Young Man

I got this statue from Sipke who owns www.artdecobali.blog. He gave the statue the name "Narcissus", so I'm adopting it.
Unfortunately, the wood developed a large crack during transportation. This crack inspired a friend to dedicate a quote by the singer Leonard Cohen to the statue:
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Thank you, Fine , for giving something negative a completely different perspective.
This statue was probably created by a gay artist, at least it depicts the young man in a pose that is otherwise clearly associated with females and incorporates both aesthetics and eroticism. Alongside Rudolf Bonnet, it was above all Walter Spies who, as a Western artist, had a significant influence on Bali's art scene. Both artists lived openly gay, which was not common at the time and was forbidden by the rulers. However, people were allowed a certain amount of freedom, but this was to come to an abrupt end.
In a wave of arrests, Spies was also sentenced to prison for "immoral behavior". Much later in 1942 when he, along with many other internees, was to be taken to Ceylon on a ship, it was attacked and sunk by the Japanese. The Dutch crew had taken almost all the lifeboats for themselves and rendered the remaining ones unusable, so that the internees went down with the ship. Spies thus became a victim of persecution by self-appointed moral guardians as well as a victim of the cruelty of the world war.
Today, many decades later, the persecution of non-normative loving people is on the rise again. Once again, moralizers and religious hardliners are fighting people they do not want to tolerate. This happens partly with laws with which the state suppresses those who think differently, and partly with sheer brutality. This happens in countries worldwide, unfortunately also in Indonesia, where the statue of the young man was made almost a hundred years ago as an expression of freedom which is now under threat again.
For this reason, the statue has a special meaning for me. Time changes everything. Those who build walls to stop time should remember:
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."