Word: khmer
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...brought together more Hispanic families than anyone else in California," he claimed. "Same goes for Hmong, Khmer, Vietnamese... There isn't a racist bone in my body...
...there is something almost surreal in the contrast between the detachment and formal purity of Khmer sculpture and the circumstances 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...
...historians divide Khmer sculpture into three long periods, starting in the 6th century to 8th century A.D., when its forms and imagery arose from Indian roots. These early images appear fully formed, without any of the archaic crudity that normally attends the birth of a style. They can be marvelously refined, like the 7th century to 8th century standing figure of the Buddha of the afterlife, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. There is a perfect balance between the abstraction of the limbs, the rich linear detail of the costume and the benign, almost feminine roundness of this Buddha's torso...
...second period begins in 802, when the royal capital of the Khmer was established at Angkor, beside the sacred river--the "Khmer Ganges"--of Siem Reap. It was to last six centuries. The sculpture of high Angkor tends to be more severe, hieratical and augustly withdrawn than the earlier work. The face of the great 9th century Vishnu figure from the town of Siem Reap bears an imperious expression, and the god's four hands, grasping his symbolic attributes--a club for knowledge, a ball signifying the earth, a chakra or disc symbolizing power and a conch betokening water...
...same authority could extend to portraits of historical figures--Khmer kings. Portrait is a relative term here. There is no knowing whether the last great Angkor king, Jayavarman VII, 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...