Masked traditions in Indochina and the Indonesian archipelago are marked by a rich fusion of indigenous traditions with those arriving over thousands of years from southern China and the Indian subcontinent. In more recent years, European colonization and world-wide touristic interest have also had a impact. Still, a strong animist underlay is still evident in the laminated cultures that have developed through a continuous process of accommodation, interpretation, and syncretic invention. With the absorption and adaptation of Indian narratives and of Chinese, Indian, and European performative strategies, striking theatrical traditions have developed that often maintain a ritual significance.

The Indonesian archipelago consists of over 13,000 islands on which over 200 languages are spoken. Most of the peoples inhabiting these islands show a mix of Papuan and Austronesian ancestry, and masked traditions akin to those found in Melanesia are still practiced. These most frequently occur in connection with mortuary rituals, initiatory rites, and the cultivation of rice in irrigated paddies. Among the Karo and Toba Batak peoples of Sumatra,

a variety of masks have been traditionally used to represent the dead and to be worn by priests and sacrificial victims in elaborate funeral rites and in agricultural ceremonies associated with rainfall. Semi-human masks of clan ancestors are used in the Berutuk ceremonies that serve as rites of initiation and renewal among the Bali Aga people of Trunyan Village. In Kalimantan, the Tiwah peoples in the south use striking funeral masks depicting a world of the dead, while the Kayan, Kenyah, and Bahau Dayaks to the east deploy whimsical Hudoq masks depicting a hierarchy of animal and semi-human forms as disguises for the local gods who come to celebrate the planing of rice and to ensure fertility. Effigies of human ancestors have an important role in some cultures of the archipelago: the Torajan people place life size tau-taus of the honored dead in balconies hewn into the rugged cliffs of South Sulawesi, while the Toba Bataks have made manipulable si galegale puppets (originally with the skull of a man who died without leaving an heir) in order to ease the passage into afterlife; this predilection for ancestral effigies has had important consequences in the development of masked performance traditions that reactualize traces of the past.

The Hudoq masks, like many of the masks in Melanesia, show the influence of the Dong Son culture emanating out of southern China between 500BC and 100AD. Other decorative elements, color symbolism, musical traditions, and a particular attention to the cardinal points of direction also indicate a continuing Chinese influence in the area. By the 2nd century AD and, especially, between the 6th to the 12th centuries AD, the archipelago came under the profound influence of Indic civilizations. Buddhism and Saivism- both with strong Tantric elements-came to the archipelago with missionaries, traders, and settlers arriving from Eastern India (especially, though not exclusively, from the ports of Kalinga) as well as indirectly via China; and these faiths have been fused, adapted and reshaped to local needs and desires. The zoomorphic barong masks and costumes used in exorcistic ceremonies in Java, Bali, and Kalimantan are cousins of the snapping dragons and lions of China, Korea and Japan, as well as the festive animals used in the hills of the former Kalinga (an area that itself that has long contained Austro-Asiatic people who came to the Indian subcontinent from Southeast Asia). The Kirtimukha and Murti traditions of Indian art found receptive homes throughout Southeast Asia and the Shakti tradition was reworked in the apotropaic figure of Ranga, used in Bali for exorcistic ritual performances and grafted onto narratives such as Calonarang, dealing with the suppression and containment of black magic. By 850AD in Java and 882AD in Bali, roving companies of masked players are recorded in administrative records.

Of particular note are the traditions of performance that evolved over the past 1000 years around the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Based on Yogiswara's 10th Century adaptation of Indian Sanskrit texts (including Bhatti's 6th century Ravana Badh) dramatized versions, frequently using masks, were developed side by with shadow plays (Wayang Kulit) and temple friezes in Java and Bali; the resultant genres retain traces of these influences in their stylistic constraints and in the conception of theatre as a form of wayang: a shadow of the mythic world. The Balinese Wayang Wong, derived from a tradition of East Java, is a particularly rich version of the Ramayana, featuring scores of raksasas and monkeys and vivid scenes of battle.

Rivaling the importance of the Indic epics in the region are the romantic tales of Panji which emanated from the Majapahit court of East Java. In the local several local variants of this narrative, the characters present a continuum of human behavior, from the extremely refined (halus) Panji to the lusful and crude (kasar) Klana-often with the aid of masks. This same concern with using masks to create a range of human behavior permeates Balinese Topeng, which dramatizes the chronicles of Balinese princes and uses half masks as well as full masks to comment reflexively and, often, comically, on the relation of the past to the present and of the present to the past in theatrical presentations that delight in virtuosic character creation.

As Islam became the dominant religion of Java during the 16th Century, the cultural elite of East Java were allowed to migrate to Bali, where performance genres continued to develop in an active interchange between court patronage and village participation. The new Islamic courts in Java did not suppress the old narratives and performance genres; instead, these underwent a radical internal conversion in style, becoming more abstract and contemplative under the influence of Sufism. The Courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta maintained an active rivalry in Central Java, while the regions of Sunda, Cirebon, and Madura all developed distinctive variations of masked dance dramas set in pre-Islamic times. Of these centers, Cirebon has a reputation for the most refined and abstract masks, and is also unique in its extensive use of women as masked dancers of male roles.

Masked dances in mainland Southeast Asia developed in relation to influences arriving both directly from India and from Java. Masked forms of the Ramayana (known as the Ramakien in Thailand and Cambodia) and also of the Panji cycle seem to have developed from the 9th to 15th Century in Cambodia, thriving even after Theraveda Buddhism became the dominant religion in the 13th Century. In 1431, Thailand conquered Angkor and performers were brought to the Thai Court, leading to the development of the Lakon Khon masked dance drama. The Thai tradition that flourished was in turn responsible for providing a model for reinvigorating the Cambodian tradition in 19th Century, and a similar form of masked dance, Zat Gyi, developed in Burma after a victory over Thailand brought Khon dancers into the Burmese Court in 1767. Over 100 elaborately decorated helmet masks of gods, heroes, monkeys, and raksasas are used in these dance dramas. Martial arts traditions, variants of the shadow theatre, and elaborate local traditions of court etiquette, along with images taken from sculptural friezes and mural paintings, have all been adapted by these traditions, which separate the narrative function from the masked dancers. Originally performed outdoors, Khon performances in Thailand now take place on the proscenium stage, with scenery inspired in part by Western practice.

In the thousands of islands that dot the Pacific ocean, from Irian Jaya of Indonesia to Easter Island, traditional sculpture is almost exclusively devoted to evocations of an ancestral presence or to related images associated with the mythic past. While this preoccupation with the ancestral world is rarely translated into masks in Polynesia or Australia, the rugged volcanic islands of Melanesian constitute one of the richest and most prolific areas of masking in the world. It is difficult to date the masking traditions of this area, but old stone masks found in Vanuatu and the widespread influence of Dongson style decorations, which must have entered the area from Southern China between around 500 BC, argue for a long period of development and differentiation. The human head is considered the container of vital energy in much of this part of the world, and skulls preserved from ancestors and conquered enemies have been overmodelled with clay and elaborately decorated: the Tatuana masks of New Ireland mortuary rites, among others, may well derive from this tradition.

Rugged geography and isolating social customs have conspired to keep local variations intact in much of Melanesia: it is estimated that more than 700 languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea alone, and masking traditions are similarly diverse. The huge wooden, hooked nosed masks of New Caledonia or the equally striking ancestral Mai masks of the Iatmuls, the fantastic basketry masks of Abelam by the Sepik or the Sulka of New Britain, the whimsical bark-cloth masks of leaf and tree spirits used by the Baining in exorcistic rituals and the smiling but dangerous Tubuan and Dukduk masks of the Tolai in New Britain, the intricate openwork human and animal Malanggan masks in New Ireland, the turtle shell masks of the Torres Straits, the clay “mudmen” masks of Papua New Guinea Highlands and the vast array of sea and land spirit masks–some over two meters high–formerly used by the Elema in the Papua Gulf give ample evidence of both the variety of imaginative richness of these traditions. While a simple palate of white, red, black, yellow, and gray vegetable dies typically is used, the masks are frequently elaborated with shells, beads, feathers, grasses, tusks, seeds, and vegetable fibers. Human and animal motifs are encountered, but almost always transformed into the stuff of waking dreams, tapping the imaginative capacity of collectives and of individuals at the borders of experience. Frequently, these masks become conduits for the visitation of clan ancestors and other spiritual entities, effecting altered states of consciousness in the wearers.

While the Asmat use masks to honor the recent dead, more frequently masks are used to invoke a mythic time of great but untamed power in rites of initiation, mourning, healing, and renewal. Men’s societies located in communal long houses have long prepared and enacted masked ceremonies hearkening back to ancestral times to narrate and ameliorate conflicts among competing communities. between men and women, and between the past and the present. Recently, performing traditions generated by this process have found new functions, at such occasions as the dedications of churches, high school graduations, and inter-communal gatherings, where masked performers come to constitute the embodiment and image of traditional local cultures thrown into to new relationships.

While masks are rare in Polynesia, gourd masks were used in Tahiti for protection and elaborate mourning costumes transformed face and body. Apart from a few masks resembling those of New Guinea found in Cape York and in the islands of the Torres Straits, masks are not traditionally used in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, though other transformative means of re-actualizing the time of creation through body painting, dance, and altered states of consciousness are common.