Indonesia has thousands of cultural heritages originating from the traditions of its people. To gain the world’s recognition, Indonesian Government through the Ministry of Education and Culture in collaboration with UNESCO have conductied joint activities to record, promote and nominate the cultural heritages as Indonesia's cultural heritage. This was stated by Director General of Culture, the Ministry of Education and Culture Hilman Farid at a press conference of The 3rd Basoeki Abdullah Award Competition in Jakarta, on Monday (Feb18).
“Our job at the ministry is focus on what we called cultural heritage and we work through UNESCO among other things to nominate Indonesian cultural heritage of having universal value and get recognition from UNESCO. So what we promote so far is based mostly on tradition. Tradition itself doesn't mean that you should limit what you present to the world as the traditional expression, you can have contemporary forms and that's we are doing with Pak Basoeki as well," Hilman Farid said.
Basoeki Abdullah is one of Indonesia's most famous painters who expressed his works through Indonesian mythological puppet paintings. Hilman added that the award carried out by the Ministry of Education and Culture aims to invite young Indonesian artists to express national identity through art, especially painting. The program with the theme of mythology is organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture every three years. (VOI / NUKE / AHM)