Ari Bayuaji is an Indonesian-Canadian artist born in 1975 in Indonesia, who lives and works between Montréal and Bali. He first trained as a civil engineer at the National Institute of Technology, Malang, before turning to art, completing a studio arts degree at Concordia University, Montréal, in 2010.

Bayuaji is best known for Weaving the Ocean, the community project he began in 2020 when the pandemic left him stranded in Bali. Observing the island's shuttered tourism economy and the plastic waste gathering along its shores and mangroves, he began extracting the coloured threads from discarded fishing ropes and, with a team of local artisans, weaving them on looms into textiles and installations — work that is at once environmental, social and cultural, recycling ocean plastic, providing income when tourism collapsed, and drawing on Balinese cosmology such as the guardian sea-creature Gajah Mina. Across his wider practice, Bayuaji works poetically with found and ready-made materials, transforming aged and discarded objects into new narratives that carry ecological and social weight.

Bayuaji has a long association with REDBASE, from a 2016 residency and solo exhibition at its Yogyakarta foundation to his solo Weaving the Ocean (2023) and subsequent group exhibitions at REDBASE Art, Sydney. His work has been shown internationally at the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art; the 4th Bangkok Art Biennale; and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo and Singapore, with a solo exhibition opening at the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2026. His work is held in major collections including the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; the Fondation Agnès, Paris; and the Coral Triangle Center, Bali.