Maybe not many people know if in the Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park (TMII) there is a museum exhibits cultural objects of the Asmat people in Papua. It’s Asmat Museum. The 6,500 m² museum is located in the Taman Bunga Keong Emas complex in TMII, East Jakarta. The Asmat Museum was built on 20 February 1986 and was inaugurated on 20 April 1986 by Madame Tien Suharto (the wife of the second Indonesian president).
The outer shape of the building mimics Rumah Kariwari, a house of worship for the Tobati - Enggros people which is a native on the shores of Lake Sentani in Papua, but with a modern interior. Inside there are three main rooms of the permanent exhibition and two connecting buildings with octagonal shape. The roof of the museum uses a 25 meter cone-shaped sago palm leaf cover. In the corners of the building there are also some special decorations of Asmat dominated by red, white and black.
The Asmat objects on display are arranged according to the theme. The first building with the theme Human and Environment. Inside the building there are traditional clothes and jewelery of the Asmat people, ancestral spirit vehicle boat (wuramon), dioramas, ancestral statues (mbis pole), and some symbols of life symptoms.
Meanwhile, in the second building the theme is Human and Culture, which contains traditional Asmat weapons, sago making equipment, hunting equipment, cultural and ceremonial objects, tifa, fu (bamboo wind instruments), and si (stone ax).
The third building has a Human and Creativity theme, exhibiting the creative work of the Asmat tribal contemporary art which is developed based on the traditional pattern of the Asmat people. Besides exhibiting Asmat objects, museum building can also be used for other activities. To enter the Asmat Museum, visitors only need to pay Rp 10,000. The rate includes an entrance ticket to Taman Bunga Keong Emas.