About

All Lasemese batiks featured here are carefully curated by Fransiska Anggraini. After 20 years working in publishing and mostly in travel writing, people have come to know her as Juragan Batik or the batik merchant in the Indonesian language.  

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Coming from an artistic family, she has always loved textiles and over the years, with her extensive world travels, her collection has been exponentially increased, but batiks had never stolen her attention. Until she came to Lasem in end of 2018. Yes, it all started in Lasem, a small, coastal city in Central Java accessible by a 4-hour drive from Semarang.

 

The detailed works and the story behind each motif have blown her away that to quench her newly found interest in Lasemese batiks, she visited a few batik makers. It was in the village of Pohlandak that she met a family-owned batik workshop whose works she loved the most. Then, she began to curate some of the batiks she liked during her visit and posted them on her Instagram account as sharing interesting insights about the process and the meaning behind every motif and color.

 

Her followers, who also had never seen batiks as beautiful as the Lasemese, asked if they were for sale. Then, the rest is history. 

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However, she only wants to work with the batiks that have stolen her heart, therefore, she only sells batiks from Lasem (crafted by the makers she has known well). But above all, she built Awesome Lasem to show the world how underrated Lasemese batiks are. With very few batik makers left in Lasem, she hopes they will still keep making batiks, so this intangible heritage lives on.