This Kulkul Could Be a Modern Villa Bell — and a Work of Art
A kulkul is usually struck to call attention. This one could just as easily stand in for a modern doorbell — while also telling a story
ARTALL NEWS
The sound itself is plain: two beats, a pause, one more. In an age when most villas simply install an electric bell to call a guest or a member of staff, the kulkul proves the same function can run without wires or batteries — while carrying something no modern bell does: a story. The question is when a functional object like this stops merely being present and earns a longer look. One answer stands near the entry of a villa in Ubud, where a kulkul carries a quieter second role: it holds a script.
Along its body, a cluster of monkey figures are carved in closely related but distinct gestures: one covering its eyes, one covering its mouth, one covering its ears. Carved as one continuous form with the drum itself, the three sit like a pause between the other, more animated poses around them — leaping, peering, half-hidden behind carved branches. At first glance, the figures read as decoration. Look closer, and each pose points to a scene from Cerita Tantri, the Balinese cycle of tales told by Ni Diah Tantri to a king — stories that use animal characters, monkeys among them, to carry wit, moral tension and social commentary, the monkey read as clever or cunning depending on which side of the story it stands on. The gesture of covering eyes, mouth and ears carries its own long-recognised meaning across cultures — restraint from seeing, saying or hearing what is harmful — and here that meaning is woven back into the logic of the Tantri stories rather than simply borrowed.
This is where Bali Artelier's approach shows itself. Art here is not designed to stand alone as ornament; it is designed to carry a narrative load connected to its setting. When the team takes on something as small as a kulkul, the working question is not only how it should look, but what story the object is entitled to carry. Sanna Ubud's landscape already draws heavily on the Tantri universe, so the kulkul became a natural point to continue that thread a functional object that, given a second look, turns out to be telling you something.
There is an older logic behind this. In Bali, carving on a building or a household object is rarely purely decorative; it is often how a community keeps stories in places people pass, touch or hear every day. The kulkul at Sanna Ubud extends that logic into the scale of a private villa — not a museum piece, not an exhibit, but an object still in use, still struck, still heard, while quietly holding a layer of meaning for anyone willing to pause and read its poses one by one.
What stands out in Bali Artelier's approach is not the carving skill alone, but the decision not to separate craftsmanship from story. A kulkul can be made beautiful without any narrative and still do its job. But once its poses are tied to Cerita Tantri and to the landscape around it, the object shifts category — from a functional villa fitting into a piece with a reason to exist exactly where it stands.
