Introducing Local Culture Trough Art Kurniawati Gautama Faculty of Art and Design Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) niagautama2406@gmail.com ABSTRACT Artworks created by artists or industrial products created by designers, ideally showed the creators’ character. An artist will produced an artwork and a designer will produced a designed to be executed into functional products. A qualified artist or designer will have the ability to create artworks with strong identity and original. Indonesia is called as Nusantara, because Indonesia is an archipelago country, that spread from Sumatera to Papua. Nusantara which is rich in its tradition and culture, has inspired many artists and designers to create artwork based on the tradition. Some artists treated tradition as a valuable art, not something ancient or out-of-date. They executed their contemporary artwork based on tradition. This paper, will share the strong capability of tradition in supporting the contemporary art and its ability to introduce a nation and a county’s identity to global world. Two artists were selected as references, they are the late Hendrawan Ryanto (1959 – 2004) and F.Widayanto (1953). The reason to choose both artists, because they were graduated from the same university and same faculty, and their artworks were tradition based, but very different in execution. Keywords : tradition, contemporary, culture, ritual, nation identity. ……… 1. INTRODUCTION Every single country in this world possessed their tradition and culture that becomes their identity. The existence of each country in present and their nation development can not be separated from its history and the traditional value they adopted. Some of those the traditional values do exist in present but some will slowly disappear as those are not applicable anymore in the present life. Reviewing creation world, there are persons who take role in the process of creation. They might be artists or a designers who produce artworks that showing their identity. An artist has more freedom in his or her work. In this case an artist do not affected by the function requirement of a product, moreover the idealist artist may obey the market taste. Whilst designers supposed to create a functional products that satisfied market needs. But of course designers have the right to feature their design characteristic which not following the market taste, and this character then become their identity strength, Indonesia or Nusantara, has been famous since long time ago with its richness in tradition and culture. Tradition is a belief, custom or way of doing something that has existed for a long time, whereas culture is a developing way of life that keep growing, both are existed among a particular group of people in a country. Nusantara that spread from Sumatra to Papua, has shown their own cultural identity. We may know Sumatra with its ulos, the traditional hand woven cloth of the Batak people of North Sumatra, to be worn at important events such as wedding and funerals. Java is known with its man’s head covered called blankon and classical puppet character called Punakawan. Bali, the most famous island amongst another island in Indonesia, is well known with its cremation ceremony, called Ngaben, a funeral ritual to send the deceased to the next life. Sulawesi, also known with its funeral ritual in Tana Toraja (South Sulawesi), called Rambu Solo. Kalimantan (East Kalimantan), known with the long ear tradition, to show the nobility in social strata society. Papua famous with its traditional costume called koteka, a man’s genital covered made from dried gourd. Those richness has inspired many creators – artists or designers – to create artworks based on tradition and later become their artistic character. They inserted tradition and culture elements in their creations to be adjusted to the present situation especially in contemporary art world. This article will elaborate the strong capability of tradition in supporting the contemporary art and its ability to introduce a nation and a county’s identity to global world. Some contemporary artists are shown in this article and focuses on two artists as mentioned in abstract.