythms model the manner in which different realms, perceptible and imperceptible, are linked. By integrating exogenous, minimalist ideas into his compositions, Alit opens up this cosmos, exploring its relation to other spheres of sound and meaning. He works within gamelan’s circular compositional logic, but seeks to introduce, as he says to me, “new ideas to the audience, so that the music… doesn’t stay stuck in tradition or romantic nostalgia.” In this music, environmental and cosmological concerns are interwoven. What ties art and travel together? Perhaps both pursuits, if we’re attentive, can teach us how to live in, or between, many worlds.