Cambodian Painting

In contrast to the amazing sculptures in the Siem Reap airport, the reliefs of the Angkor temples, the wood carving, and other arts and crafts we saw in Siem Reap, Ellie and I were not impressed with the paintings we saw in Cambodia.

I'd have to say most of the paintings I saw looked a bit like the velvet Elvis paintings one sees at street corners in U.S. cities.

Admittedly, I didn't go in any galleries and most of these paintings were for sale at stalls outside the temples and along the highways... But, they were hanging alongside batik, weaving, wood carvings, ceramics, rubbings of the temple reliefs and other folk art that made me wish I had a container to ship things home in rather than my medium-sized suitcase that had to weigh in under 50 pounds.

We wondered if the Cambodian painters had been misled by tourists who lacked taste. But then I thought about the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his colleagues did their best to rid Cambodia of fine artists during the genocide in the 1970s. It stands to reason that skill in painting would have been lost to at least a generation because of the death of those who would have been teachers.

Nevertheless, one painting stood out.

I saw it in a floating market on Lake Tonle Sap next to the charts showing the array of fish and bird species that inhabit the lake, not far from the fish farm and the tables where tourists drink fresh coconut milk before they get back on the boats that will take them back to shore. There hangs a painting in which a B-52 (I checked the silhouette against photos of U.S. war planes) flies over the lake while people go about their daily activities.

I knew the United States dropped bombs on Cambodia when it wasn't supposed to, but I didn't know why. I am reading Kenton Clymer's Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870 to try to understand why the United States bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, or the American War as it is called in Vietnam and Cambodia.

I will let you know if I understand any better after reading an expert.

Cambodia has had a few years of peace, now. I hope that the peace continues without any foreign bombers or home-grown horror. I hope this man, and other artists like him, will have the luxury of painting in oils.

Gym Source

Empty Wall

I bought a painting for myself for my birthday (today).

Ellie and I ducked into the Empty Wall Gallery to find some peace from the traffic on Luong Van Can Street in Hanoi a couple of days before Christmas. While millions of motorbike riders made their way home, and street-food vendors peddled their dumplings and tapioca drinks, we enjoyed a lovely meeting with Hai Yen and her paintings.

I noticed an oil painting of a huge Buddha face with three small monks beneath it and some others featuring flowers I had seen all over Vietnam. Some wonderful lacquer paintings attracted Ellie's attention. We talked about the prices of paintings and where the artists' work is hanging around the city. Then Hai Yen pointed the way upstairs, where we discovered more paintings in the style of the Buddha face.

Ellie and Hai Yen moved the paintings around into groupings, and we sat comfortably considering which ones Ellie might buy.

Ellie has a large art collection that reflects her postings in Ukraine, Armenia, Central Asia and Pakistan, her travels and her long association with Poland; she is used to assessing art. I have decided rather late in life that I deserve art, so I hung back from the negotiations about the paintings.

In the end, Ellie bought a lacquer painting, and I bought some abstract lacquer pendants and bracelets. We left Empty Wall with warm memories of the gallery as a refuge from Hanoi's bustle and of Hai Yen as a knowledgeable guide to Hanoi's art scene. I asked the name of the artist of the work that caught our attention. Ellie told Hai Yen that she would come back after our cruise on Halong Bay if she decided to buy one of the paintings. Hai Yen reminded her that a collector in Singapore had expressed interest in the painting that she had paid the most attention to. We left the gallery to pack for the cruise.

On Christmas day I asked Ellie if she was planning to go back to Empty Wall for the painting. She said the work wasn't haunting her. "But it's haunting you," she added.

After the long drive back to Hanoi from Cat Ba Harbor and a moment of negotiation about the beds in our hotel room, we headed back to Empty Wall. I decided that I would buy the painting of three monks moving away from the viewer into a golden mist if the gallery was open.

We found the spot on Luong Van Can Street, but had trouble finding the gallery because it turned out to be closed. We moved on to shopping for plates, chopsticks and clothes. I felt better about the extra silk outfits because I was saving some money by not buying the painting.

We went on to Cambodia (where we didn't see any paintings that appealed to us) and then home.

But the monks stuck with me.

I e-mailed Empty Wall about 10 days after I got home to Seguin, and Hai Yen sent several photos of work by Luong Trung, including "The Path of Monks." "My monks," as I had begun to think of them. Some of Trung's paintings had sold, but my monks were still available.

I sent the fee for the painting and shipping by Western Union to Hanoi. Hai Yen sent the painting by Fedex to Seguin. (This is a good side of globalization.)

The painting arrived in three days after passing through Subic Bay in the Phillipines and Anchorage, Alaska. (Package tracking is a good side of the Web.)



Mr. Luong Trung is a young artist, born in 1981. He has an impressive cultural education in Hanoi's fine art and cinematography universities. He has exhibited widely, including participation in the National Fine Art Exhibition of Vietnam in 2005. U.S. and Australian collectors, like Ellie and me, are taking note of his style and his works are turning up in more and more collections.

Ask me about Empty Wall. I can tell you how to contact Hai Yen to learn more about the artists she represents.

Gym Source

Ha and the Children of Hue

This is Ha. She is a trained accountant who left work with a beer importer to become a tour guide because she wanted to interact with people. She is a master at her job.

The day we flew from Saigon (hardly anyone calls it Ho Chi Minh city) to Danang, Vietnam Airlines had cancelled a string of flights, including our 4 o'clock, to fill up the 5:30 plane. We were late and didn't have her phone number, but she was at the airport to meet us carrying a sign with our names on it, a smile on her face, a motorcycle helmet in her hand and a driver (of a car) ready to take us to Hoi An.

Ha put together a wonderful plan to introduce us to the history and culture of the central coastal region of Vietnam, including Hoi An, Danang and Hue (the capital of the country before the troubles began in the 20th century and the location of one of the most bitter battles of the Tet Offensive in 1968). We visited pagodas, temples, tombs and the Imperial Citadel. We traveled by boat on the Perfume River. We heard two performances of traditional Vietnamese music (one onboard a riverboat). We dined in a wide variety of restaurants and had a thorough introduction to the cuisine of this region.

But most importantly, Ha showed us her full humanity. She told us about her family: her husband, child, child on the way, and her parents (whom she visited while we were in Hue).

In the photo she is holding a photograph of a group of children. These children receive scholarships that enable them to attend school because of Ha's work with a Vietnamese man who lives in California. Ha helps make the connection between capable, poor children and the benfactor.

I was surprised to learn from Ha that all children in Vietnam are required to pay school attendance fees each year. If a family can't afford the fees, no matter how capable the children are, they can't attend school.


Both Ha and her collaborator in California grew up in Hue, so they feel a special connection to the children of this city. Poor children of Hue, and other cities in Vietnam, are often working, rather than playing like the kids in this picture. According to the people I met while I was there, Vietnam has no minimum age for going to work. Children are selling things to tourists, working in shops and restaurants, begging.

Ha meets children as she is guiding tourists around and asks them how they are doing in school. If they are receiving recognition for their work, Duy (from California) finds the money to help them continue to attend school.

When we floated on the Perfume River, we passed areas where quite a few of the children who receive scholarship assistance live. Their families live on boats or in houses very close to the shore.



I hope to stay in contact with Ha and to continue to help support this effort to keep the kids in school.

What sort of Communism is it when children don't receive a free education? I think it is heartless and foolhardy for any government to ignore the needs of the people to learn.

Gym Source

Beginning at the End

Forget for a moment that Cambodia has been continuously populated since the building of the city of Angkor Thom and the various temples that comprise the Angkor complex in the 10th century.
Now, imagine yourself a French naturalist searching for species of plants and animals as yet unknown to Europeans in the 19th century. Your Cambodian guides are slicing through the jungle underbrush on a hill. You look up and see an incredible sight: a huge stone building rising from the treetops in the distance.


Never mind that Cambodian monks have been tending the temple of Angkor Wat throughout the centuries and keeping the vines and trees of the tropical forest from taking over the premises, the colonial world labels the discovery YOURS.

Today's world traveler need not be anywhere near as intrepid as those first French explorers who found Cambodia's secret. My friend Ellie and I, for example, spent five wonderful days in Siem Reap exploring the temples of Angkor Wat and the Bayon and the city of Angkor Thom.
Instead of a jungle emergence, we crossed a causway to Angkor Wat like the thousands of other tourists who visit the site each year. No need for machetes.
No one will mistakenly think that we discovered these temples, but we are certainly educating a lot of people about them.

Our visit to Angkor came at the end of an amazing trip in Vietnam, but after seeing these temples, I felt like I'd seen Halong Bay, Hoi An and the squid boats of Danang in a long-ago lifetime.


I can't do justice to the experience in one post, so as I reflect on my mind-blowing adventure, I predict that I'll be coming back again and again to the bas reliefs of Angkor Wat and the Bayon. Both temples have facilitated reverence for Hindu gods and the Buddha, according to the current king's beliefs. The reliefs combine secular and sacred history, beginning with the creation of the world and its animal and human species out of the churning milk sea through the battles among the Khmer and their neighbors in the ancient world.

Thank you to the monks who cared for the temples. Thank you to those who continue to worship in and around Angkor. Thank you to the monks who, like me, were touring the temples to learn. I apologize for invading your privacy at the sites, but the saffron robes are irresistible. I hope you will view the photos as part of my homage to the spirits who built, maintain and populate the temples.

Gym Source

Re-emergence

Hello, folks!

After a packed semester, I am back. At Christmas time I took an amazing odyssey through Vietnam and Cambodia. This trip took me and my friend Ellie from one end of Vietnam to the other and to central Cambodia, through a space and time continuum that started in the ancient world and bounced through the Cold War and into the 21st century. My next posts will highlight photos and reflections fromt the trip, in no particular order.

Meanwhile, Karma has BIG ideas and still fits in small places. She has a great fondness for this little basket and her lavender scarf.

Gym Source