Rostarr Wraps Bali's Potato Head Beach Club in His Biggest Mural Yet

Desa Potato Head's Beach Club, on Jalan Petitenget in Seminyak, is getting a new skin. On October 16, the venue unveils Evolving Landscapes, a mural wrapping the building's entire facade, by Korean-American artist Rostarr. It's said to be the largest and most intricate piece of his career so far.

Up close, the calligraphic brushwork resolves into Barong, dancers, crowds and music. Stand back and it reads as a single sweeping field of black and white line. Rostarr, born Romon Kimin Yang in South Korea in 1971, calls the style "Graphysics": East Asian calligraphy fused with geometric form, built over three decades of never sketching first and working straight off instinct.

"I'm seeking inspiration from the vivid culture and people of Bali," he said of the piece, "incorporating gods and deities, traditional dancers, and sun and sea worshippers."

A Third Wall for Rostarr at Potato Head

He painted Potato Head's Green Bus in 2009, and later its Sweet Potato bio bus, a joint project with Green School Bali. The new mural is part of the venue's Cultural Exchange Series.

The wall underneath it is also mid-repair. Beach Club's original facade, a Colosseum-like mosaic of roughly 6,500 teak window shutters designed by Indonesian architect Andra Matin for the venue's 2010 opening, was overdue for restoration even before Rostarr started painting. The mural covers the 66-metre-long, 20-metre-high wall while that work continues underneath.

His resume runs well past Bali: a founding member of New York's Barnstormers collective since 1999, a 45-minute "motion painting" film that premiered at the Centre Pompidou in 2010, campaigns for Nike, and solo shows from Tokyo to Milan to Seoul. He moved to the US at one year old and trained at New York's School of Visual Arts before settling in Brooklyn, where he's based now.

The Reveal Doubles as a Party

On October 16 from 3pm, the Beach Club turns into an open-air dancefloor: Archie, Ryosuke Fukunaga, Yuka Mizuhara, Eric Duncan, Alex From Tokyo and Suze Ijo play until midnight from a DJ booth Rostarr hand-painted himself. Archie is also a resident at Klymax Discotheque, Potato Head's other dance floor. At 5:30pm, Rostarr sits down with Potato Head creative director Dan Mitchell to talk through a working relationship that goes back 17 years. At 6:45pm, Bumi Bajra and composer Putu Septa lead a live gamelan ceremony, and projection mapping takes over the mural after dark. The party doesn't end at midnight: it moves to Klymax, where Gero, Benedek and Yuka Mizuhara play back to back before Tokyo collective Timothy Really Lab closes. A pop-up for a capsule collection with Japanese label nonnative runs throughout the day.

None of it is built to last. Bali's sun, salt and monsoon rain will spend the next twelve months weathering the paint back down. When the facade eventually comes off, Potato Head says the materials get recovered and reused around Desa Potato Head rather than thrown out.

Cover photo: Rostarr on site at Evolving Landscapes, by Adrian Morris, courtesy of Desa Potato Head.