Agung Rai Museum of Art

This guide to the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Bali follows Agung Rai from a young bookseller hawking postcards to tourists in Ubud to a man who, by the 1970s, was quietly buying up Balinese paintings that moved him. It traces what he watched happening around him, foreign buyers hauling away crates of Balinese and Indonesian art bound for overseas auction houses, and a 1980 visit to two of Ubud's older museums that changed his thinking. You'll hear how a bookseller with no formal training decided private collecting was not enough. Look for how the garden pavilions still carry his instinct for a painting worth keeping.