VO LU M E 1 8 N O.

4 D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9

the journal of
the asian arts society
of australia

TAASA Review

ADORNMENT

contents
Volume 18 No.4 December 2009

ED ITOR IAL

TA A S A RE V I E W

Sandra Forbes and Sabrina Snow, guest editors

W HITE R ABBIT

THE ASIAN ARTS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA INC.

Abn 64093697537 Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2009
ISSN 1037.6674

Elizabeth Keenan

SO WHAT IS CO N T E M P O R A R Y ? Q U E E N S L A N D S A P T 6

Russell Storer

ON BEING AR T: DADANG CH R ISTANTO S SU R VIVO R

Helen Holmes

10

THE ARTISTS OF ANGKOR: CONTEMPORARY AND MEDIEVAL STONE WORKSHOPS IN CAMBODIA

design / layout

Martin Polkinghorne

Ingo Voss, VossDesign

13

GREAT PERFECTE D B E I N G S

Jackie Menzies

16

THE AR T OF IMITATIO N: MING WO NG AT TH E VENICE B I E N N A L E

Published by The Asian Arts Society of Australia Inc.

PO Box 996 Potts Point NSW 2011
www.taasa.org.au

Alexandra Crosby

Enquiries: admin@taasa.org.au

1 9

S Y D N E Y S B L A N K E T O F C L A Y: A V I E W O F T H E A U S T R A L I A N C E R A M I C S T R I E N N A L E

of The Asian Arts Society of Australia Inc. TAASA Review welcomes

Merran Esson

submissions of articles, notes and reviews on Asian visual and

21

THE PAZYR YK C AR P ET, 6 0 YEAR S O N

Leigh Mackay

24

IN THE P UBLIC D O MAIN: T W O J A PA N E S E T E MPLE GUA R DI A N S

Russell Kelty

Registered by Australia Post. Publication No. NBQ 4134

e di torI A L email: editorial@taasa.org.au

General editor, Josefa Green

publications committee

Josefa Green (convenor) Tina Burge

Melanie Eastburn Sandra Forbes Ann MacArthur
Jim Masselos Ann Proctor Susan Scollay
Sabrina Snow Christina Sumner

printing

John Fisher Printing

TAASA Review is published quarterly and is distributed to members

performing arts. All articles are refereed. Additional copies and

subscription to TAASA Review are available on request.
No opinion or point of view is to be construed as the opinion of
The Asian Arts Society of Australia Inc., its staff, servants or agents.
No claim for loss or damage will be acknowledged by TAASA
Review as a result of material published within its pages or
in other material published by it. We reserve the right to alter
or omit any article or advertisements submitted and require
25

ALAS TAIR MOR R ISO N ( 1 9 1 5 -2 0 0 9 )

Claire Roberts

indemnity from the advertisers and contributors against damages

or liabilities that may arise from material published.
All reasonable efforts have been made to trace copyright holders.

26

C ITIES OF THE SIL K R OAD : A TAASA SEMINAR

Christina Sumner

28

R EC ENT TAAS A ACTIVITIES / TAASA MEMBER S D IAR Y

29

BOOK R EVIEW: CO MMUN I T Y A N D ME MO RY

Jocelyn Chey

30

W HAT S ON IN AU STR AL IA : DE CE MBE R 2009 F E BR UA RY 2 0 1 0

Compiled by Tina Burge

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COVER
OBJECT OF DESIRE by WANG ZHIYUAN, China, 2008,FIBREGLASS, BAKING PAINT,
LIGHTS, SOUND, 355 x 356 x 70 cm

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T A A S A committee

EDITORIAL

Judith Ruther for d President

Sandra Forbes and Sabrina Snow, guest editors

Collector and specialist in Chinese textiles

G i ll G r een Vice President

Art historian specialising in Cambodian culture

A NN GUILD TR EASU R ER

Former Director of the Embroiders Guild (UK)

KATE JOHNSTON SECR ETA RY

Intellectual property lawyer with

an interest in Asian textiles
Hwei-fe n cheah

Lecturer, Art History, Australian National University,

with an interest in needlework
JO CE LYN C HEY

Visiting Professor, Department of Chinese Studies,

University of Sydney; former diplomat
M att Cox

Study Room Co-ordinator, Art Gallery of New South

Wales, with a particular interest in Islamic Art of
Southeast Asia
Philip C ourtenay

Former Professor and Rector of the Cairns Campus,

James Cook University, with a special interest in
Southeast Asian ceramics
Sandra Forbes

Editorial consultant with long-standing interest

in South and Southeast Asian art
Josefa Green

General editor of TAASA Review. Collector of Chinese

ceramics, with long-standing interest in East Asian
art as student and traveller
G E RALD INE HAR D MAN

Collector of Chinese furniture and Burmese lacquerware

ANN PROCTOR

Lecturer in Asian Art, Sydney University

and the National Art School, Sydney
A NN ROBER TS

Art consultant specialising in Chinese

ceramics and works of art
SABRIN A S NOW

Has a long association with the Art Gallery of New

South Wales and a particular interest in the arts of China
CHRISTIN A S UMN ER

Principal Curator, Design and Society,

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
SPE CIALIS T ADVISOR ON N E ASIA

Min-Jung Kim
Hon. Auditor

Rosenfeld Kant and Co

state representatives
Australian Capital Territory
Robyn Max well

Visiting Fellow in Art History, ANU;

Senior Curator of Asian Art, National Gallery of Australia
Northern Territory
Joanna Barrkman

Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture,

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
Queensland
Suhanya R affel

Head of Asian and Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery

South Australia
James Bennett

Curator of Asian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia

Victoria
Carol C ains

Curator Asian Art, National Gallery of Victoria International

TASMANIA
Kate Brittlebank

Lecturer in Asian History, School of History and Classics,

University of Tasmania

This December edition of the TAASA Review,

is indeed a collaborative effort: Josefa Green
and myself soliciting articles, Sandra Forbes
completing the bulk of the editorial work, and
finally myself pulling it all together! Excellent
teamwork from the TAASA Publications
committee!!

pressures of life today, these artists interpret

aspects both of traditional and modern life in
China to produce works of striking creativity,
wit, and freshness - especially in the inventive
range of media used. The work of White
Rabbit artists are represented on both our
front and back covers this edition.

This Review was intended as general issue,

but in early 2009, our publications team
discovered that Australia was offering this year
a most vibrant and exciting exhibition scene,
especially in the context of contemporary
Asian art. Since July, Sydney has played
host to the Australian Ceramics Triennal; has
seen the opening in August of the exciting
new private museum specializing in Chinese
contemporary art, The White Rabbit, and
has witnessed the stirring performance art
of Indonesian Dadang Christanto at Gallery
4A. In addition, in Brisbane, on December
5th, the sixth Australian Triennal of Asian
Pacific Art (APT) a major regional forum
for contemporary art, will open at the
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG). To complete
the Asian exhibition coverage with a more
traditional theme, we feature an article on
the stunning Indian art collection of the royal
Rathore family of Jodhpur, now on show at
the Art Gallery of New South Wales. So if this
edition were to have a title, Australian Asian
art exhibitions and Events 2009 would seem
a most appropriate one.

Alexandra Crosby, writing from the Venice

Biennale, discusses how the Singaporean
artist curator team Ming Wong and Tang Fu
Kuen manipulate stereotypes of race, gender
and nationality, to show the changing nature
of cultural identity in an increasingly global
world. Wong does this with wit and humour
through the medium of video, giving insights
into the changing interpretations of national
film and its identities.

The 2009 APT at the QAG is a culmination

of sixteen years showcasing the exciting
developments in contemporary art in our
region, amongst the most dynamic in the
global context. ( See TAASA Reviews Aug 93;
Dec 96; Sep 99; Sep, Dec 02; Dec 06 ) Here,
Russell Storer traces the changes in the aims
and orientation of the Triennial, showing how
it has responded over the years to the artistic
movements in Asia and the Pacific. From an
early focus on a general introduction to artists
and practices in the region, to that of looking at
individual practices, it is now launching its most
ambitious project yet, in 2009 exhibiting over
100 artists from 25 countries. This APT presents
challenging questions on the intrinsic meaning
of contemporary art, covering its varied
practices, forms and approaches, and goes on
to explore the dominant themes that preoccupy
contemporary Asian artists popular culture,
consumerism, social issues, dislocation, place
and identity, and many more.
These themes certainly feature with the artists
of the White Rabbit Gallery, Chippendale.
Elizabeth Keenan describes how, in the context
of what are universal social and economic

Underlying many of the works of Asian artists

discussed in this review is an awareness of
tradition, where traditional media and art
practices have been revised or reinterpreted
using contemporary methods and ideas. This
is evident in the work as much at the APT
as it was in that of the emerging ceramicists
at the Ceramics Triennale. Many of these
artists draw their inspiration from Asia,
especially China, as reflected in the title of
one of its 40 exhibitions Another Silk Road.
The Review carries this theme further with
a report on the TAASA seminar on The Silk
Road held in Sydney in September. A series
of speakers offered a variety of perspectives
on the history, architecture, art and texture
of human life in the Silk Road cities from
antiquity to the present. Leigh Mackay also
presents here a fascinating article on the oldest
preserved Persian pile carpet ever excavated,
from Pazyryk on the edges of the Silk Road in
North Central Asia, thought to be from a 3rd
century BCE Persian inspired workshop.
For lovers of sculpture and Khmer art, this
edition of TAASA Review carries a leading
article on contemporary and medieval
stone workshops in Cambodia, by Martin
Polkinghorne. Martins detailed research
provides new light on the methods and
practices of the artists who continue to
pass on exquisite carving techniques from
centuries - old prototypes .
This December edition of TAASA I think
offers something for everyone. In particular,
it offers insights into the vibrant exhibition
scene Australia is offering its public in Asian
art, especially contemporary art. The APT in
Brisbane continues until April 2010, dont
miss it!

WHITE RABBIT
Elizabeth Keenan
RED MEMORY SMILE by Chen Wenling, China, 2007,bronze and vehicle duco, 290 x 120x 200cm

n 1999, after almost ten years living in

Australia, the artist Wang Zhiyuan paid a
visit to Beijing. There he heard something that
stopped him in his tracks: dance-hall songs
from pre-revolutionary Shanghai. When he
was growing up, these capitalistic tunes had
been banned. Now they were everywhere
-- along with Debussy and jazz, rock and
hip-hop. Art too was exulting in its liberation.
Painters who had once been jailed for making
bourgeois art were now richly paid for it.
When Wang Zhiyuan left China in 1989,
there were no commercial art galleries in the
country. Now there were thousands, and
whole districts of Beijing were being turned
into artists enclaves. So exciting were the
changes that Wang Zhiyuan started thinking
hed move back there.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, Judith Neilson was also
being bowled over by Chinese contemporary
art. Now that her two daughters were teenagers,
the former graphic designer and photographer
wanted to resume her art studies and was
looking for a tutor. At the Ray Hughes Gallery,
she spotted a series of flat shapes, cut from
sheet metal, that portrayed whimsical fusions
of animals, birds and plants: a bird-angel,
a winged cloud-man, a pig sprouting fruit.
Whoever made these, Neilson decided, was
the artist she wanted to learn from. His name,
she discovered, was Wang Zhiyuan.
After returning to Sydney, Wang soon
became a regular visitor to the Neilsons
home, tutoring Judith Neilson in drawing and
painting--and enthusing about the wonderful
art hed seen in China. After several months
of this treatment, Neilson and one of her
daughters went to Beijing to see what all the
fuss was about. They came back with a single
painting, but when she raved to her husband,
Kerr, about all the other works shed seen,
he said, Why didnt you buy more? I said,
We have no room in the house, she recalls.
But later I started thinking, it would be
wonderful if we could have a space, to show
what contemporary Chinese art really is. So I
said, Why dont we open a gallery?
In August 2009, the White Rabbit Collection
opened to the public. The name just came
to me, Neilson says. It was a little flash.
Admission to the three-storey former knitting
factory, in the inner-Sydney suburb of
Chippendale, is free. I did this for a quite
personal reason, Neilson explains. I just want

to share the art because I can. And to share it

with as many people as possible: I wanted a
place where people whod never set foot in a
gallery could come and not feel intimidated,
or that they werent smart enough, or their
opinion was wrong.
When their ideological shackles were first loosed,
in the mid-1980s, the first instinct of many Chinese
artists was to look backwards. Countless works
appeared mocking Mao and the revolution,
collectivism and communist propaganda.
By 2000, older artists had got the past out of
their system, and new artists were emerging
who had no past to worry about. They were
exploring any subject that grabbed them, using

every genre from abstract expressionism and

traditional ink painting to embroidery, flash video
and conceptual art, incorporating themes and
influences drawn from Western magazines, pop
music, Zen, Taoism, Chinese folk art, the internet,
consumerism, feminism, Marshall McLuhan
and Marcel Duchamp. Their output was prolific,
energetic and superbly executed. Chinese art
education may have been ideologically rigid, but
it was also technically rigorous. Now that artists
could say anything they pleased, they had the
skills to do so with flair.
The 400 works in the White Rabbit Collection
(90 of which appear in the opening exhibition
of August 09 ) reflect the fireworks that

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

EXUVIATE II WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE by Jin Nu, China, 2005, cotton, muslin

undiscovered ones. White Rabbit has works

by celebrities such as Ai Weiwei and Lin
Tianmiao, and by emerging artists like Jin Nu
and Dong Yuan, both aged 25. This is not a
star show, Neilson says. It is a document of
Chinese contemporary art since 2000.
Just inside the gallerys glass doors hangs
Wang Zhiyuans Object of Desire, a bas-relief
on a giant pair of brightly coloured womens
panties. On a red-curtained bed lie a fat
businessman and a young woman flaunting a
ring that flashes with electric light. Above the
couple glows a green neon sign: Diamonds
matter most. The work mocks the libertinism
that is the shadow side of liberty. But it
also has a soundtrack: those long-banned
Shanghai dance-hall songs, which seem to
add ...And freedom is a diamond.
Elizabeth Keenan is Press and Publications

result when creative freedom meets technical

mastery. They range from Chen Wenlings
naked, grinning boy, six metres tall and
covered in red car duco, to Jin Nus delicate
little-girls dresses, floating like a pastel cloud.
Dai Huas I Love Beijings Tiananmen, a witty
cavalcade of Chinese history and legend, was
made entirely in a computer. A few steps
away are the spare geometries of Gu Fans
Find Light in the Rain, hand-stitched in black
wool on white cloth. There are Jiang Jians
heart-tugging full-length portraits of Chinese
orphans, and an installation by Xiao Lu-featuring sperm freezer and glass jarsthat
mourns her inability to have a child. There are
Liu Haizhous gigantic, fluorescent portraits
of dead chickens, and the tiny abstracts of
his wife Du Jie, each spun from a single,
intricately folded line. There is exuberant
colour: Zhu Jinshis paint is applied so thickly
(with a spade and a wok spatula that form

part of one work) that it took months to

dry. And there is no-colour: Lu Zhengyuan
sculpted his seven Mental Patients in grey, he
says, because that is what you get when you
dilute every colour enough, and when you
mix all the colours together.
All the works were bought because Neilson
loved them. Wang Zhiyuan, now living in
Beijing, scouts for pieces he thinks will appeal
to her; sometimes she buys them, sometimes
not. Three-monthly visits to China have honed
her eye. The more you see, she says, the
faster you can identify what is good. Since
the works are not bought for resale, Neilson is
free to define good independently of market
fads. I buy work because I have a reaction
to it, she explains. It might be the colour or
the shape or the subject, but I notice it -- it
stays with me. Names are not important: I
want to show established artists and promote

Director for the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney.

All quotations from Judith Neilson from personal
interviews, August 2009

WORKS REFERRED TO
Chen Wenling (b. 1969), Red MemorySmile (2007)
Jin Nu (b. 1984), Exuviate IIWhere Have All the Children Gone? (2005)
Dai Hua (b. 1976), I Love Beijings Tiananmen (2006)
Gu Fan (b. 1980), Find Light in the Rain (2007)
Jiang Jian (b. 1953), The Orphan Files (2004)
Xiao Lu (b. 1962), Sperm (2006)
Liu Haizhou (b. 1971), Gorgeousness Overripe No. 11 and No. 21 (2007)
Du Jie (b. 1968), Green, 2007.01.18 (2007)
Zhu Jinshi (b. 1954), Diary: 25.12.2006 (2006)
Lu Zhengyuan (b. 1982), Mental Patients (2006); quotation from
personal interview, August 2009
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Oil Spill (2007)
Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961), Focus Series No. 1 and No. 2 (2007)
Dong Yuan (b. 1984), Sketch of Family Belongings (2008)

I LOVE BEIJINGS TIANANMEN by Dai Hua, 2006, GICLEE PRINT, 110 X 635CM

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

SO WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY? QUEENSLANDS APT6

Russell Storer

Tandem bicycle (from Sharing knowledge series) by Svay Ken, Cambodia 2008. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 80cm.
On show at APT6, Queensland Art Gallery. Collection Queensland Art Gallery, purchased 2008 through
the Queensland Governments Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund

ver the past 16 years, the Asia Pacific

Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) has
reflected the cultural and social changes taking
place in this extraordinarily dynamic part of
the world. From its inception, the APT has
introduced new artists and practices to local
and international audiences, helping to build
interest in, knowledge of and engagement
with the diversity of cultures that surround
us. Arising at a time when there were few
opportunities, not only in Australia but also
overseas, for Asian and Pacific artists to
show their work in a museum context, the
APT has been a significant agent in building
discussions around contemporary art in the
region. From what was a series of largely
grass-roots scenes in the early 1990s, the
Asian contemporary art landscape now also
includes numerous biennials and triennials,
an array of public and private museums, a
vigorous art market, and a number of critical
journals and magazines.
With each instalment, the APT has responded
to the artistic movements taking place in Asia
and the Pacific, as well as to shifts in reception.
As local knowledge also grows, increasingly
nuanced and sophisticated understandings of
art and exhibition making are enabled and
expected. The early APT exhibitions, for example,
provided much-needed introductions to artists,
art practices and contemporary cultures, with
QAG staff working with co-curators and
advisors throughout the region to select artists
and to facilitate their participation. As regional
networks have strengthened, institutional
expertise has developed, and audiences have
become more informed, the exhibition has been
able to be articulated in new ways. The broad
representation and multi-curator approach of
the first three Triennials moved into the tighter

focus and retrospective model of APT 2002,

which looked at individual practices over several
decades. This deepening view extended to the
grand scope of APT5 in 2006, which launched
the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
and presented complex, collection-driven
commissions such as Pacific Textiles and a multipart display by the Long March Project, Beijing.
The Asia Pacific department of the Gallery has
also grown in response to this increased focus
and expertise, establishing dedicated positions
in contemporary Pacific and Asian art, unique in
Australia and rare internationally.
APT6 builds upon this history with arguably
its most ambitious exhibition to date. Taking
up the entire GoMA building, as well as

the Water Mall and adjoining spaces of the

Queensland Art Gallery, APT6 will feature
works by over 100 artists from 25 countries.
While maintaining its focus on new and
recent work, the exhibition offers numerous
opportunities to question what constitutes
the contemporary in the region, through
enormously varied practices, forms and
approaches. Contemporary art has been
described by the art historian Boris Groys
as the act of presenting the present, rather
than simply describing art produced today
(Groys 2008: 71). Grounded in the here and
now, works in the exhibition offer myriad
responses to the conditions and experiences
of being in the world a world ever-more
complex and interconnected.

Immortalis (from Effugio series) by Thukral & Tagra, India, 2008. Acrylic and oil on resin, 76 x 72cm. On show at APT6, Queensland Art Gallery. Courtesy the artists

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

The new book of mountains and seas (part 1) (still) by Qiu Anxiong, China, 2006. Digital hand-painted animation,
AVI file, 3 channel projection exhibited from PC, mediaplayer 11, 4:1, black and white, sound, ed. 1/10, 30:15 minutes.
On show at APT6, Queensland Art Gallery. Courtesy the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong

Reflecting these interrelationships, APT6

weaves several thematic threads through the
exhibition, drawing productive links between
works. The prevalence of popular culture,
for example, both in its global aspects and
local inflections, is a constant inspiration for
artists. With burgeoning wealth and growing
middle classes across much of Asia, luxury
goods and fashionable lifestyles have become
highly visible, producing marked shifts in
visual cultures. Artists such as Thukral &
Tagra, Farhad Moshiri, Rudi Mantofani and
Tracey Moffatt use the vivid imagery and
communicatory techniques of advertising,
cinema and pop art to explore intricate social
questions such as imperialism, consumerism
and intercultural relations.
Changing economic fortunes and urban
development have led to the dramatic
transformation of cities and had enormous
impact on individual lives. Works by
Chen Qiulin address the impact of human
displacement through the Three Gorges Dam
project, while both Chen Chieh-jen and Yao
Jui-chung reflect upon the effects of financial
crises and the loss of industry in Taiwan.
Similar forces are considered in works by
artists from the Mekong region of Southeast
Asia, which has undergone great economic

and social transformations over the past few

decades. Presented as a focused platform within
APT6 and co-organised with the Vietnamese
artist and researcher Rich Streitmatter-Tran,
The Mekong features works by Jun NguyenHatsushiba and Svay Ken that convey the
tensions between Buddhist tradition and
consumer society, while Vandy Rattanas
photographic project Fire of the Year looks

at problems faced by overcrowding and lack

of infrastructure in Phnom Penh. Bui Cong
Khanhs ceramic works locate the new urban
lifestyles in Vietnam within a long history of
trade and capital flows, in the form of blueand-white porcelain vases.
Other themes in APT6 look at artistic forms
and approaches. A resurgence of drawing

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TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

A Chinese Cloisonne meiping vase, 17th century.

From the series Flowers, fruits & portraits [Schaedel-01-2007] by Shirana Shahbazi, Iran, 2007. Type C photograph,
90 x 70cm. On show at APT6, Queensland Art Gallery. Courtesy Bob van Orsouw Gallery, Zurich, the artist

importance of collaboration in the production

of contemporary art, technically as well as
conceptually. While models of collaboration
and collectivity differ, and arise for a range
of reasons, they inevitably enable broader
approaches to making art, with different yet
complementary skills brought together to
realise ambitious works.
The interdisciplinarity that flows out from
these interactions is a feature of much
significant art-making in the region, and
underpins many works in APT6. Artists often
work across design, architecture, and various
disciplines within visual art simultaneously,
expanding and invigorating our conception
of artistic practice. As theorist Sarat Maharaj
has noted, what we call art activity is
expanding, extending, transmogrifying in the
contemporary art setting (Maharaj 2008: 280).
This interrogation of the parameters of art
has been a consistent motif in the APT project
since the beginning, with its presentation of
performance, music, video and film alongside
traditional artistic media such as sculpture
and painting. The conception of tradition has
also continuously been brought into question,
with the inclusion of media such as textiles,
brush-and-ink painting, calligraphy, porcelain
and miniature painting, which have been
revised or reinterpreted with contemporary
methods and ideas.

is a feature of contemporary art all over the

world, and artists in Asia and the Pacific
are able to tap into rich graphic histories.
Minam Apang and Gonkar Gyatso both
trained in Buddhist thangka painting, and
employ its exquisite linear technique to new
ends; while Qiu Anxiongs animated video
works combine drawing and traditional
brush-and-ink techniques to comment on the
transforming landscapes of China. Hawaiian
artist Solomon Enos uses a comic strip mode
to create a sprawling epic of thousands of
years of Polynesian history, reaching to the
past and into the future. Looking at another
popular form, the musical genre of reggae
has enormous currency across the Pacific, and
a special program of promotional and live
video clips, documentaries and performances
has been developed for APT6 . Curated with
the assistance of ABC broadcaster Brent
Clough, Pacific Reggae demonstrates the
varied ways this form has been adopted
and articulated by musicians from Hawaii
to Vanuatu to New Zealand, and how it has

become an important means of telling stories

and addressing local concerns.
Collaboration a key element in contemporary
arts engagement with the social is another
important aspect of APT6. Several collectives
and collaborative projects are included in
the exhibition, reflecting the wide sphere
of activity artists are involved with, across
disciplines and in different sites. The
Australian group DAMP, which has been
operating since 1995, have constructed a space
within the gallery in which meetings can be
held and people can sit and interact with
each other; while the art/design collaboration
Yoshitomo Nara and Graf, known as YNG,
have built an elaborate architectural structure
reminiscent of an artists studio, filled with
art works produced by Nara. A number of
artistic collaborations are featured in APT6,
including Thukral and Tagra, Alfredo and
Isabel Aquilizan, Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing,
Robin White, Leba Toki and Bale Jione, and
Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu, conveying the

One of the strengths of the APT has been

its embrace of the great heterogeneity and
mutability of Asian and Pacific art, rather
than attempting to contain it within linear
narratives of modernity and history. It is this
openness to the protean energies of the region
that has maintained the projects vigour, and
APT6 promises to extend this further.
Russell Storer is Curator of Contemporary Asian Art
at the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern
Art. The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary
Art (APT6 ) opens at the Queensland gallery on 5
December 2009 and runs to 5 April 2010.

REFERENCES
Groys, B, 2008: The Topology of Contemporary Art, in Terry
Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (eds), Antinomies of
Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, p.71.
Duke University Press, Durham.
Maharaj, S, 2009: Philosophical Geographies, in Making Worlds:
53rd Biennale of Venice (exhibition catalogue), p.280. Marsilio
Editori, Venice.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

O N B E I N G A R T: D A D A N G C H R I S T A N T O S S U R V I V O R
Helen Holmes
Volunteers stage Dadang Christantos performancework Survivor
atGallery 4A, Sydney, on 15 August 2009. Photo Garry Trinh

urvivor continues Dadang Christantos

interrogation of the impact of human
disaster. The work refers to the tragic manmade mud catastrophe in the Sidoarjo region
of East Java where, three years ago, hot mud
began to erupt from the site of a gas exploration
well, effectively wiping out 11 villages in the
region. To this day, the mud flow continues to
subsume surrounding villages. Christantos
work gives voice to the tragedy of lives lost
and the silent suffering of the survivors. The
work is a continuation of his theme of loss,
empathy for human suffering and all victims
of injustice, and relates to his previous work
about the disappearance of his own father
under the Suharto regime in the mid-1960s.
As the director of Sydneys Gallery 4A,
Aaron Seeto, explains: The entire history of
a village its livelihood and future -- is being
buried under the mud. While Christantos
work is politically confronting, it is also a
poetic experience that reminds us of a human
fragility and erasure in the face of disaster.
Christantos solo show, also titled Survivor,
opened at Gallery 4A in Sydney on 15 August.
The major performance work associated
with the show was orchestrated by Summar
Hipworth as part of the shows opening. For
this performance, volunteers were requested.
So, in mid-winter, 30 stoic individuals donned
sawn-off track-suit pants and oversized Tshirts and, after what seemed like The Last
Supper (a vast morning tea) and instructions
from our creator Christanto, we spent the
next half hour rolling about in mud (clay).
The majority of volunteers were young art
students, though the performers also included
a handful of others, who, lets say, were
eligible for concession bus tickets. For the
latter, three hours without bathroom facilities
was somewhat daunting.

asked us to take our poses and instantly we

were transformed into serious silent clay
models ready to embody the tragedy of the
human struggle.

we could metamorphose from a gregarious

gathering of people into victims of disaster
and become the art -- and indeed, a Survivor,
in more ways than one.

Three hours went by in a flash. It was a

truly sombre and meditative experience.
We remained in an almost trance-like state,
vaguely conscious of people coming and
going, photographers clicking away and
the hum of conversation and tinkling wine
glasses echoing from a group at the end of
the gallery. Movement was minimal, just a
slow pivot in the slippery sludge with care
not to fall and no eye contact with our fellow
performers. As the clay caked and dried
on our bodies and then started to crust and
powder and drop to the canvas there was a
sense of decay and disintegration: yet our
bodies remained resilient and resolute. The
drip, drip of falling clay and the slow silent
revolutions were reminiscent of the passage
of time, as survivors wait

Helen Holmes is the cook, the wife, the lover,

a guide at the AGNSW and a one- time piece of
performance art. Survivor was staged at Gallery
4A, Sydney, on Saturday 15 August 2009,
with documentation and detritus from the
performanceon display until 19 September.
The work was previously staged in Jakarta in
2007 in Proclamation Square.

Each individual was handed a photographic

portrait memorialising the life of one of those
lost, fractured or displaced in the tragedy
that has inspired Christantos work. Our
instructions were to focus on that person, to
remain silent and motionless, making only
slow pivotal movements, until the press had
been and gone; after that, we could sit or
recline in pose if necessary.

During the final half hour individual

performers tiptoed quietly out of the art,
leaving behind in the mud the powerful image
of the survivor they had held. Their reward
was showers and sustenance, provided by
the very capable, friendly staff atGallery 4A.
Then after three hours Christanto gave the
sign that the performance was over.

After a half hour of hilarious child play,

cavorting about in glorious mud, Christanto

The astonishing revelation for me was that we

could maintain the poses for so long, and that

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Dadang Christanto was born in Tegal, Central Java,

in 1957 and studied painting in Yogyakarta. Over
the past decade his work has gained worldwide
recognition with exhibitions of paintings, sculpture,
installations and performance art. In Australia he has
had two solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New
South Wales and Sherman Galleries in Sydney, and
at the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory.
He has been included in two Asia-Pacific Triennials
at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and has
exhibited in key contemporary Asian art museums in
the Asian region and the Venice Biennale 2003.

REFERENCES
www.4a.com.au
Gallery 4A, About the project Survivor, information sheet for
volunteers. www.crossart.com

THE ARTISTS OF ANGKOR: CONTEMPORARY AND MEDIEVAL

STONE WORKSHOPS IN CAMBODIA
Martin Polkinghorne

Decorative lintel from Lolei, Hariharalaya, showing the technical mastery and sublime beauty
of Khmer sculpture , late 9th century. Photo: Martin Polkinghorne

he beauty and significance of Angkorian

sculpture is, without fear of exaggeration,
superlative, and is recognised as among the
greatest achievements of human creativity.
Drawing from an established tradition of
hieratical forms founded in earlier urban
centres, the artists of Angkor fashioned
sculpture characterised by universally
recognised values of beauty, harmony of
composition, naturalism and precision of
execution. Although sculptural fashions
changed over time, medieval Khmer sculpture
continuously observed a delicate and
distinctive balance between simplicity and
attention to detail, humility and grandeur,
subtlety and expressiveness. Today, we can
revere these sculptures in situ in numerous
Angkorian sanctuaries and in museums
throughout the world. But what do we
actually know about the Angkorian artistic
process and artists themselves? The medieval
Khmer epigraphic record is silent on the
matter; there are few references to artists and
no indications about the organisation and
direction of their work.
The artists and their methods were
undoubtedly of considerable importance to
the court and to broader Khmer society, yet
they remain largely anonymous. Although
the past is a foreign country (Hartley
1953),a carefully considered analogy with
contemporary Cambodian stone workshops
offers us considerable potential to appraise the
processes and organisation of the celebrated

artists of Angkor. In contemporary Cambodia,

from Ta Keo to Preah Vihear, artists faithfully
continue and transform the Khmer aesthetic
by replicating the designs, sculptures and
bas-reliefs of their ancestors.
Seventy-eight year old master Him Tuo, of the
Banteay Srei Rachana workshop in Siem Reap
is one such artist. Accomplished to reproduce
any pre-Angkorian or Angkorian masterpiece,
Tuo still marvels at the aesthetic and technical
abilities of the ancient artists who fashioned
their works without the aid of modern
methods or tools. Like many contemporary
stone sculptors, and conceivably Angkorian
sculptors, Tuo comes from a family lineage
of artists. Just as he learnt the suite of Khmer
design features from his grandfather and
father, he has passed them on to his children

and grandchildren, who apply their art at

several locations in Siem Reap. The array of
Khmer decorative motifs, known as kbach,
primarily derive their inspiration from natural
forms. Among these are the mythical goose
tail shape, the fish egg shape, a row of
fish eggs surrounded by lotus petals called
romduol, the chakachan shape named after
a steamed rice flour sweet cut in the shape
of a diamond, the hanging ornament called
romyoul after the flower of the Nymphaea
Lotus, and the spiral snail shell or vong hien
shape (Chan and Preap 2005).
Before the Second World War Tuos father
and grandfather were based at the Tomlap
Rangsey Pagoda of Prasat commune in
Banteay Meanchey province, a specialised
artistic pagoda that undertook sculptural
commissions for the pagodas of the region.
Tuo began his training at the age of six or
seven, but his education in sculpture could
be described more as a process of osmosis,
rather than a formal delineated program. For
students recruited from outside the familial
structure, basic sculptural training can take
anywhere between six months and three years,
depending on the aptitude of the individual.
It takes over ten years to be an accomplished
artist worthy of the title of master. Trainees
are given easy and monotonous work at first,
such as cleaning sculptures and cutting raw
sandstone blocks, and then are gradually
trusted with more skilled duties, until the
entirety of practices are propagated. At no
time are pupils instructed to draw from nature
directly. Instead they are required to reproduce
the traditional kbach idealised forms handed
down and transformed from generation to
generation. This allows the artist to imitate
from memory certain well-known designs and

Master Him Tuo and apprentice of the Banteay Srei Rachana workshop put the final touches to a replica of
the 7th century pre-Angkorian Buddha from Phum Thmei, Kompong Speu. Photo: Martin Polkinghorne

10

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Artists at Banteay Srei Rachana II workshop fashion a

Banteay Srei style decorative lintel with tungsten
blade chisels, referring to a photo of the original as
they progress. Photo: Martin Polkinghorne

Chaing and Phnom Srok in the north-west

province of Banteay Meanchey is the most
sought after, though there are also quarries at
Phnom Tbng in Preah Vihear, and in Pursat
and Kompong Thom. Most sandstone can
be rendered into any sculpture irrespective
of size or detail, however in the Angkorian
period, possibly because of the limitations of
their tools, different sandstones were selected
for different kinds of work.

figure subjects, making use of the traditional

elements of design on whatever surfaces they
are commissioned to decorate.
Many artists learn the traditional forms of kbach
by sculpting in wood first. Correspondingly,
art historians have considered that the
sandstone sculptures replicated techniques
pioneered from working in wood. (CoralRmusat 1934, 246) supposed that wooden
models were the common ancestors of both
Indian and Khmer decorative ornamentation.
This is particularly apparent in the sculpting
of motifs such as foliage and rinceaux that
appear to follow the combined natural
tendency of the craftsmans chisel and the
grain of the wood. (Dupont (1952, 40) thought
that sculpture of the 7th century must have
succeeded prototypes represented by wooden
sculptures that have since disappeared.
(Marchal 1951, 10) believed that the particular
sandstone employed by the Khmer was so
easily manipulated that the adaptation from
wood to stone decorative techniques was
made with little impediment. Although there is
little evidence to substantiate how knowledge
of the trade was transmitted from artist to
artist in the Angkorian period, a pragmatic
deduction would be that the exchange of
skills was conveyed via an analogous master
and apprentice relationship. For instance, on
the large projects of the 10th century (East
Mebon, Pre Rup), numerous decorative lintels
of lesser skill are situated on minor prasat and
were likely the work of apprentices and junior
artists whereas the decorative lintels on the
primary prasat were reserved for the masters.
The first task creating a sculpture is sourcing
adequate stone. Numerous Angkorian period
sandstone quarries have been identified
across Cambodia including sites at Phnom
Kulen, Beng Melea, Koh Ker and in Banteay
Meanchey province. In contemporary
Cambodia, sandstone from Phnom Chunh

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Recent scholarship suggests that harder

sandstones were selected for sculpture in
the round, compared with decorative lintels
which typically depict higher levels of detail
(Caro, Douglas and Im in press). At the
Banteay Srei Rachana and Artisans dAngkor
workshops subject choice is primarily market
driven, based on specific commissions and
is largely drawn from pre-Angkorian and
Angkorian masterpieces. Designs are finalised
on a computer using image manipulation
software which is adjusted accordingly to the
size of the sandstone block to be carved upon.
The design is printed on carbon paper at full
size and then placed and traced onto the stone
designating the basic sculptural divisions.
Drawings and photos of the original sculptures
provide a constant reference source for the
working sculpture. During the Angkor period
it is conceivable that artists used copy books,
but because of their perishable nature none
have survived to the present day. However
(Marchal 1951, 34) believed that Cambodians
were not accustomed to working according to
texts and that the oral traditions were enough
in the majority of the cases to be used as
starting point from which imaginative ardour
could take over.

indication why each lintel was not finished,

but the deficit works are a window into the
process of sculpture manufacture.
Scrutiny of the unfinished lintels indicates
that the process of sculpture was not uniform
through time or space, yet general consistencies
allow reconstruction of the overall process. In
comparison to contemporary lintel sculpture
which is completed on the ground, in the
Angkor period lintel sculpture predominantly
began with the stone being fixed into position
first, and then being prepared for carving.
The lintel face was roughly finished into
structural divisions. Characters, motifs and
designs were transferred onto the sandstone
face with charcoal or chalk. Nothing remains
of these drawings, but the commitment to
preliminary light carving of the final lintel
form could not have occurred without such
sketches. At Prasat Chhuk light engravings
show the beginnings of a central foliage
arch. This carving could not have occurred
without the final symmetrical composition of
the work having already been copied onto the
stone. The next task consisted of light carving

Once the basic form of a sculpture has been

delineated by lesser craftspeople, one or two
artists take ownership of the actual sculptural
process. When working on a contemporary
decorative lintel, for example, two artists
regularly swap positions working on the
same areas to maintain the works overall
consistency. George Grosliers analysis of
the pilasters of Angkor Wat, the Bayon and
Banteay Chmar concluded that more than
one artist must have worked on the same
piece at any given time. Each section was
the combined effort of at least two persons; a
tracer, and a sculptor. Many similar pilasters
carved by many artists indicate that artisans
possessed common knowledge, and similar
technical practices and abilities, which were
informed by consistent and standardised
training (Groslier 1921, 224.226, 1921.23,
206.208). Similarly, the medieval process of
carving decorative lintels can be reconstructed
by reference to the great many unfinished
lintels in the material record. There is little

11

Stone sculpture, Borobudur, Java. 780-850 CE. Royal couple wearing golden
jewellery in the Indian style. Photo: Dr Robert Parker, 2008

familial based, organised on a village basis,

and responded to commissions at the
request of patrons throughout the empire
(Polkinghorne 2008b). Discovery of an actual
Angkorian sculpture workshop has thus far
eluded researchers, however recent fieldwork
approximately 8kms north of Jayavarman
VIIs walled city of Angkor Thom at the sites
of Phnom Dei and Daun Tei has identified
production debitage consistent with artistic
intensification. The unearthing of numerous
unfinished sculptures of late 12th early 13th
century Avalokiteshvara by French scholars in
the early 20th century suggests that this site
could indeed be the location of a sculpture
workshop. By appraising the methods and
technology of this workshop, researchers have
a unique opportunity to connect master Him
Tuo of the Banteay Srei Rachana workshop
and the sculptors of contemporary Cambodia,
to the lineage of artists who have continuously
fashioned at Angkor some of the worlds
greatest sculptures.
Martin Polkinghorne is an expert in Khmer art and
completed his PhD in 2008 at the Department of Art
History and Film Studies, The University of Sydney,
with a focus on Angkorian architectural sculpture.

of the details. Examples from Pre Rup, Prasat

Kravanh and the North Khleang indicate that
the shallow engraving was completed in its
entirety before deep carving and finishing
began. This exact same process occurs in
the contemporary sculpture of decorative
lintels and bas-reliefs. Lintels from Trapeang
Totung Thngay, Trapeang Srang (Dei Dom),
and Kutisvara, however, retain totally blank
segments offset by completed sculpture on
the same lintel (see also Polkinghorne 2008a).
The incisions on numerous decorative lintels
were very deep, and required the precise
removal of small localised pieces of stone.
This was probably executed with the use
of a small drill that created holes to break
elements of the sandstone away. Because
lintels were carved in situ the application
of this technique, and indeed the whole act
of lintel carving must have been carried
out with the utmost skill and care by the
most experienced carvers. Today accidental
breakages can be remedied with the aid
of glue, yet during the Angkor period a
stone fracture probably meant that the image
must be recreated from the beginning. Artists
use specialised chisels of their own making,
with iron shafts and tungsten blades. At
the Phnom Santuk workshops of Kompong
Thom the use of angle grinders for bulk
stone removal and more nuanced modelling
is common practice. As yet no recognisable
tools have been indentified in excavations at
Angkor, however numerous iron chisels were

12

recovered during the restoration of Prasat

Phimai now in contemporary Thailand.

He is currently living in Cambodia undertaking a

post-doctoral Endeavour Fellowship including a
placement at The National Museum of Cambodia.

Medieval tools were certainly lesser quality

than contemporary instruments, making the
technical marvel of Angkorian sculpture all
the greater. In contemporary workshops the
master sculptor also acts as a quality controller,
marking the sculptures with pencil where they
need to be corrected. The final tasks are the
detailed and refined carving , followed by
cleaning and polishing with a grinding stone
which bring the work to completion. The time
it takes to complete a sculpture, depends on
the skill level of the artist, however, one large
and detailed decorative lintel can take as long
as three months for two master sculptors to
complete. Today workshops are paid in cash
for the outputs of their labour, but in medieval
Cambodia, where there was no system of
easily exchanged currency, the inscriptions
tell of a system of commerce where donations,
payments, and taxes were exchanged between
temples, individuals, and the state in numerous
forms , including land, grain, livestock, textiles,
and metals. Sculptors may also have been
compelled to provide their services out of
religious or regal obligation.

REFERENCES
Chan Vitharin and Preap Chanmara. 2005. Kbach. A Study of
Khmer Ornamentation. Translated by I. Muan. Reyum Publishing:
Phnom Penh.
Coral-Rmusat, G., de. 1934. De lorigine commune des linteaux
de lInde Pallava et des linteaux khmrs prangkoriens, Revue des
Arts Asiatiques 8(3):242 - 251.
Coral-Rmusat, G., de. 1951. Lart khmer. Les grandes tapes
de son volution (2nd dition). Van Oest, Les ditions dArt et
dhistoire: Paris.
Dupont, P. 1952. Les linteaux khmers du VIIIe sicle, Artibus
Asiae 15(1-2):31 - 83.
F. Caro, J. G. Douglas, Im Sokrithy, in press. Towards a
Quantitative Petrographic Database of Khmer Stone Materials
Koh Ker Style, Archaeometry.
Groslier, G. 1921 1923. tude sur la psychologie de lartisan
Cambodgien. Arts et archologie khmers, Revue des recherches
sur les arts, les monuments et lethnographie du Cambodge, depuis
les origines jusqu nos jours 1(2):205 220.
Groslier, G. 1921. Recherches sur les Cambodgiens. Daprs les
textes et les monuments depuis les premiers sicles de notre re.
Augustin Challamel: Paris.
Hartley, L. P. 1953. The go-between. Hamish Hamilton: London
Marchal, H. 1951. Le dcor et la sculpture khmers. tudes dart et
dethnologie asiatiques. Vanoest: Paris.
Polkinghorne, M. 2008a. Khmer decorative lintels and the
allocation of artistic labour, Arts Asiatiques 63: 21 35.

The supply of sacred images to Angkorian

temples must have employed many teams
of artists, similar to those who continue the
Khmer sculptural traditions By extrapolating
from contemporary workshops, Angkorian
artistic production was most probably

Polkinghorne, M. 2008b. Artists and Ateliers: Khmer Decorative

Lintels of the ninth and tenth centuries, Udaya The Journal of
Khmer Studies 8: 219 242.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

GREAT PERFECTED BEINGS

Jackie Menzies

he absorbing paintings in the impressive

Indian art exhibition Garden & Cosmos,
currently showing at the Art Gallery of New
South Wales, were recently rediscovered
in the ancestral collection of the powerful
Rathore clan whose current maharaja still
lives in the royal palace in Jodhpur. The
Rathores ruled the desert kingdom of Marwar
in Rajasthan from the 13th century to Indian
independence in 1947, with a crucial point
in their history occurring in 1564 when their
acceptance of Mughal sovereignty elevated
them from local authorities to great kings
(maharajas). A unique Marwar court culture,
reflecting the merging of indigenous Rajput
traditions with those of the Mughals, emerged
across the fields of literature, music and
painting. This culture was further enriched by
the religious piety of various maharajas who
commissioned texts and paintings that would
propagate their beliefs. Particularly under
the reign of Man Singh (r.1803-43), the 18th
maharaja of the Rathore clan, new imagery
emerged as a result of his patronage of the
Nath order of yogins.
The paintings created from the 17th to 19th
centuries in the Marwar royal workshops
are extraordinarily well preserved, many of
them still glowing with the pristine, luminous
colours and gold and silver highlighting of
the day they were made. Created for the
private enjoyment of the Maharajas and
their courts, they range in size from the
expected dimensions of an Indian miniature
(approximately 30 x 20 cm) to unusually
large, designated monumental paintings
(approximately 45 x 135 cm).

In this article I want to focus on a selection of

the paintings that illustrate the hagiology and
teaching of the Nath order of yogins. Most such
paintings were created at the request of Man
Singh, who gave unprecedented patronage
to the Naths. His patronage extended to
commissioning illustrated texts from the royal
workshops, challenging his artists to create a
new vocabulary of vibrant imagery relating to
Nath beliefs and teaching.
The Nath sect traces its origins back to the
12th or 13th century when various heterodox
Shaivite lineages and disparate groups of yogis
coalesced to recognise the guru Gorakhnath
as their historical founder. Traditionally,
Gorakhnath is credited with the creation of
hatha yoga which, Naths believed, offered the
means to move beyond the phenomenal world
and to become an immortal ascetic (siddha)
through its discipline of physical postures and
meditation. Outstanding individuals such as
Gorakhnath were recognised as mahasiddhas
(great perfected beings), and there were
various lists of the Nine, the Twelve, even
the Eighty-four important mahasiddhas.
Traditionally Nath devotional practice did
not embrace images; teaching was mainly oral
transmission from guru to student, although
unillustrated texts did exist. This situation
changed with Man Singh, whose reign
witnessed not only the composition of three
new Nath texts the Nath Charit, Nath Purana
and the Meghamala but also the creation of
a new visual vocabulary to illustrate them. In
addition, three other illustrated manuscripts
were produced: the Siddha Siddanta Paddhati,
Shiva Rahasya and Shiva Purana. In total,

the Jodhpur workshop completed perhaps a

thousand smaller paintings and more than
340 monumental folios (Diamond 2008: 43).
The Naths had not received any preferential
support during the reign of Man Singhs
predecessors, but because Man Singh credited
his accession to the Marwar throne to the Nath
sectarian order, he gave them unprecedented
power and favours. The reason for his
support of the Naths is well documented. In
the summer of 1803 he had been hostage in
his castle at Jalore, besieged by the troops of
his uncle Maharaja Bhim Singh (r.1793-1803),
who had assassinated every other claimant
to the Marwar throne. Man Singh was
already a devotee of the Nath sectarian order,
particularly of the immortal mahasiddha (great
perfected being) Jallandharnath, for whom a
temple had been built near Jalore. Just when
Man Singh was on the point of surrendering
to Bhim Singh, his Nath spiritual preceptor,
the guru Dev Nath, pronounced a message
from Jallandharnath to the effect that if Man
Singh waited a few more days, he would
keep his fortress at Jalore plus become ruler
of Marwar. Man Singh therefore deferred
surrendering. Bhim Singh unexpectedly died,
and his royal forces came to the support
of Man Singh, who did become the next
Rathore Maharaja. Thus his respect for the
Naths, his guru Dev Nath and above all the
mahasiddha Jallandharnath was consolidated.
As Maharaja, Man Singh elevated the Naths
to positions of power, built temples for them,
and commissioned new art relating to Nath
portraits and teachings.

The Practice of Yoga, folio 5 from the Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati attributed to Bulaki, India (Rajasthan), 1824.
medium OPAQUE WATERCOLOUR ON HAND MADE PAPER 46 x 122 cm. courtesy Mehrangarh Museum Trust, India

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

13

Jallandharnath and Maharaja Man Singh on Diwali by Shivdas Bhatti, India (Marwar, Rajasthan), c1820-before July 1825.
Opaque watercolour on handmade paper (wasli), 50 x 33 cm. courtesy Mehrangarh Museum Trust, India

Yoga, where nine mahasiddhas, each depicted

in the recognisable iconic style created for
portraits of Jallandranath, are seen meditating
in secluded vignettes. A fish and lotus-filled
silver river reinforces the arcadian, lush
landscape to which all who follow Nath
practice can aspire. In the lower right of the
painting is depicted an aspiring yogin, while
the white-walled celestial city above him and
the pink mountain peaks are overwhelmed
by the scale of the mahasiddhas who are the
foci as our eye moves across the painting.
This folio, and the other first five folios
of the Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati, correlate
closely with the opening chapters of the text
they illustrate, which is attributed to the
mahasiddha Goraknath and considered to be
the clearest and most systematic exposition
of Nath metaphysics and practice (Diamond
208: 232). The mahasiddhas sit in different
yoga postures (asanas), their hands in various
gestures (mudras). One faces frontally, his
right index finger compressing his nostril
as he practices pranayama (breath control).
The group of Nine Naths is a grouping
of significant, legendary or historical
founders of the Nath sampradaya (religious
community; teaching tradition). There are
many permutations to the list of Nine Naths,
according to different texts and traditions, but
the names of Gorakhnath and Jallandranath
appear frequently on such lists.
Apart from images of Jallandranath and
other mahasiddhas of the Nath lineage, the
exhibition contains paintings that exemplify
the new imagery created to illustrate Nath
cosmographies. For example, while Nath
teaching, like many Hindu religious traditions,
embraces the concept of the Absolute known
as Brahman, Man Singh commissioned his
court artists to depict it. The artists solved the
challenge of depicting the Absolute, which -being immeasurable and formless -- is beyond
the constraints of imagery, by depicting it
as luminous, shimmering fields of gold.
Other innovations inspired by Nath teaching
include anthropomorphic images to illustrate
such expansive concepts as Consciousness
(Purusha) and Matter (Prakriti).
A feature of Man Singhs transformative impact
on Nath teaching was his commissioning
of numerous portraits of Jallandhranath,
of whom previously there had been no
images. Through countless repetition, the
artists of the royal atelier created what is
now an immediately recognisable icon of
Jallandranath. Portraits of Jallandranath show
him teaching lesser gurus, advising the Hindu
gods, or, as in the image illustrated, being
worshipped by Man Singh. This image is a
characteristic depiction of Jallandranath: he
is shown in profile, his body is ash-smeared,

14

he wears the saffron coloured garment and

jata (dreadlocks) of a Shaivite holy man, a
triangular black hat and the large kundal
earrings (worn through holes bored in the
ears inner cartilage) that are a distinctive
feature of Nath gurus. (In his depiction of the
eyes, however, the artist resorts to traditional
Rajasthani court practice for royal portraits.)
The subtly didactic intent of many of the
verdant landscape scenes, peopled with
various gods, mahasiddhas, birds and
animals, is exemplified in The Practice of

The Naths regarded Jallandharnath as an

anthropomorphic manifestation of the
Absolute, with the court artists reflecting
such beliefs through pictorial representations
of him. For example, Nathji creates the
Earths Sacred Waters depicts Jallandranath
(whom Man Singh referred to as Nathji) as
the anthropomorphic manifestation of the
universe, teaching Kala (Time), represented
as a Nath siddha. This particular painting, as
well as others illustrating Nath mythologies,
proclaims Nath belief in the pre-eminence

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

The Equivalence of Self and Universe, folio 6 from the Siddha Siddhanta Paddha,
by Bulaki, India (Rajasthan), 1824. Opaque watercolour on handmade paper ,
122 x 46 cm. courtesy Mehrangarh Museum Trust, India

of Nath mahasiddhas over

Hindu gods: Jallandranath
is shown instructing the
three great Hindu gods:
Shiva,
blue-skinned
Vishnu, and four-headed
Brahma (Diamond 2008:
187). A number of lesser
deities
are
depicted
overawed by the Nathjis
radiance that suffuses the
whole scene. Further right
in this extraordinary and
innovative painting, Nathji
is seen creating the great
rivers of India, and meeting
several times with Shiva
who had doubted Nathjis
primacy (see Diamond
p.187 for fuller discussion
of this painting).

these images is still uncertain, awaiting the

appearance of currently unidentified texts
that might elucidate their meaning. As so
often with Asian art, we are confronted with
the expanse of what is still unknown.
Jackie Menzies is Head Curator of Asian Art at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition
Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
was curated and organised for its world tour by
the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian
Institution, Washington DC, in partnership with the
Mehrangarh Museum Trust, and is at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales until 26 January 2010. Further
information on the exhibition and associated events,
see Whats On, p. 30.

REFERENCES
Diamond, Debra et al, 2008: Garden & Cosmos: The Royal
Paintings of Jodhpur. Thames and Hudson, London.

According to Nath belief,

in the penultimate year of
the 12-year course of hatha
yoga, a yogin becomes
a siddha, a perfected
being who achieves an
equivalence of self and
universe (Diamond, 209).
This belief is graphically
captured in the image of
the fully frontal standing siddha whose eyes
are crossed in yogic
meditation, and on whose
body and orange dhoti are
mapped the 14 principal
worlds of the universe. The
scale of this transcendental
figure can be gauged by
the complementary sun
and moon on his cheeks.
In depicting Nath beliefs
and aspirations, there
are further paintings
illustrating yantras, sacred
diagrams for realising
the self; others depicting
cosmographical mandalas;
and yet others depicting
Nath mahasiddhas against
vibrating fields of swirling cosmic waters. Each
expanse of water is a
different colour: gold,
pink, silver, saffron; each
folio contains a symbol, for
example the letter om, a
tortoise, a snake, significant
within yogic tradition. The
exact meaning of many of

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

15

THE ART OF IMITATION: MING WONG AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

Alexandra Crosby
Ming Wong at the Venice Biennale 2009. Photo Alex Davies

he Venice Biennale has and may always

maintain a Euro-American focus. With
audiences queuing for the most talked-about
shows at the British and American pavilions,
this years Biennale (7 June to 22 November
2009) has been no exception. Many of the
Asian pavilions and exhibits went relatively
unnoticed. But Singapores artist-curator team
Ming Wong and Tang Fu Kuen produced one
of the exhibition highlights. Their courageous
show Life of Imitation certainly fitted the theme
of this years Biennale, Making Worlds, and
well deserved the Expanding Worlds award.
Tucked away in the glorious crumbling
Palazzo Michiel del Brusa in Cannareggio,
the Singapore pavilion transformed a dusty
Venetian interior into an opulent Singaporean
cinema. With careful attention to a series of
defining cinematic moments, Wong expressed
a deep perspective on the various and
shifting dimensions to national film and the
global flow of filmic identities. Rather than
attempting to produce an authentic voice of
Singapore (or Asia), Life of Imitation exposed
the futility of thinking along such lines.
Three multi-channel video installations
were displayed in Sala1, Sala2, and Sala3,

each recreating scenes made by different

directors. Sala3 showed Wongs oldest
work, Four Malay Stories (2005), in which the
artist himself portrays 16 characters from
four films: Ibu Mertua Ku/ My Mother-InLaw (1962), Labu dan Labi/ Labu and Labi
(1962), Docktor Rushdi/ Doctor Rushdi (1971),
and Semerah Padi/ The Village of Semerah Padi
(1956), all by the famous Malay director, actor
and musician P. Ramlee. Heavily influenced
by Indian cinema, Ramlees work is typically
melodramatic. But his stock characters the
evil rich mother-in-law, the poor musician,
the unjustly treated servant are also drawn
from stereotypes of a Malay society defined
by class, gender and ethnicity. The artists
conceptual strategy here is to destabilise
these stereotypes with humour, introducing
himself as each of the characters, isolated on a
plain grey background, to further deconstruct
all the elements of the scene and engage in
interpersonal melodramas with the other
now invisible characters. In each scenario,
we recognise him as both the artist and
the character, rendering the context of each
films narrative much less relevant than the
re-enactment of the characters. Bringing the
four films together in this manner points to
the way these identities interact to form an

entire language through speech, gesture

and costume that plays out the social and
moral concerns of the time.
Re-identification through self-portraiture
may be a well-trodden path in contemporary
art. Cindy Sherman, for example, restaged
herself in the 1960s as hundreds of characters
from an imagined film canon, her familiar
stare showing the self and constructions of
femininity to be in constant metamorphosis.
What is unique about Wongs work is his
remarkable attention to language though
perhaps this is not so surprising for an artist
from multilingual Singapore who currently
lives in the linguistic muddle of Europe.
Four Malay Stories is subtitled in Malay and
English, while Wong is clearly learning
Malay as he recites his lines, his mistakes are
recorded and sequenced one after another.
And while these characters may be familiar
in households across Singapore, Malaysia and
Indonesia, for Wong as a Chinese Singaporean
their language is a kind of indirect heritage.
Wongs immaculate costumes also show signs
of imperfection and exaggeration. On Wongs
chameleon features, a false moustache, a
prosthetic bald brow and overly dramatic
makeup all question the authenticity of the
original as much as his pastiche.
In Sala1, the title work Life of Imitation
(2009) appropriated Imitation of Life (1959)
by German director Douglas Sirk, itself a
remake of John M. Stahls 1939 film adapted
from Fannie Hursts novel. Sirks film deals
with the privileges of whiteness in the
United States. Its plot is based around the
struggle of a black woman with her lightcomplexioned daughter who attempts to pass
for white, both pitied by a white actress.

Life of Imitation by Ming Wong, from installation at the Singapore Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2009,
curated by Tang Fu Kuen. Image courtesy of the artist

16

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Life of Imitation by Ming Wong, from installation at the Singapore Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2009, curated by Tang Fu Kuen. Image courtesy of the artist

In Life of Imitation, Wong casts three actors

from Singapore, a Chinese, a Malay and an
Indian, to recreate these racial tensions in a
single heart-wrenching scene from the film.
Exposing the fact that performing identities
is not exclusive to black and white, nor to the
melodrama of mother-daughter relationships,
Wong ridicules the simplification involved
in reducing the complexity of such identities
to flat characterisations. Wongs actors take

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

turns in each of the roles, producing a kind

of round robin of interpersonal relations that
makes it impossible to see anyone as either a
victim or culprit. Im white. White! they cry,
one after another.
In Love for the Mood (2009), shown in Sala2,
also problematises whiteness by replacing
both star-struck lovers from the famous
Wong Kar Wai film In the Mood for Love

(2000) with a Caucasian New Zealand actress.

By referencing an internationally acclaimed
film of Chinese origin, this piece uses film
itself as a metaphor for the way cultural
ideas travel, constantly redistributing not
only representations of their place of origin,
but their relationships with other places and
ideas as they drift in the global flows of
production and audience. He questions how
sex and love are bound up in complex rites,

17

Four Malay Stories by Ming Wong, from installation at the Singapore Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2009, curated by Tang Fu Kuen. Image courtesy of the artist

taboos and experiments, and how these are

exchanged across cultures. The resulting
work is a deeply layered expression of how
Singaporeans and Asians represent traditions
of love and relationships, and also of how
non-Asians see and represent love in Asian
contexts. In this way, Wongs work is neither
Singaporean nor Asian, but essentially global
in context.
Wong, who is now based in Berlin, negotiates
the constrictions of the contemporary art
world with refreshing humour. While many
artists deal with dislocation, diaspora and
transience with a sense of longing (a recurring
theme in the Biennale), Wong conquers the
differences between shifting cultural spaces,
claiming them as the foundation for his own
distinct global identity.
But Life of Imitation is also nostalgic,
specifically for the 1950s and 60s, the golden
age of Singaporean cinema. As a retrospective,
the show is as much about the spaces of
film consumption as it is about the films
themselves. Filem-Filem-Filem (2008) is a series
of Polaroids depicting the fate of old cinemas
in Singapore and Malaysia. These buildings
show evidence of the mobility of international
architectural styles, particularly Art Deco and

18

Bauhaus. But on closer inspection, these styles

were clearly localised for the tropical climate
and the multiple identities they were required
to express, with signage in English, Chinese,
Tamil and Jawi. This was also the period of
Singapores partition from Malaysia (1965)
and, along with Four Malay Stories, such work
encourages a re-reading of national cinema
that acknowledges the multiple histories of
language and identity. While Malaysia has
never scored a pavilion at Venice, Wongs
view of the messiness of visual culture
probes national boundaries of Malaysia and
Singapore, and does much to include their
shared cultural histories, a slippery terrain of
authenticity and ownership.

impossible to avoid in Venice we must

consider the absence as well as the inclusion
of so many countries. Where is Malaysia,
Indonesia, or India, in this cacophony of
culture? Ming Wong elegantly dealt with the
clumsy nationalism of the Venice Biennale
with his own reading of Singapore, Asian,
and international cinema. Freely quoting
from multiple cultures and histories, he
resists visual languages that confine him
to a singular identity. Despite its place in
global surveys such as the Venice Biennale,
the context of contemporary art such as Life
of Imitation can no longer be defined as if
the world was neatly divided into exclusive
geographic or cultural zones.

The exhibition also included a series of

documentary interviews with Wong Han
Min, a private collector of cine-memorabilia
from Singapore and the Malay world, and a
movie ticket seller. Eight striking canvases
painted by Singapores last surviving movie
billboard painter, Neo Chon Teck, completed
the tribute to a time that may have passed,
but for Ming Wong it is seemingly available
to limitless interpretations.

Alexandra Crosby is a writer and researcher

currently based in Brussels. She is completing a PhD
on the cultural practices of environmental activists
in Java, and recently co-edited the book re:Publik,
Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures, available at
www.gangfestival.com

If we are to look through the lens of the

Nationalist Biennale model and this is

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

S Y D N E Y S B L A N K E T O F C L A Y: A V I E W O F T H E A U S T R A L I A N C E R A M I C S T R I E N N A L E
Merran Esson

n October 2008 I spent two weeks in

Jingdezhen, China, hoping to meet Takeshi
Yasuda who runs the Pottery Workshop there.
I was interested to meet the man who was born
in Japan, lives in England and is now managing
the Pottery Workshop and Experimental
Sculpture Factory in China. Yasuda says that
he is one bloody lucky potter, referring to
the opportunity to be part of a revolution
overseeing the establishment of an exciting
enterprise offering residencies to international
artists and the opportunity to work with some
of the most skilled makers in the world.
Well, I missed Takeshi Yasuda in Jingdezhen,
because he had gone to Japan and then to
England. But I finally met him in July this
year when he accepted our invitation to be
both a keynote speaker and a demonstrator at
the first Australian Ceramics Triennale, held
in Sydney in July 2009, during which time a
selection of his work was shown at the Rex
Irwin Gallery.
I loved Jingdezhen. My travelling companions
there last year were Roger Law and Deirdre
Amsden, both from the UK. Roger used to
be famous as the creative energy behind the
very wicked UK TV show Spitting Image; he
now spends his time between UK, Bondi and
Jingdezhen, having been seduced by ceramics
and Australian sunshine. Of course Roger
is a dab hand at modelling, so his desire to
combine his ideas with the knowledge, skills
and traditions of the factories in China has led
to some seriously big pots being made by the
Chinese factory workers and modelled and
decorated by Roger and a few willing Chinese
apprentices. I suspect that both cultures benefit
from this very practical exchange. Roger gets

TAKESHI YASUDA
Everyone benefits from exchanges that occur at
events such as the Australian Ceramics Triennale,
held Sydney in July this year, where Japaneseborn ceramic artist Takeshi Yasuda was a generous
presenter and demonstrator, offering a quiet
philosophy developed over many years of practice
in three very distinct cultures.
I own a few of Takeshis pieces and I continue to
be delighted by his work. I use his ceramic vessels,
something I know would please him as he sees
his pots as a focus in our daily lives, not just as
visual objects. His work has luscious thrown rims
and generous curves and is all about touch as he
converts this soft material with masterly confidence
into exuberant and exaggerated forms.
On his website, Yasuda states: After 40 years of
handing this strange material called clay it continues
to amaze me. You only need your bare hands to
form it. It responds to the touch of a feather or the
blow of a hammer accurately and proportionally,
and remains thus unless any other force is applied.
See www.takeshiyasuda.com
very large pots thrown for him, and the Chinese
workers are learning the tools of the modelling
trade honed in the creative workshops of
Spitting Image in 1990s England.
Roger was also a keynote presenter at the
Ceramics Triennale conference. He presented
a paper titled The Long March to Jingdezhen,
very much in keeping with Facing Asia,
one of the themes explored during the four
day conference. Australias proximity to Asia
and the wealth of knowledge and skills of

Ceramic artist Takeshi Yasuda (UK/Japan)

demonstrates technique at the Australian
Ceramics Triennale. National Art School,
Sydney, 20 July 2009

our near neighbours has meant that many

Australian ceramic artists are exploring
and experimenting in Asia, such as those
following Ah Xians footsteps to work at the
Pottery Workshops in Jingdezhen.
Sydney presented over 40 ceramics exhibitions
during July: the Triennale literally blanketed
the town with clay. We presented lectures,
demonstrations and welcomed delegates
from Asia including China, Japan, Korea,
Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and Pakistan.

Five stemmed cups by Takeshi Yasuda (Japan/UK), 2009. Porcelain, each ht 6.5cm x diam 7cm. Exhibited Rex Irwin Gallery, Sydney, 14 July-8August 2009. Photo Terence Boque

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

19

Teapot by Takeshi Yasuda, Japan/UK, 2009. Porcelain, ht 23cm x diam 20cm. Image courtesy the artist

individuals personal expression: it offered

a rare opportunity to identify ideas which
are common across cultures, celebrating
the similarities rather than differences. Our
common language is clay, which has a long
history in Asian cultures and is important in
everyday Asian life. The history of ceramics
allows us to track the evolution of humanity,
the development of ideas, the connection to a
cultural heritage or an institutional tradition.

Along with others from UK, Poland, USA,

NZ, Canada and Australia who have visited
and worked in Asian workshops, we were
able to discuss this phenomenon of Western
artists being drawn to the East.
The Triennale was supported by three of
Sydneys art education institutions. At COFAs
Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Jacqueline Clayton
curated Another Silk Road, an exhibition that
focussed on work being made in China by
both local and international artists. In the
exhibition catalogue, she says: The Silk Road
has become a metaphor for cultural exchange
between disparate and distant groups with
China as a key destination and hub.

which in the English language has a certain

ambiguity, is not so easily defined in Korean.
Link suggests a form that connects to another
as in a chain, where as in the appropriate
Korean characters there is far more emphasis
on person-to-person and the connection
resulting from this link. The exhibition was
about much more than the work; it was
about an association made between people,
between cultures. The most productive
projects, the most dynamic exhibitions
result from genuine personal bonds. The
ceramic work represented more than just an

Rather than the links of a chain that shackle

and restrict, the exhibition and the Triennale
conference forged new associations and
pointed to new and dynamic possibilities.
We leave our footsteps and fingerprints upon
this earth, and those of us lucky enough to
work with the materials of the earth have
the opportunity to make a language all of its
own. From earliest time humans discovered
that to press a thumb into a lump of clay
leaves a small hollow impression. The aim
of the Triennale was to make a slightly
larger impression. Exchanges begun at this
conference offer a healthy dialogue through
process, materiality and concept. Ceramic
artists from Australia and Asia will certainly
continue to interact.
Merran Esson is a ceramic artist, Acting Head of
Ceramics at the National Art School, Sydney, and
Chair of the Australian Ceramics Triennale.

At Sydney College of the Arts Galleries, Jan

Guy curated Young Guns. In her catalogue
essay, she wrote: The idea for Young Guns
germinated from long reflection on the state
and status of ceramic arts in Australia. Still
today there is much talk of the demise of the
discipline and its failure to produce works
of a high standard or innovation. This loose
chatter contradicted what I was seeing on the
ground locally. Here the emerging ceramicists
were creating exciting experimental works
that dealt with contemporary social issues and
constructed new views of ceramic traditions.
At the National Art School Gallery in
Darlinghurst we presented LINK, an
exhibition profiling the ceramics departments
of The National Art School in Sydney and
Kongju University in Korea. This was curated
by me and Professor Hae Sin Ro from Kongju
University, South Korea. Link, a word
Freshwater-Saltwater Pots by Roger Law, UK, 2008. Made and photographed in Jingdezhen, China, 2008.
Porcelain, celedon glaze, sizes variable, tall pots ht 140cm x diam 95cm

20

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

T H E P A Z Y R Y K C A R P E T, 6 0 Y E A R S O N
Leigh Mackay

ne ancient summer in the Altai Mountains

of southern Siberia, a band of iron-age
horsemen gouged a deep chamber in the earth
and buried an aristocratic couple equipped with
various items for the afterlife. The mourners then
covered the tomb with heavy layers of logs and
soil, topped it with a broad mound of stones,
and rode away. This alpine cemetery, slightly
northeast of the junction of Russia, Kazakhstan,
China and Mongolia, was later called Pazyryk -local Turkic dialect for Valley of the Dead.
Robbers soon looted the tomb of any precious
objects. But a permafrost gripped the burial
chamber, and through the hole the robbers
left, the rain poured in and quickly froze,
eventually filling the tomb with ice. When
veteran Russian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko

opened the tomb 60 years ago, in 1949, he

found the two embalmed aristocrats, nine
horse carcasses with riding gear, exquisite
artefacts and everyday utensils preserved in
ice for more than 2000 years (Rudenko 1970).
This moment 60 years ago was magical, not
only for archaeology but the study of carpets
and textiles. For the ice yielded an embroidered
Chinese silk, coloured felt saddle cloths, a
huge felt appliqu hanging showing a rider
approaching a goddess -- and a spectacular
multi-coloured pile carpet, the oldest ever found.
It is now displayed in the Hermitage Museum in
St Petersburg (Barkova 1999, 2002; Bunker 1991).

burials across the Altai and the Eurasian steppes

from the Ukraine to Mongolia, most of them
looted in antiquity. Of the mounted pastoral
nomads who dominated Eurasia from about
1000 BCE until well into the Common Era, the
best documented are the Scythians, Sarmatians
and Sakas to the west and the Xiongnu in the
east; the Pazyryk people clearly belonged to
this cultural spectrum (Rudenko op cit). These
kurgans have yielded an astonishing range
of artefacts in gold and other solid materials
fashioned in the Animal Style of steppe art
(Aruz et al 2000). But the nomads textiles are
mostly a mystery, for these quickly perished
unless preserved in salt, dry sand or ice.

This tomb or kurgan (the Russian term), labelled

Pazyryk V, is among hundreds of nomadic

The Pazyryk carpet is all wool, measures

1.83m x 2.00m, and its format hardly differs

The Pazyryk Carpet, c 328-250 BCE, discovered in an Iron Age tomb in southern Siberia in 1949. Wool warp, wool weft, 1.83m x 2.00m.
Collection Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo courtesy HALI

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

21

from that of todays oriental carpets. Its centre

field of 24 symmetrical squares is surrounded
by two major borders with guard stripes.
One shows a procession of 28 horsemen in
steppe gear, alternately walking or riding
their horses; the other shows a line of stags or
elk (moose) walking in the opposite direction.
These counterwise processions give the carpet
balance and movement. Two minor borders
show griffins or winged lions.
The carpets silky, lustrous pile is cropped to
only 2mm high. Its seven vegetable colours
are predominantly red or crimson and include
turquoise and yellow. The dense asymmetrical
knotting (each knot completely encircling two
warps) is extremely regular (Barkova 1999). Rug
scholars Harald Bohmer and Jon Thompson
estimate the Pazyryk consumed the fleece of
about 100 sheep (Bohmer, Thomson 1991).
The carpets symbolism and purpose are
subject to speculation -- but not its age, quality
and significance for textile history (Pinner
1982). Some experts had assumed pile weaving
was a nomadic invention carried westward
by migrating Turkic-speaking nomads, such

as the Oguz confederation of around the 10th

century CE. But radio-carbon dating of the
Pazyryks fibres and the timber used to line the
tomb, combined with dendrochronology (the
study of tree rings), gave the most probable
date as 328-250 BCE (Rageth 2004).
Together, the Pazyryks age and technical
excellence proved the art of weaving fine pile
rugs with polychrome designs was significantly
older than previously thought. Further, since
1949 numerous pile fragments have been
discovered in the At-tar caves of Iraq and
Fostat (old Cairo), woven in the early centuries
CE. Rug scholar Murray Eiland Jr observed:
Clearly all the weaving techniques required
for a variety of pile carpets -- including the
techniques still most commonly used -- were
present in Western Asia before the 1st century
AD, and any theories based on a hypothesis
that this weaving technology was first brought
West by the Turks in the 10th century [CE].
or by any other East Asian group, is quite
unnecessary. (Eiland Jr 1998).
So, who wove the Pazyryk and where? Here,
science blends with art historical analysis,
offering probabilities but not certainty.
Many researchers doubt that the Pazyryk
inhabitants had the necessary technology and
skills to produce the carpet -- though we should
never underestimate the abilities of the steppe
nomads. A firmer argument against a steppe
origin was the Pazyryks iconography. Steppe
artefacts are typically wrought in the elegantly
curved Animal Style, usually portraying
wild animals in combat or feline predators
attacking hoofed animals. Their bodies are
highly stylised or distorted to suggest pain
or spontaneous action, while body parts
often morph into others: for example, deer
antlers end in birds heads (Rudenko 1970).
In contrast, the Pazyryks imagery is highly
formal, symmetrical, balanced and realistic.
There is nothing wild or fanciful about the
horsemen (rarely depicted in steppe art), or the
carefully-drawn horses, harnesses and bridles,
or the stags with their antlers and patterning.
Even the griffins, which do occur in steppe art,
appear in symmetrical repeats (Barkova 1999).
To many observers, the carpets imagery
and composition indicate an origin not on
the steppes, but in Achaemenid Persia or
perhaps Mesopotamia via Persia (Azerpay
1959; Rudenko 1970). For example:
The rugs central grid of squares with
floral motifs resembles the carved grid on
stone floor panels in the Assyrian palace
of Senacherib at Nineveh, from the 7th
century BCE (Schurmann 1982).

22

The procession of riders and horses

strongly echoes the Pointed-cap Saka
nomads (from Central Asia) carved on the
Apadana steps at the Achaemenid capital,
Persepolis. In both cases they walk their
steeds with arms bent along the animals
spine, reining its head back sharply,
while the horses wear head plumes and
braided manes, and are of small stature.
Such human and animal processions are
common in Near Eastern art, not steppe
art (Schurmann 1982; Learner 1991).
The motifs that represent the shoulder
and hindquarter muscles of the stags also
appear in lions in Mesopotamian glazed
brick friezes -- at Susa for example -- and
the bulls carved in relief on the Apadana
stairs at Persepolis (Learner 1991).
So the carpet could be a Persian import
incorporating Mesopotamian elements; in fact,
Pazyryk V also contained a cut-up, illustrated
kilim (tapestry) thought to be inspired by
Achaemenid Persia (Rubinson 1990). Of
course, Altaian weavers might have copied an
original Persian carpet, perhaps because its
iconography represented Achaemenid power
and cultural prestige.
Bohmer and Thompson gave the Persian theory a
twist. While accepting the New Eastern character
of the imagery, they stressed as rug scholars
always do that textile designs and motifs
easily migrate, so to identify a carpets origins
we must also study its structure and technique.
They noted the extremely even knotting and
resulting consistency of design, the carefully
planned spacing of the stags and riders, and the
depressed warp that produced the dense, tight
structure. They concluded that these and other
points indicated the Pazyryk carpet was woven
in an urban workshop, perhaps commissioned
by a nomadic VIP. A workshop would entail a
fixed loom and one or more weavers following a
designers cartoon or even copying an original
carpet with the same design (Bohmer, Thompson
1991; Barkova 1999).
Researchers also noted the Pazyryks rustic
touches and steppe references, such as the
stags, the horsemens steppe gear, and the
horse blankets bearing Tree of Life designs
associated with nomadic textiles (Barkova 1999).
These elements indicated the proposed carpet
workshop lay not in the Persian heartland, such
as a royal atelier, but on the periphery: perhaps
a steppe province where Achaemenid cultural
traditions survived and nomadic lifeways were
a familiar sight. The weavers might well have
been former nomads. Bohmer and Thomson
further noted that the insects (Polish kermes)
that were crushed for the crimson dye in the

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Pazyryk Carpet, detail of stag, probably elk (moose):

Pazcryk Carpet, detail of horseman: note steppe costume,

note antlers, patterning. Collection Hermitage Museum,

horses gear. Collection Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

St Petersburg

REFERENCES
Aruz J., Farkas A., Alekseev A., Korolkova E. (eds), 2000: The Golden
Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian
Steppes. Metropolitan Museum NY & Yale University Press 2000.
Azerpay, G. 1959: Some Classical and Near Eastern Motifs in the
Art of Pazyryk, Artibus Asiae 22, pp 313-339.
Barkova, L. 1999: The Pazyryk -- Fifty Years On, HALI 107, pp 64-69.
Barkova, L. 1999: Pazyryk Felts, HALI 113, pp 74-79.
Bohmer, H., Thompson, J., Bunker, E.C., Learner J. et al, 1991: in
Source: Notes in the History of Art, 10.4 Summer 1991 (devoted to
the Pazyryk carpet).

carpet were native to Central Asia and western

steppes, both on the Persian fringe, and not to
the Iranian Plateau itself.
They concluded: If the urban character of its
weaving style is accepted, then the Pazyryk
carpet can be seen as a provincial interpretation
of the fashionable Achaemenid court style
produced for a nomadic clientele by urban
weavers with cultural connections to both Persia
and the steppes (Bohmer, Thomson 1991).
Logistically, the most likely location of such
a workshop would be in the ancient Persiancontrolled regions of Sogdia or Fergana (both now
in Uzbekistan), or Bactria (northern Afghanistan)
before Hellenistic Greek art displaced Persian
styles; or in Chorasmia (now Karakalpakstan
and Turkmenistan), or even Parthia in the same

region. All were linked to southern Siberia and

the Altai by trade routes and numerous Saka
and other nomadic tribes who might have
transmitted Persian luxury goods northwards in
exchange for gold and furs.
Today the experts still favour this view of the
Pazyryks origin -- but cautiously, because much
about the carpet remains elusive. Even Thomson
and Bohmer conceded that the Pazyryk could be
a nomadic copy of an Achaemenid Persian
original (Bohmer, Thomson 1991). Never
underestimate the nomads.

Eiland, M. Jr., Eiland M. 1998: Oriental Carpets: A Complete

Guide. Bullfinch Press, London, Ch. 1.
Pinner, R. 1982: The Earliest Carpets, HALI 5.2, pp 110-115, 118-119.
Rageth, J. 2004: Radiocarbon dating of textiles, Orientations
35:44, pp 57-62.
Robinson, K.S.1990: The Textiles from Pazyryk: A study in the transfer
and transformation of artistic motifs, Expedition 32.1, pp 49-61.
Rudenko, S.I. 1970: Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials
of Iron Age Horsemen. University of California Press, Berkley.
Schurmann, U. 1982: The Pazyryk (symposium paper, Armenian
Rug Society.
Hermitage Museum web site: http://depts.washington.edu/
silkroad/museums/shm/shmpazyryk.html

Leigh Mackay is President of the Oriental Rug Society of

NSW. He has a BA in Philosophy and Linguistics and an
MA in Islamic Studies. A former journalist, he has lived
in Iran and travelled in Central Asia, and has a strong
interest in the history and culture of these regions.

We offer over 20 study tours each year, of which the following scheduled during
2010 may be of interest to TAASA members.
Jordan and Syria
04 - 24 February 2010
Jordan and Syria have seen the birth of civilisations and have experienced the movements of successive
nations across their soil. Trace the story from Neolithic times, to sites like Ugarit, to Roman Jerash in
Jordan and Dura Europas in Syria. The Christian west becomes involved with the ill-fated Crusades but
also leave their mark with crusader castles like Kerak in Jordan and Crac des Chavaliers in Syria.
Of course fabled Petra and Wadi Rum are included. Tour leader is Ancient Historian Leonie Hayne.
Land Only price per person, twin share: $6,595
EGYPT: FROM ALEXANDRIA TO ABU SIMBEL
15 FEBRUARY 08 MARCH 2010
This comprehensive tour of Egypt includes the usual cruise from Luxor to Aswan, with time to explore
the Luxor temples and Valleys of Kings and Queens. You will also visit Abu Simbel. There will be time to
explore both the ancient sites around Cairo but also the Islamic medieval city as well. You will visit the
UNESCO Library in Alexandria and travel to the fabulous Siwa Oasis. The tour is led by Ben Churcher.
Land Only price per person, twin share: $7,450
Iran
26 March 16 April 2010
John Tidmarsh (Near Eastern Archaeology Foundation) leads his second tour to Iran for us, exploring
pre-historic sites, the cities of the Persians and Sassanians, whose sophisticated society challenged
the Byzantines and laid the foundations for an advanced Islamic succession. Includes fabled Isfahan
and Shiraz.
Land Only price per person, twin share: $7,395

Spring in the Stans

01 14 April 2010
A comprehensive tour of the great sites and cities of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan where Turkic culture
and art flourished. Visit legendary Samarkand and Bukhara, Khiva, Nukus, Merv and Mary. Tour leader
is Helen Nicholson.
Japan: Through the Torii Gate
05 -22 April 2010
Experience Japan at Cherry Blossom Time. This tour covers central and southern Japan, and includes
visits to great modern cities like Tokyo and Osaka, historic centres like Kyoto and Nara, feudal castles
like Himeji and Matsuyama, and well preserved small towns like Kanazawa and Takayama. In
conjunction with WEA and led by Simon Gentry.
Land Only price per person, twin share: $7,995
Three Ancient Lands: Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia
16 April 05 May 2010
The Caucasus a unique melting pot of Eastern Orthodox and Islam. From the shores of Lake Sevan,
the oil boomtown of Baku, to the lush church-studded hills of Georgia, the Caucasus is its own world.
Led by Rob Lovell
Land Only price per person, twin share: $7,295
ALSO
From Ho Chi Minh City to HanoiS 1000th Birthday
19 September 11 October
Arabia Felix: Oman and Yemen
6 October 20 November

For a brochure on any of the above tours, or to receive our quarterly newsletter Bon Voyage, please phone:
(02) 9290 3856 or 1300 799 887 (outside Sydney metrop.), fax: (02) 9290 3857, e-mail: robl@alumnitravel.com.au; www.alumnitravel.com.au

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

23

I N T H E P U B L I C D O M A I N: T W O J A PA N E S E T E M P L E G UA R D I A N S
Russell Kelty

Pair of temple guardians [nio], Japan Edo Period (1615-1868), 17th-18th century. Fukui, wood, lacquer, cloth, paint, glass,
iron; left figure 192.0 c 120.0 x 65.0 cm, right figure 200.0 x 95.0 x 65.0 cm. Gift of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett through the
Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2009, collection Art Gallery of South Australia

he Art Gallery of South Australia recently

acquired a pair of Japanese temple
guardians (nio) which are a spectacular
testament to the great heritage of East Asian
Buddhist art. They are unusually large, and
are the only examples of their kind in an
Australian public collection.
On passing through the main gateway of many
Buddhist temples in Japan, the frightening
visages of two wrathful nio figures inevitably
confront the visitor . These threshold guardians
are usually housed on either side of the southern
gate and delineate the boundary separating
profane and sacred space. Their role is to protect
monks and lay devotees from the negative
forces and spirits that would contradict the
Buddhas Dharma. As guardians of the Buddhist
teaching, nio are ubiquitous elements of temple
architecture throughout East Asia. The majority
of these statues were fashioned from wood and
enshrined in semi-open porches, exposed to the
vagaries of the weather as well as to the civil
unrest that often led to the destruction of temple
buildings. An intact pair of figures is therefore
a rare survival.
The two figures are known respectively as Naraen
Kongo and Misshaku Kongo, and are commonly
called kongo rikishi or vajra-wielding strongmen.
Naraen Kongo, a form of the Hindu god Vishnu,
probably once held a vajra in his raised hand.
He would have stood on the right of the temple
entrance. Misshaku Kongo, a manifestation of
the Hindu god Indra, probably once held a
sword in his lowered left hand and would
have stood on the left side of the entrance. The
two figures together are sometimes described as
doubles of Vajrapani, the bodhisattva of power.
Vajrapani is often depicted in Chinese Buddhist
cave chapels dating to the late Tang (618-917)
and early Song dynasty (960-1279) and in those
locations displays similar appearance and traits
to the Japanese nio.
The carved faces still possess their original bulging
glass eyes, and convey a powerful expression of
unbridled ferocity. The mouth of Naraen Kongo
is open in the agyou position and the mouth of
Misshaku Kongo is closed in the ungyou position;
according to a common interpretation, these
positions represent the Sanskrit mantra syllables
Ah and Om. Since Ah and Om are the first
and last syllables of the Sanskrit alphabet, it is
often said that this alludes to the beginning and
end of the world. However, recent research into
the connection between East Asian Buddhist
imagery and ritual practices suggests that the

24

mouth expressions were intended to represent

the forceful declamation of a mantra associated
with acts of exorcism. Alternatively, the
expressions may be connected to a secret mantra
used in esoteric rituals to summon protector
deities during the visualization of a deity and his
entourage, similar to Shingon Buddhist practice.
The partially disrobed bodies of the Art Gallerys
two nio are fantastically muscled and their dramatic
gestures articulate their role as spiritual guardians
demonic protectors of the faith - epitomizing
righteous cosmic fury. The arm postures may
derive from the movements of ancient Chinese
martial arts or even the stylized choreography of
shamans during Buddhist exorcisms.
The iconographical lineage of these gods dates back
to the earliest development of Buddhist figurative
imagery. Their ancestors were the yakshas, ancient
Indian Vedic forest gods described as inoffensive
male nature fairies or gruesome ogres. One of the
earliest figurative elements of Indian art, yakshas are
portrayed either as fearsome warriors or as portly,
dwarf-like figures. In a Buddhist context, the yaksha
subsequently transformed into dharmapala (Skt:
protectors of the Dharma) and were stationed
at temple entrances charged with the protection
of the Buddha and the Dharma. Nevertheless, a
forest yaksha still appears frequently as an attendant
mourner in Japanese nehan paintings depicting the
death of the Buddha.

(Japanese cypress) wood, prized in Japan for

its fragrance, long-lasting quality and sacred
associations. The unknown sculptors used the
common yosegi zukuri (joined block) carving
technique introduced in Japan in the later half
of the 10th century. Sculptural elements like
the chignon (top knot), glaring eyes, stylized
musculature and fluttering waist wraps,
derived from the Indian dhoti garment, are
hallmarks of nio in Japan, Korea and China. In
particular the figures chrysanthemum nipples
documents a stylistic link to the theatrical
idealism of sculptures produced during the
Kamakura period (1185-1333), which many
Japanese scholars believe represents the zenith
of Buddhist art in Japan.
The Art Gallery of South Australias Pair of
temple guardians possess a spectacular sense of
energy. The charming naivety in the modeling
of details such as the feet indicates a provenance
from an extant Fukui Prefecture temple. The
lack of idealization of the bulbous belly and less
self-conscious articulation of the musculature
directly connects them to an ancient heritage of
Buddhist protector art found in archaic stone
sculpture at locations like the Longmen grottoes
(c. 493CE) in China. They are a unique testimony
to the interpretation of this subject as it evolved
over a millennium in the art of East Asia.
Russell Kelty recieved his BA in Art History from
Colorado State University and is currently pursuing

The SA Gallerys temple guardian figures were

created in the 17th-18th century with hinoki

his MA in Art History (Asian Art) at the University

of Adelaide.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

ALASTAIR MORRISON (1915-2009)

Claire Roberts

ALASTAIR MORRISON AT HOME IN HUGHES,

CANBERRA, IN 2006. PHOTO JEAN-FRANCOIS LANZARONE
POWERHOUSE MUSEUM, SYDNEY

lastair Morrison, who died in Canberra

in August aged 93, was a passionate
collector and a generous donor to cultural
institutions. He was a great traveller,
raconteur, ornithologist, conservationist,
colonial administrator, and high-level public
servant, the son of George Ernest Morrison
(1862-1920), husband of the photographer
Hedda Morrison (1908-1991) and much loved
friend of many people from diverse social and
cultural backgrounds.
Alastair was born in Peking in 1915, the
second son of George Ernest Morrison and
Jenny Wark Robin (1889-1923). His father,
an Australian doctor turned journalist,
was the Peking correspondent for The
Times newspaper in London from 18971912, and later political advisor to Yuan
Shikai, President of the Chinese Republic.
Morrisons insightful dispatches earned him
the nickname Chinese Morrison. Tragically,
Alastairs father died when he was five years
old and his mother died three years later.
He and his two brothers Colin and Ian were
brought up by their nanny and an elderly
maiden aunt and educated in England.
From an early age Alastair immersed himself
in the natural world, finding solace and
pleasure in the heaths and pinewoods of
Surrey and in the pages of books about birds
and the lives of naturalists drawn from his
fathers vast travel library. As a child he
suffered from various ailments and it was
during a period of convalescence that he
began to take an active interest in ornithology
and keeping birds. His first collections were
of moths and butterflies. After graduating in
economics from Cambridge in 1937, Alastair
travelled to Peru and Chile to collect bird
specimens, many of which he then sold to
British zoos and museums.
In 1940 he visited his brother Ian, who was
working in Shanghai, and accompanied him
on a trip to Peking. Alastair had been ill and
decided to recuperate there. He met and
became enamoured of Hedda Hammer, a
photographer who had lived in Peking since
1933, and together they explored the city of
his birth. He took a job as a cipher officer in
the British Embassy and after the outbreak
of the Pacific War worked in intelligence in
India and then entered the army and joined
the 2nd Ghurkhas. At the end of the War he
returned to Peking, marrying Hedda in 1946.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

After demobilisation in Hong Kong, Alastair

joined the British Colonial Service, and the
following year the Morrisons moved to
Sarawak, where Alastair worked as a District
Officer in various up-river locations. He
was appointed to the Colonial Secretariat
in Kuching in 1954 and worked as Principal
Assistant Secretary (Defence), Development
Secretary and then Information Officer. After
the incorporation of Sarawak into the state
of Malaysia in 1963, Alastair was invited
to work in the new Federal Department of
Information. Prior to his departure from
Sarawak the title Dato was conferred upon
him in recognition of his service to Malaysia.
In 1967 the Morrisons moved to Canberra
where Alastair worked as Head of the SouthEast Asia branch of the Office of Current
Intelligence under the Joint Intelligence
Organisation until his retirement in 1976.
Alastair was born with an innate curiosity
and wanderlust. Like his father and his two
brothers, he spent much of his life in Asia.
After his retirement, Alastair and Hedda
drove around Australia in their beetle before
choosing to settle in Canberra, where they
came to love the landscape of the Australian
Capital Territory. Alastair was a keen walker,
bird watcher and conservationist. In the
lonely years after Heddas death in 1991,
he was supported by his many friends and
colleagues. He sponsored the publication of
a field guide to the birds of the ACT and
reptiles and frogs of the ACT and expanded
his interest in collecting. The Powerhouse
Museum was one institution that became part
of his late-life extended family.
I first met Alastair in 1989 when the Powerhouse
Museum commissioned Narelle Jubelin to
produce an artwork that responded to objects
in the Museums collection. Hedda Morrison
gave permission for her photographs of life in
Peking to be used as the basis for petit-point
renditions that formed Jubelins Legacies of
Travel and Trade (1990).

National Library of Australia respectively.

The photographs gifted to the Powerhouse
formed the basis of the retrospective In Her
View: The Photographs of Hedda Morrison in
China and Sarawak (Powerhouse Museum,
1993). In the years that followed the
Powerhouse became the home of important
collections of papercuts, Chinese belt toggles;
Japanese netsuke; Indian, Nepali and Tibetan
bronze figures; ceramics from North and
Southeast Asia, and a rich library of books
reflecting Alastair and Heddas wide-ranging
collecting interests. In 2002 Alastair was made
a Life Fellow of the Powerhouse Museum in
recognition of his outstanding contribution to
the development of the collection.
Alastair was himself a rare bird, a learned,
inspiring and gentle man. He is greatly missed.
His generous spirit now lives on in Hedda
Hammer Morrisons remarkable photographs
and in the objects that he and Hedda collected
and gifted to cultural institutions in Australia
and America in order to spark the interests of
future generations.
Claire Roberts, Senior Curator of Asian arts and
design at the Powerhouse Museum, is currently
(2009-10) a Research Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study at Harvard University, working
on a research project relating to photography and

After Heddas death Alastair donated a large

collection of his wifes exhibition prints to the
Powerhouse Museum and a smaller set of
prints to the National Gallery of Australia. Her
substantial archive of photographic negatives
was divided into East Asian, South and
Southeast Asian, and Australian groupings
and was bequeathed to the Harvard-Yenching
Library, Cornell University Library and the

China and including a detailed study of the Hedda

Morrison archive at the Harvard-Yenching Library.

REFERENCES
www.powerhousemuseum.com/heddamorrison/
catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1585946?lookfor=yallourn&offset=
218&max=220
hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/harvard-yenching/collections/morrison/
rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM04516.html

25

CITIES OF THE SILK ROAD : A TAASA SEMINAR

Christina Sumner
In Damascus, Syria: the Great Mosque of the Umayyads, 705-715: the prayer hall faade
as seen from the courtyard. Photo Ross Burns

entral Asia has a hold on us. This land of

contrasts at the heart of the Asian landmass
arouses endless fascination and an appetite for
its stories. In particular we are drawn to those
narratives which promise to untangle for us
the ancient network of trade routes which
traversed the region and which we know as
the Silk Roads. Equally appealing is the lure
of the great cities of the region, redolent as
they are of romance and immoderate histories.
Not surprisingly, the recent TAASA seminar
Cities of the Silk Road, held at the Powerhouse
Museum in Sydney on Saturday 5 September
this year, was a sellout.
For this seminar, the latest in an excellent
series on the great cities of Asia, five cities
were chosen as topics. They were Damascus,
Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand and Kashgar,
each of which would arguably merit a whole
day of lectures. As a carefully chosen group
they were strong not only for themselves
but also as representative of the region and
the history of the Silk Roads. Grouping them
enabled us to glimpse the urban landscape of
the region and the Silk Roads in their entirety,
from Damascus, Europe and the West, through
Uzbekistan and on to Kashgar, China and the
East. Conversely, the fact that the Silk Road
covered such vast distances and spanned
some 2000 years, ensured that capturing
its history and differing cultures in a day
would be a challenge. TAASA approached
this challenge with great sensitivity, selecting
speakers who brought differing perspectives.
This diversity of approach enabled a wider
view and expanded our understanding of the
region considerably.
In Discovering Damascus, Ross Burns traced
the early history of the city through an analysis
of the work of the citys first historians and
archaeologists. As Australian ambassador to
Syria from 1984 to 1987, Burns fell in love with
the area and, following his undergraduate
degree in history and archaeology and two
publications on the archaeology of Syria,
is currently undertaking a doctorate at
Macquarie University. His talk challenged
many assumptions and conclusions regarding
the archaeological record and brought the
scant remains of ancient Roman, Byzantine
and Arab Damascus carefully into focus.
Central to Burns talk was the Great
Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, which
is now documented as having been built

26

upon an earlier temple to Jupiter by the

Umayyad Caliph al-Walid I between 705
and 715. Many early historians, reflecting a
growing European interest in Western Asia,
sought to demonstrate that mosques were
once Christian buildings. In the mid-1600s
for example, Edward Pococke argued that
the Great Mosque was originally Roman and
Byzantine, rather than the work of Arab
architects. In the 1850s, Josaiah Porter drew
an accurate plan of the Great Mosque,
showing its overall schema of two concentric
rectangles; but sadly, the marvellous interior
of the great building which Porter and other
early travellers saw was almost entirely
gutted by fire in 1893.
More recently, in the early 1900s, Karl
Watzinger and Karl Wulzinger carried
out research with a view to preserving old
Damascus through preventing the Turks
from their customary practice of robbing old
buildings to make new ones. Some elements of
the great colonnaded thoroughfare of Roman
Damascus, which lies under the modern city,
can still be identified today, as can intact
remaining stonework of the original 8th
century Umayyad building which forms the
western wall of the Great Mosque.
By contrast, Rae Bolotins Memories from
Tashkent: life between two cultures in the City
of Stone, offered a highly personal perspective
describing her childhood in Tashkent from
the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Uzbekistan
at that time was part of the USSR (it did not

become independent until 1991, following the

dissolution of the Soviet Union). Tashkent
suffered a devastating earthquake in 1966
which had a profound impact on the city
which, with a population of 2.1 million, was the
fourth largest in the USSR. Large numbers of
people were homeless, living in rows of tents,
and Tashkent faced the enormous challenge of
building a new city before winter. The result as
described by Bolotin was a concrete jungle of
cheap and ugly buildings.
Life in Tashkent for Bolotin centred on the
walled compound where she lived as the only
child of academic parents. Interestingly, for the
additional insights provided, the compound
was shared with another family who had
a dramatically different lifestyle. Bolotins
account of the contrasting yet peacefully
interconnected lives of the two families offered
a model of tolerance. While Bolotin was the
only child of a Jewish family from Belarus who
spoke Russian and generally stayed indoors,
the other family was Uzbek-speaking and
Muslim, with six daughters and a son, and
lived mostly outdoors. On opposite sides of the
same compound, the two houses also differed
considerably, one with wooden floors, metal
roof and a refrigerator, the other with earthen
floors, straw and clay roof, and large holes in
the ground for cool storage. Particularly telling
was Bolotins reference to the inclusion of
children in the daily work of the other family.
Although this is often characterised as child
labour, Bolotin as an only child simply saw the
laughter and togetherness of a large family.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

Kashgar MARKETPLACE, Xinjiang, China. Photo John Gollings 2005

Leigh Mackays talk, Bukhara: microcosm of

Central Asia, focused on how the Bukhara we
see today has been shaped by its past. More
a large agricultural country town than a city,
Bukhara was a key oasis stop on the Silk Road
network and its old town typifies Central Asian
cities generally. Bukhara also has immense
charm, in large part due to the protection
of its remarkable buildings. Contributing
factors in Bukharas preservation have been
the restoration work done by the Soviets in
the 1970s in preparing it for tourism and, more
recently and more conservatively, by UNESCO,
following the citys heritage listing in 1993.
Mackay identified six historical periods for
Bukhara beginning with the 700s, which saw
Muslim Arabs bringing Islam to Central Asia.
This was followed by a Golden Age from 9001200, when the city was a famed intellectual
centre with large numbers of mosques. The
10th century Samanid Mausoleum dates to
this period and the Kalyan Minaret, also
featuring exquisite decorative brickwork, was
built in 1127. Decline and eclipse followed,
however, in the period 1200-1500. Central
Asia was devastated by Ghengis Khan in
1220 and Bukhara was almost entirely razed,
although it was partially rebuilt by Timur and
the Timurids from the late 1300s.
1500 to 1700 was Bukharas Silver Age, a
period of considerable building work,
notably mosques, madrassas, bazaars
and caravanserais, when the city was
re-established as regional capital. Stagnation
followed, however, from1700-1900. The Silk
Roads trade had declined dramatically and
Bukhara acquired a reputation for despotism
and cruelty. The heavily fortified Ark, today
the Bukhara Museum, was the seat of the
ruling Emirs who lived extravagantly while
the city became increasingly impoverished.
Bukhara was eventually annexed by Russia,
along with the rest of Central Asia, in the
mid 1800s. As a result, Western influences are
increasingly evident, as in the Palace of Moon
and Stars outside Bukhara. The last phase
brought in the modern Soviet socialist state
in the 1920s and finally the independence of
Uzbekistan in 1991.
Samarkand, one of the worlds oldest cities and
situated in the middle of the ancient Silk Road,
was the subject of Dr Heleanor Felthams
talk Samarkand: the golden crossroads.
Feltham emphasised the magical status of
Samarkand in the popular mind and sought
to account for and balance its eternal romance
and fascination as an imaginary destination
through a summary of the citys role in the
broader scheme of things and consideration of
its economic historiography.

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

As an oasis settlement in a very dry land,

an abiding preoccupation for Samarkands
inhabitants was the management of water for
their practice of intensive irrigated agriculture.
The earliest agriculturalists of Samarkand,
then called Afrasiab, were the Sogdians who
understood that their agricultural way worked
best when they allied themselves with pastoral
nomads and their flocks. The cultural symbiosis
thus formed allowed cities like Samarkand to
become great centres of commerce.
Known to the ancient Greeks as Marakanda,
Samarkand was part of the Persian Achaemenid
Empire until conquered by Alexander the
Great in 330 BCE. Some 200 years later,
Chinese adventurers travelled to Central Asia
in search of horses, paving the way for the Silk
Road trade, whereby the Sogdian traders of
Samarkand flourished. Samarkand too was
destroyed by Mongol invaders in the 1200s,
but rebuilt by the Timurids to become a great
cultural centre for the arts. Its spectacular
surviving Timurid architecture of the 1300s
and 1400s includes the fabled Registan, Timurs
tomb the Gur Emir, Ulug Begs extraordinary
Observatory and, a little outside the city, the
necropolis Shah-i-Zinda.
Today in Samarkand, economic life continues
to reflect ancient nomadic and urban
interactions. Following independence in 1991
after 100 years of Russian and Soviet rule,
local Uzbek and Tajik traditions are being
reaffirmed in tandem with a rapid return to
trade and tourism.
The final talk of the day took us east to Kashgar,
in an area traditionally inhabited by Uighur
people and now part of the Chinese province
of Xinjiang. Dr Farid Bezhan, in Kashgar: oasis
city on Chinas old Silk Road, portrayed the
city through two lenses: firstly the analytical
eye of researchers at the Monash Institute,
working with Chinese scholars at the Xinjiang

Normal University and Urumchis Institute of

Archaeology; and secondly the camera lens
of Australian photographer John Gollings.
Mesmerised as we were by the haunting
beauty of Gollings photographs, many of
them in a soft monochrome reminiscent of
the surrounding desert landscape, we were
readily drawn by Bezhan into a virtual
experience of contemporary Kashgar.
Bezhan emphasised the uniqueness of Kashgar
in its location, its history and its surviving
culture, including its exceptionally large
donkeys. Surrounded by mountains and the
Taklamakan Desert, Kashgar connected China
with Central Asia via the Silk Roads. Echoes of
Kashgars past can still be seen in its surviving
architecture and also at the renowned Sunday
market, to which people still bring their goods
to sell loaded on animal carts.
Bezhan posed the political question of how
much Kashgar now belongs to China and how
much to Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands
of Chinese have moved to Kashgar from Beijing
and Urumchi, but Kashgar is still immediately
adjacent to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The Uighurs were converted to Islam by Sufis
who ruled Kashgar for 200 years and their form
of Islam is soft and flexible, strongly influenced
by shamanism. It seems the people of Kashgar
inhabit two worlds simultaneously, Muslim
Uighur and the everyday political reality.
This was an excellent seminar, a good day
which greatly enriched our understanding
of five great Silk Road cities of Central Asia
and evoked in diverse ways their remarkable
interconnected history, culture and survival.
Christina Sumner is Principal Curator, Design &
Society, at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
For a review of the book Kashgar, Oasis on Chinas
Old Silk Road by Jocelyn Chey, see p. 28 this issue.

27

RECENT TAASA ACTIVITIES

TAASA QLD
Asian Textiles Seminar

On Saturday 26 September, with the

co-operation of the Australian Centre for Asia
Pacific Art (ACAPA), a seminar on Asian
textiles was held in the lecture theatre at the
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG). Members
Marjorie Morris and Dana McCown spoke
respectively on Central Asia, on the subject
of A Look at the Silk Road and Telia Rumal,
an extraordinary but neglected group of
textiles from South India. They illustrated
their presentations with slides and samples
of garments and textiles from their personal
collections. Miranda Wallace, curator of the
Easton Pearson fashion exhibition running in
the adjoining Queensland Gallery of Modern
Art at the time of the seminar, also gave a
short slide show and then a floor talk about
the exhibition, with emphasis on the Indian
influence on the fashions. Most who attended
then enjoyed a social function in the Museum
caf after the seminar.

Book launch

On 20 October TAASA and the Australian

Institute for International Affairs (AIIA)
hosted a book launch of Dr Solomon Bards
newly published book Light and Shade:
Sketches from an Uncommon Life at Glover
Cottages, Sydney. Dr Bard, who during his
life relocated from eastern Siberia to Harbin
in northern China , then to Hong Kong and
now to Sydney, recounted his experiences as
a child growing up in Chita, Siberia. He chose
to study medicine in Hong Kong and went on
to become a conductor of the orchestra there,
as well as to delve into the archaeology of the
island. As that period of the twentieth century
witnessed the Russian revolution, the takeover
of Manchuria by the Japanese, then the horrors
of World War II in Hong Kong, Dr Bards
experiences shed a multitude of fascinating
personal insights into this period of history.
TAASA VIC
Talk: Sibylle Noras on The Mythical Snow
Lions of Tibet

TAASA NSW
TAASA Textile Study Group

For the October meeting, Chris Reid and

Safrina (Evi) Thristiawati re- created the
textile components of their wedding in
Lampung, South Sumatra nine years ago
(TAASA Review, Vol 11, no.1, March 2002).
The bride wore a stunning gold wrapped
thread traditional tapis and the groom a
checked pattern sarong with a silk ikat
patterned headwrapper. Chris and Evi filled
the meeting room with textiles from their
collection of wall hangings, door drapes and
covers traditionally used in the ceremony.

On 1st September members of TAASA Victoria

were treated to a talk on The Mythical Snow
Lions of Tibet, by Sibylle Noras. Sibylle discussed
the origin and iconography of the snow lion,
illustrating her presentation with images
of snow lions in paintings, sculpture and
architecture, and examples of snow lions from
her collection. Sibylle has travelled extensively
in the Himalayas for many years and became
fascinated by the playful snow lions that are
often depicted upholding the Buddhas throne.
She started collecting repousse and wooden

snow lions while working on a project with

ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated
Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Preview of Sothebys Connoisseurs
collection Sale

On Wednesday 21 October TAASA Victorian

members were invited to an evening Preview
of the Sothebys Connoisseurs Collection sale
which took place on Tuesday 27 and Wednesday
28 October in Melbourne. The sale included many
specialised areas including Jewellery, Clocks,
Watches, Furniture, Silver, Glass, Ceramics,
Paintings and Rugs. Of particular interest to
TAASA members was the section of Chinese and
other Asian Works of Art. Among the highlights
were a group of 19th century cinnabar lacquer
vases and a brushpot, a 17th/18th century
rhinoceros horn libation cup, a Wanli mark and
period Three Friends blue and white jar, and
an impressive 19th/20th century gilt copper
alloy with polychrome Vajrabhairava. It was
a very enjoyable evening with refreshments
kindly provided by Sothebys in their attractive
Armadale showrooms.
Talk: Julia Johnston on Hiroshi
Sugimotos Seascapes

On Wednesday 18 November Julia Johnston,

who is visiting Japan in January to further
her research on this artist, gave a talk on the
contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi
Sugimoto at Kazari Collector Gallery in
Prahran. Julia discussed Sugimotos renowned
Seascape series within the framework of the
artists reworking of the series.

TAASA MEMBERS DIARY

DECEMBER 2009 MARCH 2010
TAASA NSW CHRISTMAS PARTY

On Wednesday December 9 TAASA NSW will be holding its annual Christmas Party.
from 6.00 9.00 pm. This year the venue will be in The Briefing Room at the Powerhouse
Museum, Harris St., Pyrmont. As this party is a way for all TAASA members to get together
after a busy year, there is no charge for the drinks and nibbles for members. Access to the
Briefing Room is from MacArthur Street, which runs off Harris Street to the side of the
Powerhouse building.
TAASA ACT EVENT

Study Group members examining some traditional wedding

On Saturday March 13th (tbc) TAASA is planning to hold a Study Day with curators to
view the Asian photographic collection at the NGA and the artworks of East Asia at the
National Library. Members will also be invited to a talk on Islamic calligraphy by the
Australian - Iranian artist Nasser Palangi on Sunday 14th.

textiles. Photo Gill Green

28

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

B O O K R E V I E W: C O M M U N I T Y A N D M E M O RY
Jocelyn Chey

Kashgar, Oasis on Chinas Old Silk Road

John Gollings (photography), George Michell,
Marika Vicziany and Tsui Yen Hu (introduction).
Frances Lincoln, London 2008.

Kashgar, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan

Desert in far west China, has been in the
news this year because of widespread conflicts
between Han Chinese and local Uighur citizens.
The demolition of Kashgars Old City and its
impact on Uighur cultural identity and way of
life, well documented in this book, are certainly
among the causes of recent violence.
Kashgar was a Silk Road junction where travellers met before or after hazardous mountain
crossings to Persia and India. The foothills of
the Pamirs are clearly visible from the city.
An age-old trading centre whose population
today is over 70 percent ethnic Uighur, it feels
as if it belongs in Central Asia. Beijing is over
4,000 kilometres to the northeast.

dictionary when living in Baghdad, but his

tomb is in his hometown, Kashgar.

50,000 households in high-rise apartments in

new suburbs.

Kashgar: Oasis City on Chinas Old Silk Road profiles the history and everyday life of the town
and its residents and provides a brief introduction to the ongoing research project being undertaken by Monash Universitys Asia Institute
in the Kashgar/Yarkand region. Photographer
John Gollings visited in 2005 and took thousands
of photographs of archaeological sites, mosques,
tombs, bazaars, streets, and Kashgar residents at
work and play. An illustrative selection of photos
is accompanied by an excellent introduction by
the Monash team and their Chinese collaborator,
Prof Tsui of Xinjiang University in Urumqi.

A recent report from the Beijing Cultural

Heritage Protection Centre emphasised
the preservation value of the Old City and
expressed concern about procedural aspects
of the project. Rebuilding the city not only
promotes earthquake safety but also reinforces
ethnic unity and the reinforcement of
Xinjiangs borders, according to one report
from a local planning meeting.

The book provides a succinct history of the

Southern Xinjiang Uighur people and their
culture but its chief importance may well lie
in the unfortunate fact that Gollings excellent
photographs now stand as a memorial to a way
of life already lost. Ninety percent of the Old
City of Kashgar has already been demolished
because of government concerns about the
threat of earthquakes. Officials from UNESCOlinked ICOMOS (International Council on
Monuments and Sites) wrote to the Chinese
government in June 2009 to express concern
about the threat to the unique mudbrick city.

Once named Shule, Kashgar first came under

Chinese rule during the Han dynasty. It
briefly regained independence around 75CE
before being retaken by General Ban Chao.
It was wrested from Tang rule by Tibetan
forces, retaken and lost again to Arab forces
in 751 at the battle of nearby Talas River. In
the 10th century Kashgar became the seat
of power of the Karakhanid kingdom, the
first Turkic state to convert to Islam. Marco
Polo visited Kashgar in 1273 and remarked
on the wonderful gardens and vineyards
and the large quantities of cotton. Emperor
Qianlong annexed the city in 1759: it has
since remained under Chinese control, while
retaining a strong sense of local identity.

The Chinese government recognises the cultural

importance of the historic Silk Road. It has
announced its intention to rebuild the old city in
traditional style while incorporating earthquakeproofing technology. This is not likely to be a
success, judging by similar work carried out in
Beijing in the lead up to the Olympics last year

The Uighurs have a well-established

historical identity. A clear line of descent
can be established between the 8th century
Orkhon Turkic inscriptions and todays
Uighur language. In 2005, a seminar in
Kashgar marked the millenarian anniversary
of Mahmoud al-Kashgari, who compiled
Diwan Lughat at-Turk, a key text for research
into Turkic history. Al-Kashgari compiled the

The Old City of Kashgar is redolent

of community and inherited memory,
characterised by mud brick courtyard houses
overshadowing narrow lanes that may be
built and rebuilt many times over the centuries
but remain the centre of the tight-knit local
community. Now, under a US$4.4 billion
project launched last year, authorities will
reconstruct the Old City and resettle roughly

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

The reconstruction project highlights weaknesses

in Chinas framework for cultural heritage protection, particularly as it relates to ethnic minorities.
The Kashgar demolition project illustrates broader
problems in Chinas policies on ethnic minorities.
Jocelyn Chey, a former diplomat, is Visiting
Professor at the University of Sydney and a member
of TAASAs Committee of Management.

The Silk Road flourished because of international

commerce and cultural exchange. This supranational message does not conform with national
policy, which stresses unity and conformity. In
Kashgar, Uighurs are by definition a minority.
Their views on cultural heritage are discounted
and their cultural monuments are suspect if
they reinforce separate ethnic identity.

29

WHATS ON IN AUSTRALIA : DECEMBER 2009 FEBRUARY 2010

A SELECTIVE ROUNDUP OF EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS
Compiled by Tina Burge
AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY

work in Australia and also includes work by

his contemporaries and followers.

Asian Art Talks

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

19 January 12.45: Beatrice Thompson, Asian

Art - Asian costume
2 February 12.45: Niki Van den Heuvel mythical creatures of Borneo.
18 February at 12.45: Pamela Walker ,
International Art - Islamic calligraphy from
Southeast Asia.
For further information go to:
www.nga.gov.au
NEW SOUTH WALES
Garden and cosmos: The royal paintings
of Jodhpur
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
29 October 2009 26 January 2010

The exhibition showcases the internationally

renowned royal collection of the Mehrangarh
Museum Trust, Jodhpur, famous for the
superb paintings from the unique art
tradition that flourished in the royal courts
between the 17th and 19th centuries The
paintings included in the exhibition range
from miniatures to monumental artworks
depicting the palaces, wives and families
of the Jodhpur rulers,and epic narratives
demonstrating the devotion of Maharaja
Man Singh to an esoteric yogic tradition.

Zhongjian: Midway
Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth
15 Jan - 28 Feb 2010

Go to www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au for
further information
2010 Arts of Asia Lecture Series Powerful Patrons
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Tuesdays 1-2pm from 2 March - 12 October 2010

The 2010 Arts of Asia lecture series explores

the preeminent individuals in Asia who have
shaped the arts, culture and sense of identity
of their peoples. Lectures will include well
known historical identities such as Ottoman
sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and Shah
Jehan, architect of the Taj Mahal. However,
the series will also explore other influential
leaders who are less widely known such as
Korean King Cheongjo himself a painter,
who sponsored Buddhist temples and
created the royal library or Tibets 5th Dalai
Lama, who oversaw the efflorescence of
Tibetan artistic style and set into motion the
creation of the Potala Palace. Art Gallery
of NSW Director Edmund Capon launches
the series of two terms of 12 lectures each
by introducing the legacy of Chinas First
Emperor Qin Shihuangdi.
For full program and online booking
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/events/courses

Following its tour of four major centres in

China - Beijing, Tianjin, Xiamen, Shanghai,
- Zhongjian: Midway will tour to fourteen
Australian regional venues, after commencing
at Wollongong City Gallery in October
2009. The exhibition consists of works by
fifteen artists from China and Australia,
including several of Chinas and Australias
most notable contemporary artists: Ah Xian
(Australian tour only), Guan Wei, Liu Xiao
Xian, Guo Jian, Jin Sha, Xifa Yang, Sally
Smart, Kate Beynon, Lionel Bawden, Laurens
Tan, Julie Bartholomew. Lu Peng, Shen
Shaomin, Liu Qing He, Zhang Qing.
For further information go to:
www.tamworthregionalgallery.com.au
QUEENSLAND
The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art (APT6)
Qeensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art
5 December 2009 5 April 2010

The sixth exhibition in the Gallerys Asia

Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series
will include the work of more than 100 artists
from 25 countries, including collaborations
and collectives, which reflect the diversity of

There is an event program associated with

the exhibition
Hymn to beauty: the art of Utamaro
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
13 February - 2 May 2010

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) is the

quintessential exponent of ukiyo e
woodblock prints of Jaapanese courtesans
His sensuous and insightful portraits
of women from all walks of life - aloof
courtesans, diligent housewives, affectionate
mothers and passionate lovers have
enjoyed unabated popularity in Japan
and worldwide.
Featuring around 80 prints from the
renowned collection of the Museum of Asian
Art, State Museums in Berlin, this exhibition
is the first extensive survey of Utamaros
Guo Jian, Untitled No.8, 2008, Oil on canvas, 152 x 213 cm, TAMWORTH REGIONAL GALLERY VISITING EXHIBITION

30

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

practices across Asia, the Pacific and Australia.

It will have a number of specific focuses
and thematic links while considering recent
shifts in contemporary art in communities
that have not been represented in the APT
before, including works by artists from Tibet,
North Korea (DPRK), Turkey and Iran, and
from countries of the Mekong region such as
Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma).Innovation
in performance art and music in the Asia
Pacific is also represented, as is cinema from
the Indian sub continent to the Middle East.

Drawn from the collections of the Queensland

Art Gallery, the Queensland Museum, the
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
and a private collector, the exhibition features
works from Fiji, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii,
Futuna, the Solomon and Cook Islands,
Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

For further information go to:

www.qag.qld.gov.au

Chinoiserie: Asia in Europe 16201840

There is Program of free events associated

with this exhibition
For more information about other programs
associated with the exhibition go to
www.ngv.vic.gov.au/ngvinternational.

For further information go to: qag.qld.gov.

au/exhibitions/current/paperskin
VICTORIA

National Gallery of Victoria, International,

Melbourne

Paperskin: Barkcloth across the Pacific

9 October 2009 14 March 2010

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

31 October 2009 14 February 2010

Paperskin celebrates the visual sophistication

and vitality of cloth made from the beaten
bark of paper mulberry, banyan and fruit
trees, which has played an essential role in
everyday life in SE Asia, as well as holding
political and ceremonial significance.
Paperskin explores the stories embodied
in these cloths. With their evocative visual
language of bold and intricate patterning,
barkcloths have been likened to tattoos

JAPAN: AUTUMN,
ISLANDS AND ART

Chinoiserie refers to a style in Western art which

draws its inspiration from the arts of China,
Japan and India. Drawing mainly from the NGV
Collection, with a few key loans, this exhibition
will showcase European Chinoiserie in a range
of media including ceramics, furniture, glass,
textiles, painting, prints and drawings. These
creations will be placed with examples of Asian
art which illustrate both the inspiration for the
European productions and how these works
depart from their Asian models.

BURMA: THE
ESSENTIAL
EXPERIENCE

VIENNA PORCELAIN FACTORY (DU PAQUIER), Vienna Austria

17181864 Coffee pot c.172530, porcelain (hard-paste) 26.2
x 24.7 x 17.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1940

CAMBODIA:
ANGKOR WAT
AND BEYOND

07 November
29 October
17 October
24 November 2010
17 November 2010
02 November 2010
Japan is a two-sided coin: one Designed and hosted by TAASA Angkors timeless grandeur is
unmissable, an unforgettable
post-modernist side embraces contributor Dr Bob Hudson, our
travel memory. Yet Cambodia
longstanding annual Burma
cutting-edge technology; the
program features extended stays offers a host of other important
other reveres and preserves
cultural and travel experiences:
in medieval Mrauk U, capital
fine artistic and cultural
outstanding ancient,
of the lost ancient kingdom of
traditions. Ann MacArthur,
vernacular and French colonial
Arakan (now Rakhine State)
Senior Coordinator of Asian
architecture; spectacular riverine
and Bagan, rivalling Angkor
Programs at the Art Gallery
environments; a revitalising
Wat as Southeast Asias
of NSW, is our experienced
urban capital in Phnom Penh;
Japanophile leader. Kyushu and richest archaeological precinct.
and beautiful countryside.
Shikoku predominate including Exciting experiences in Yangon,
Join our team of Gill Green,
Inle Lake, Mandalay and a
the Setouchi International
art historian, author and
private cruise down the mighty
Art Festival on the island of
Vice President of TAASA plus
Ayeyarwady are also included.
Naoshima on the Inland Sea.
expatriate museologist, Angkor
A lengthy stay in Kyoto is our
Land Only cost per person
resident and TAASA contributor
spectacular autumn finale.
ex Yangon $4750
Darryl Collins on this latest,
Land Only cost per person
updated version of our highly
ex Fukuoka $5000
evaluated 2008 and 2009
programs.
Land Only cost per person
ex Phnom Penh $4700
HERITAGE DESTINATIONS

BACKROADS
OF BURMA

LAOS: LAND OF THE

LOTUS-EATERS

16 November
02 December 2010
One trip to Burma is never
enough. Backroads of Burma is
ideal for the second-time visitor
or indeed first-time travellers
desiring remote and rustic
locations. Starting and finishing
in Yangon, our schedule wends
south into Mon State, visiting
Kyaiktiyo and Moulmein
before heading north to Sri
Ksetra, the ancient Pyu capital.
Mystical Mount Popa, Bagan,
Monywa and the spectacular
cave temples of Po Win Taung,
Sagaing and Mandalay follow.
Dr Bob Hudson is program
leader.
Land Only cost per person
ex Yangon $4150

27 January
10 February 2011
Enigmatic and relatively
undeveloped, landlocked
Laos offers travellers an
intimate glimpse of traditional
Southeast Asian life. Gradually
emerging from tumultuous
recent history, Laos is a gem of
Indochina with interesting art,
architecture, French and Lao
cuisine, intricate river systems,
and rugged highlands. Darryl
Collins, long term Southeast
Asian resident, has designed
and will guide a comprehensive
tour of Laos which includes the
wonderful historic royal city of
Luang Prabang and Wat Phu
Champasak.
Land Only cost per person
ex Vientiane $4400

N AT U R E B U I L D I N G S P E O P L E T R AV E L L E R S

PO Box U237, University of Wollongong NSW 2500 Australia

m 0409 927 129 e heritagedest@bigpond.com
ABN 93 086 748 834 LIC NO 2TA004916

TA A S A R E V I E W V O L U M E 1 8 N O. 4

For a brochure or further information phone Ray Boniface at Heritage Destinations

on 0409 927 129 or email heritagedest@bigpond.com or visit our website
www.heritagedestinations.com.au

31