Living Painting
by Gus Teja & KDA Bali
Music fromBali
At the sunset hour, Gus Teja’s bamboo flute summons an ancestral Legong dancer.
Best with headphones
Sandikala is the twilight hour in Balinese folklore, when the boundary between the human and spirit worlds grows thin and the spirits of the dead are said to return to walk the earth.
In this Living Painting, Gus Teja’s suling, a bamboo flute, summons an ancestral Legong dancer, conjuring the spirit with each breath.
The scene was built in Unreal Engine. Many of its elements are 3D scans, made with permission, of temples and gardens in Bali, assembled into the mythic world you see.
Balinese suling
Gus Teja is a flautist and composer from Bali, and one of the island’s best-known musicians. He plays the suling, the bamboo flute of Balinese music, with a gentle, meditative tone that has carried Balinese melody to listeners far beyond the island.
Legong dance
KDA Bali is a Balinese dancer known for her Legong, one of the island’s most refined classical dances: precise, flickering movements of the fingers, eyes and shoulders, performed in gilded costume and frangipani headdress.
Digital art
Jonathan Hislop is a digital artist based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the founder of Sounds of a Sphere. Jonathan films traditional musicians and dancers, then sets them inside worlds built from the visual heritage of their own cultures: temple carvings, miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts.
Each world is built by hand in Unreal Engine, Nuke, After Effects and Photoshop. No generative AI is used at any stage. Musicians and cultural advisors guide how their tradition is represented.
These Living Paintings have filled a room at the BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival three years running, opened the Māoriland Film Festival, screened at international film festivals and been shared by New Zealand embassies around the world.
