This beach booth in Penang offers a choice of the most typical 'tourist batiks' meant to be worn over the bathing suit. There is handmade batik as well as industrially produced textiles. On the lower rack you can see a choice of 'wraparounds' that can be draped around the body in several intricate ways. Some are block-printed, others are hand-painted.

Batik is set up as a national symbol in the tourist market. A sign of this are busloads of tourists who are sluiced through batik factories with spacious showrooms and specially trained guides cum sales personnel. At the same time tourism affects batik as an industry as well as a form of aesthetic expression.

What is tourist batik?
Many tourists are primarily interested in buying the same products that Malaysians buy, and do not see much point in the typical souvenirs (see the preceding page). The distinction between batik for tourists and batik for natives is not always clear-cut. The difference may be in ways of using a product rather than the kind of product preferred. All groups of customers may thus agree that the caftan is an attractive garment. But whereas Malaysians wear it for relaxation at home, a Western customer may well see fit to wear it to a party. All groups may likewise fancy the batik shirt, but a Malaysian cannot wear the short-sleeved type at a formal occasion.

But there is one category of clothes that only Western tourists will buy, namely the typical beach outfits and other leisurewear that expose a lot of naked skin. These garments are made in block printed as well as handdrawn patterns. A popular type of design on beachwear is deep-sea motifs with tropical fish, seashells and bottom vegetation.

Batik merchants in the typical tourist areas claim that tourists from Japan and the Western countries prefer simpler patterns and more subdued colours to the more polychrome and complex patterns of Malay batik. A great deal of the batik sold at these places can be made in combinations of white and one other colour. This is also of course simpler and cheaper to produce. But again it should be stressed that the distinctions are not so clear cut. Batik in two colours was not at all uncommon before tourism gained importance, and in the old Javanese batiks dominant colours were often subdued blue and brown shades. (See The Javanese heritage).

The page on design traditions tells us that the old Javanese batik was loaded with references to myths and beliefs in supernatural phenomena. Some batik in the tourist market carries motifs that play on contemporary ideologies and trends. This is mostly found in pictorial art and hand-painted T-shirts. There are antiracist motifs, motifs symbolising oppression, or reference to environmental problems. There are also ambiguous reference to drugs, with many imaginative varieties of the motif ‘magic mushroom’.

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