A Place Where Cultures Met

Fascinating article from The New York Times. I don't know what I'm going to do when it goes pay per view next year. I hope the financial model does NOT work and I'll get my free New York Times back. Please.  Does this look like an "imaginary animal" to you?  It looks like an elephant to me, despite the funky toes and truncated body. Identification of graphic: Librado Romero/The New York Times -- A stone carving of an imaginary animal, the Gajasimha, from Thap Mam, Binh Dinh province, in the 12th to 13th century.

Gaja is one of several Sanskrit terms for an elephant.  It's not hard to figure this out by looking at the carving - it has tusks and the an upturned nose/trunk.  Simha - I'm guessing - it's a lion (like "Simba" from The Lion King - demonstrating my total ignorance but brilliant guessing capability???)  The toes and the general shape of the body, along with the long tail curved against the rear flank, suggest an oriental rendering of a lion - such as in Chinese "foo dogs."  So, this figure is a combination of two powerful, totemic animals with ancient religious and mystical significance across several cultures.

Ancient Sphere Where Cultures Mingled
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: February 4, 2010

In 1988 the art historian Nancy Tingley, then a curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, went to Vietnam to talk with museums about borrowing examples of the country’s ancient art for the first major United States exhibition. It was a bold idea. To most Americans, Vietnam still meant little more than the memory of a nightmare war. And who knew it had a great art tradition, never mind museums that preserved it?

The show didn’t happen. The diplomatic situation was volatile; negotiating loans proved impossible. The Asian Art Museum dropped out as a sponsor, and even after new ones signed on, the project remained in limbo. But Ms. Tingley stuck with her original plans, and her persistence, 20 years on, has paid off in “Arts of Ancient Vietnam: From River Plain to Open Sea” at the Asia Society Museum. Is the show worth the wait? It is. It’s fabulous. Perfectly (meaning modestly) scaled, with the kind of Asian art loans — matchless in quality, straight from the source — that we rarely see here anymore.

From the moment you enter the galleries you’re seeing things you won’t find anywhere else and certainly not in this combination: a bronze drum as hefty as a hot tub; a wooden Buddha, tall, dark and Giacometti-thin. Avid-eyed Hindu deities keep company with contortionist dancers. A tiny serpent of beaten gold basks in a spotlight. Ceramic plates and bowls crowd a room just as they had once filled the hold of a ship that went down in the South China Sea.

Once you’ve made your way through the society’s suave installation, you’ve seen treasures from 10 Vietnamese museums. You’ve time-traveled from the first millennium B.C. to the 17th century A.D. And you’ve style-traveled through dozens of cultures both inside and outside Vietnam itself.

Geographically Vietnam was made for trade. A narrow slice of land with a 2,000-mile coastline running from China to Cambodia, it was open to the world whether it wanted to be or not. Where nearby countries like Laos and Thailand are chunky and dense in shape, Vietnam measures at certain points less than 40 miles across. It has virtually no interior, no way to shut its doors and retreat.

As important as accessibility was its location at a nodal point where international shipping routes met. With countless natural harbors — its coastline might have been cut with pinking shears — Vietnam made an ideal layover for sea traffic. It also made a lucrative global marketplace and as such gave as good as it got.

It absorbed early formative influences from China, evident in metalwork (seen in the show’s first gallery) from the prehistoric Dong Son culture that settled in northern Vietnam in the last half of the first millennium B.C. At the time Vietnam itself was valued for its creative vitality. The bronze ritual drums made by Dong Son artists were sought-after collector items, with examples, some weighing close to 400 pounds, turning up not only in China but across Southeast Asia as well.

With the rise of the pre-Angkor state of Fu Nan in the Mekong Delta in the first centuries A.D., Vietnam’s cultural spheres expanded further. We still don’t know much about Fu Nan — there’s a lot of basic archaeological catch-up work to be done — though we do know that its people established harbor cities and experienced a wave of influence from India, which led to adopting Buddhism and Hinduism and their intertwined traditions of religious sculpture.

The tall wooden Buddha, its features time-smoothed almost to invisibility and its figure in profile like a parenthesis, reflects post-Gupta style conventions current on the subcontinent in the sixth century. But it was Hinduism that really caught on, first with the worship of Vishnu. We see him, with the breath-swelled body of a yogi and wearing a princely crown, in a stone figure on loan from the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum.

Devotion to Shiva also became in vogue, and soon much of the rest of the Hindu pantheon found its way into Fu Nan and its art: Ganesha, with his elephant’s head and pudgy body; Durga, a blank-faced warrior-goddess stripped down to her skirt for a fight; and Surya, the sun god, in his buttoned-up untropical attire of West Asian tunic and boots.

These immigrant divinities showered Fu Nan with prosperity until the mid-seventh century; then their largesse stopped. For reasons we can only surmise — maybe the appearance of overwhelming commercial competition — a vital state grew moribund and gradually dropped from sight.

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