Ceremonial Hanging (palepai)
19th century
Medium
Cotton, silk, and silver-leaf-over-lacquered-paper-strip-wrapped bast fiber (probably ramie), plain weave with supplementary patterning and brocading wefts, main warp fringe
Dimensions
Without fringe: 67 × 296.6 cm (26 3/8 × 116 3/4 in.)
Classification
textile
Department
Textiles
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
180298
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
The Paminggir aristocracy employed a type of ritual hanging commonly known as a ship cloth, a name that refers to one of the principal motifs of such textiles. These hangings display a very limited repertoire of patterns, including one or two red ships, a single blue ship, tree images, buildings, and rows of stylized anthropomorphic figures. The indigenous name for textiles of this type, palepai, probably goes back to the old Javanese word lepih, which means “to fold” or “to double.” Palepai ser...