Reflections of the Lotus: Art from Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos- Art Gallery of South Australia
Until July 4.
THERE has been a lot of talk about Australian familiarity with Asia recently, and a special report in this newspaper last month was full of such expressions as Asia literacy and Asia readiness.
The general conclusion was that Australian schools needed to do a lot more about introducing pupils to Asian languages and culture.
It was surprising, on the face of it, to learn that the study of Asian languages has declined markedly in past decades, though less surprising that teachers and pupils should prefer to study an English or American novel to a Japanese or Chinese one, or European history rather than Asian.
After all, these are part of their culture, part of what helps pupils to understand who they are and where they have come from. Just as our personal identity is developed in the course of our lives and experience, our collective identity as participants in a culture is the product of our history; we must know it to know ourselves.
One problem is that the discussion is being led by business people who have little understanding of what a culture is, and simply want more Asia-ready workers; at worst, one suspects that the great wealth of Eastern cultures is of less interest to them than a post-cultural vision of society as a colony of human worker ants.
The giant Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China has been in the news recently for a spate of copycat suicides. This is where the iPhone and many of our other electronic consumer goods are manufactured, in a factory-city complex that makes the assembly-line production of a century ago in the West look like a cottage industry.
Here, between 300,000 and 400,000 workers are housed and fed, and alternate on 12-hour shifts that keep production running around the clock, forbidden to speak to each
other while on duty. And this is a comparatively happy place, whose suicide rate is only a fraction of the Chinese national average.
Is it knowing about this sort of thing, or not caring, that constitutes Asia literacy in the minds of those who promote this vague idea? In fact, it is important to be aware of such realities, but one can no more reduce Chinese culture to Shenzhen than European culture to any of our own less creditable achievements.
To understand a culture deeply, one has to see the complex connections between its best and worst aspects; just as you cannot understand the contemporary West without considering its origins in Greek values of democracy, freedom of thought and restless curiosity, you cannot understand China without some idea of its age-old traditions.
This is why the Asia literacy discussion should be led by humanists, not technocrats, and be seen in the perspective of a liberal education rather than as part of a utilitarian scheme of commercial training.
It may sound paradoxical, but you can't engage meaningfully with another culture unless you understand your own; mall-man, as the contemporary mass consumer has been called, can't understand other cultures because he lives in a post-cultural swill of meaningless products, images and fashions. When, on the contrary, you are deeply versed in your own traditions, encountering those of others becomes a fascinating adventure. Reflections of the Lotus, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, takes us to Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, places that we know of in a characteristically patchy and superficial way: we eat Thai food regularly, we follow the rioting in Bangkok on television, we have seen photographs of Angkor and heard of Laos, while Burma means Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta.
In fact, this is a particularly complex area, with a mixture of ethnicities, languages, religions and cultural traditions. The whole peninsula (including Vietnam, which we also know in a particular way but which is not covered in the exhibition) is appropriately known as Indochina, for this is a place where the two greatest civilisations of Asia meet.
Broadly speaking, in fact, the east coast of Indochina, represented by Vietnam, is more subject to Chinese influence, and the west, with the ancient civilisation of the Khmers, is more Indian: the Vietnamese used Chinese characters until the Romanisation of their language under French colonial government, while the other Indochinese languages, as well as Javanese, use variants of the ancient Indian Brahmi script.
But just to complicate things further, the Thais and Laos, and their languages, are of south Chinese origins, not Indian. So the cultures of the area are a permutation of ethnic and linguistic characteristics, united, as the exhibition suggests, by the Buddhist religion. Buddhism is as important for an understanding of many Asian societies as Christianity is for the modern Western world, although with at least as many variations of belief and practice, as well as accommodations to earlier or parallel religious and philosophical traditions.
The most important motif in Buddhist art is the figure of Buddha himself, and the variations in the representation of his features and the nuances of his facial expression are as rich as those of, for example, the Virgin Mary in Christian art, similarly conveying important differences of spiritual sensibility.
The Adelaide exhibition has some fine examples from each of these cultural regions, including several pieces lent from important private collections in the city. Among the oldest is a head of Buddha from Angkor -- originally Hindu until the conversion of Jayavarman VII, who built the new Bayon temple -- with its characteristically broad, serene features, contrasting with the thinner, more highly strung Thai model.
There is one head from Laos too, of comparatively primitive workmanship with a strange grin that is like a less subtle version of the so-called archaic smile of early Greek kouroi. For subtlety of spiritual expression, of course, there is nothing like the breathtaking refinement of the Japanese Amida which is upstairs in the gallery's collection but of course not included in this exhibition.
Some of the most outstanding figures are from Burma, including a beautiful figure of Buddha seated in the attitude of calling the earth to witness. The face is round and almost boyish, with a small nose and slightly pursed lips; the original gold leaf is largely worn off, revealing the rich dark red underpainting in cinnabar, the natural ore from which mercury is extracted.
Another Burmese piece, bigger and even more impressive if not quite so beautiful, is once again a Buddha in the same attitude. Here the gold leaf is largely intact, worn off only in places where one imagines the faithful have touched the statue (hands, feet, forearm), and the surface beneath is black lacquer.
There is a late 19th-century marble Buddha from Burma, too, which should have been painted and gilded, but was apparently bought from the workshop in this state by an Adelaide collector who preferred its classical whiteness; he subsequently set it up in a grotto in his country house.
More unusual is a beautiful little carving of a monk, shown with hands together in prayer and an intent expression of spiritual absorption. We learn from the label that for all his holiness, he was nevertheless doomed to a violent death because he had murdered his parents in a previous life.
In the middle of these images of peaceful contemplation there is an unusual and grotesque object, a wooden carving of a bloated corpse with bulging eyes and swollen tongue. Crows are perched on this repellent image, probably the second in an original series of nine showing successive stages of the decomposition of the dead body, intended to turn the minds of young monks away from worldly pleasures.
Thai pieces include the relatively uncommon image of an emaciated Buddha, representing the young prince's experiment in extreme asceticism before deciding that a more moderate regime was preferable, and two standing figures, one with both hands up in the mudra of forbidding the ocean, the other with one hand raised in the attitude of abhaya, or fearlessness.
These figures both have the fine, elongated physique and long oval faces typical of Thai sculpture, and the standing attitude emphasises the striking desexualisation and even feminisation of the body that is, in accordance with Buddhist teaching, wholly freed from desire.
This exhibition includes an almost entirely separate display of Thai ceramics, accompanied by a small but scholarly booklet by James Bennett, also with the title Reflections of the Lotus. It seems as though the larger exhibition drawing on the rich private collections of oriental art in Adelaide may have grown around the original idea of researching the ceramics of the region, and the result is an amalgam of two sets of work.
In any case, there are some fine pieces, and as so often the study of ceramics leads one into the social and political history of the people who made them. These works date mostly from the 14th century, when the technology was imported or implanted in Thailand, until the 16th, when a combination of factors brought the manufacture to an end.
Ceramics is not like carpentry, where you can pack up your tools and move on and cut down timber somewhere else. There is an investment in infrastructure that increases as the work becomes more sophisticated, firing at higher temperatures and achieving more beautiful and durable results; and infrastructure means reduced mobility and vulnerability to destruction in war and other circumstances.
The Thai potters began by imitating Vietnamese and Chinese models, and as manufacturing increased, they began to export to other areas of Southeast Asia that lacked such sophisticated technology.
Beginning with bowls painted in underglaze black iron oxide patterns, the Thai potters soon began imitating the fine green glazed wares with incised patterns that we know as celadon, and that the Chinese themselves originally developed because the colour recalled that of jade.
The fate of Thai ceramics is deeply related to events in China and even in parts of the world of which they knew nothing. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the later 14th century, the emperor proclaimed a ban on ceramic trading overseas, which produced, for a time, the massive fall in exports that is known among specialists as the Ming Gap.
Thai production boomed with their giant competitor temporarily hobbled in this way. But Chinese exports inevitably resumed, and then the Europeans, who had first sailed to Asia at the end of the 15th century, soon established a flourishing business trading up and down the east coast of the continent.
The Dutch and Portuguese trading networks of the 16th century formed a perfect commercial synergy with the Chinese manufacturers, and the new accessibility of markets with an insatiable demand for ceramics led to an enormous growth in the Chinese production of inexpensive export wares.
The Thai potters couldn't compete, and a slow decline set in. Then the kilns had to be evacuated in 1584 when the Burmese launched an invasion, and Thai ceramic production abruptly stopped.
The remarkable thing is that when peace returned, the workshops did not start up again; in the end it wasn't the invasion that killed the industry, but something familiar to us today, Chinese mass-production.
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