Kaji Habeb

Kaji Habeb (b. 1972, Magelang, Indonesia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, theatre, puppetry, and traditional craft. For over three decades, he has explored the intersections of performance, spirituality, and visual art — transforming colour, gesture, and material into acts of storytelling.

His paintings are theatrical in composition: layered, vivid, and alive with movement, as if caught mid-performance. Equally, his engagement with textile heritage has given rise to Batik Rajah, a studio where he reinterprets the sacred rajah symbols — ancient Javanese spiritual inscriptions — into contemporary batik art. Each piece becomes both adornment and invocation, a wearable expression of strength, protection, and beauty.

Habeb also experiments across mediums, including the creation of Wayang Mikael, a contemporary puppet crafted from mica, through which he performs as both puppeteer and writer. His artistic universe bridges ritual and modernity — where the rajah, once a mystical emblem, finds new life through the language of colour and form.

From the theatre stage to the batik studio, Kaji Habeb continues to weave the tangible and the unseen, keeping alive the ancestral pulse of Javanese creativity through a contemporary, inclusive lens.