LOS ANGELES — The Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California has been swallowed by the sea.

The Indonesian fiber artist Mulyana has taken over the museum with colorful, hand-knitted and crocheted aquatic life. Mulyana: Modular Utopia features two room-sized installations, three-dimensional fiber wall sculptures, colorful costumes, and soft, inviting pillows.

Mulyana crafts a tactile, mystical world in which fish, whales, and coral reefs coexist with sea monsters. A multi-hued green figure made from yarn, “Adikara” (2020), emerges from a bright bed of seaweed and coral. Mulyana, pulling from Indonesian tradition, often creates masks and costumes to explore other dimensions of his personality, usually a heroic, nonhuman creature. A ruffled, yellow costume, “Si Koneng” (2022), sprouts from patches of dull gray coral, contrasting the subdued sea life with its sunny energy.

The duality of life and death is a recurring theme in Mulyana’s deceptively cheerful art. Much of the plush, gray coral that spreads across the walls in “Luna#6” and “Candramawa” (both 2022) represents reefs in slow states of decay. Warming waters associated with climate change and manmade chemical waste dumped into oceans are responsible for the once-vibrant ecosystems’ loss of color. In a video performance, the Si Koneng monster wanders through the dreary, grayscale ruins of Indonesia, searching for signs of life.

The devastation becomes more accentuated in the large-scale installation “Satu” (2018). Beautiful, pure white clusters of tubular and rosette corals surround a 3D-printed whale skeleton. Above, a large cluster of jellyfish study their fallen friend. The monochromatic room harrowingly foreshadows what will happen to our oceans without any intervention.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.