section_path: Culture/Arts
section_name: Arts
paragraph_text: Arts
  
  The arts of Southeast Asia have an affinity with the arts of other areas. Dance in much of Southeast Asia includes movement of the hands as well as the feet, to express the dance's emotion and meaning of the story that the ballerina is going to tell the audience. Most of Southeast Asia introduced dance into their court; in particular, Cambodian royal ballet represented them in the early seventh century before the Khmer Empire, which was highly influenced by Indian Hinduism. The Apsara Dance, famous for strong hand and feet movement, is a great example of Hindu symbolic dance.
  
  Puppetry and shadow plays were also a favoured form of entertainment in past centuries, a famous one being the wayang from Indonesia. The arts and literature in some of Southeast Asia are quite influenced by Hinduism, which was brought to them centuries ago. Indonesia, despite large-scale conversion to Islam which opposes certain forms of art, has retained many forms of Hindu-influenced practices, culture, art, and literature. An example is the wayang kulit (shadow puppet) and literature like the Ramayana. The wayang kulit show has been recognised by UNESCO on 7 November 2003 as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
  
  It has been pointed out that Khmer and Indonesian classical arts were concerned with depicting the life of the gods, but to the Southeast Asian mind, the life of the gods was the life of the peoples themselves—joyous, earthy, yet divine. The Tai, coming late into Southeast Asia, brought with them some Chinese artistic traditions, but they soon shed them in favour of the Khmer and Mon traditions, and the only indications of their earlier contact with Chinese arts were in the style of their temples, especially the tapering roof, and in their lacquerware.