Word: cambodians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...image of Cambodian culture that haunts the West is vague and almost ineffably romantic: the royal city of Angkor, slowly abandoned under threat of Thai occupation after 1431 but still the chief symbol of Cambodian identity, one of the largest archaeological sites in the world, with its colonnades and giant water reservoirs; its huge, impassive stone faces split by tree roots; its temple mountains and crumbling pine-cone spires. Spreading over some 150 sq. mi., it has excited dithyrambs from visitors ever since the French started going there in the 19th century. "I looked up at those towers rising above...
...show have done the next best thing. With the cooperation of the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Musee Guimet, under the general curatorial direction of the art historians Helen Jessup and Thierry Zephir, they have assembled the first full-scale traveling exhibition of classic Cambodian sculpture in more than 50 years. (A smaller show, a dress rehearsal for this one, was seen in Australia...
...Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted from unguarded sites for the voracious Western art market...
...under which so much of it precariously survives. To walk into this show is to shift gears; to be immersed in an extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha in his various forms; the main Hindu deities: Shiva, Vishnu, the elephant god Ganesha and so forth. And there...
...actually looked like the stone effigy made of him in the late 12th century, and it is most unlikely that he ever sat for its sculptor. (No social prestige attached to being a Khmer sculptor, and not a single artist's name in all the 1,000 years of Cambodian art has been recorded.) Which hardly matters, since the subject of this dense, exquisitely carved image is less a man than a conception of kingship: full of presence but withdrawn in meditation, centered, and plain to the point of humility. As pure as any Brancusi...