How Pinterest Images Become Paintings in an Indonesian Village | Knowledge #539

Members of the cizucu editorial team recently travelled to Indonesia for the Jakarta International Photo Festival (JIPFest). We covered the visit in an earlier magazine story.

While we were there, we wanted to learn more about how images are made and circulated in Indonesia, so we travelled on to Bandung in West Java. Walking along Braga Street in the city centre, we saw paintings of mountains, fields and flowers lining the road.

Where did all these paintings come from? Our search led us to Jelekong, a village on the outskirts of Bandung. It is home to many painters and workshops, and painting is firmly established as a way of making a living there.

At an exhibition about Jelekong, we came across the word “Pinterest-an.” It combines Pinterest with the colloquial Indonesian suffix “-an,” giving it a meaning along the lines of “Pinterest-like” or “in the Pinterest style.”

But as we walked through the village and saw how the paintings were made, we began to wonder whether “Pinterest-an” described more than just a visual style. It might also capture the process of an image passing through human hands and taking on a different form.

Here, the generic images that flood our screens become material for painting. There is something strangely real about that transformation—something words alone cannot quite capture.

Jelekong has long produced paintings for the market through a village-wide division of labour, with different people handling each stage from production to finishing. This system has supported both the local economy and everyday life in the village. When the pandemic made face-to-face sales difficult, it seems to have adapted to online orders. We were told that simpler orders can now be completed and shipped in as little as three days.

A customer opens Pinterest and chooses one image from the countless options—something that looks like the painting they want. They send it to a painter along with requests for the size, colours and other details. The painter then uses the image on screen as a reference and recreates it on canvas.

Here, Pinterest serves as a catalogue for finding an image and commissioning a painting. A saved image effectively becomes an order form.

In Jelekong, one painter does not necessarily complete every painting from start to finish. Some people make the canvases, while others paint, frame or package the finished work. Still others ship it to the customer. Every stage, from receiving the reference image to sending out the final product, is divided among different workers in the village.

You could think of the whole village as a 3D printer powered by human hands. An image that once existed on a screen passes through many pairs of hands, becomes a painting made with canvas and paint, and is sent somewhere else.

Even when painters work from the same reference image, no two results are exactly alike. The movement of the brush, the choice of colours and the details left out all introduce small differences. These traces of the hand remain, even within a system built around a division of labour.

The finished painting is framed, packaged and shipped to the customer. An image that appeared on a smartphone only days earlier now has the size and weight of something that can hang on a wall, making its way to someone’s room far away.

Braga Street in central Bandung was one of the places mentioned as a destination for paintings from Jelekong. Along this street of historic buildings, paintings with similar subjects—mountains, fields, rivers and flowers—are displayed side by side. Pinterest now seems to offer a new entry point into a painting production and distribution network that has existed for years.

An image from a screen becomes a physical object displayed in someone’s room. That transformation depends on a series of hands-on, analogue tasks. Between the digital image and the finished object lie not only technical skill, but also labour and time.

Once complete, the paintings are photographed and posted in online shops and on social media. Someone else sees those photos and places a new order, and the image is painted onto another canvas.

Search on Pinterest. Send an image. Paint it by hand. Deliver it as a painting. Photograph the finished result and put it back online. As an image moves back and forth between digital and physical forms, it changes slightly with every step.

Following the idea of “Pinterest-an” reveals more than a set of colours or shapes. It brings an entire system into view: digital images are selected, turned into paintings by hand and sent out into the world. The boundaries of what counts as “Pinterest-an” may still be unclear.

What we saw in Jelekong may not have been the exact moment when an image becomes a painting. Instead, we may have been seeing the journey in between—the process of an image returning to the physical world in another form.