Juggling culture, religion, art and hi-tech, Alan Potkin makes an intriguing presentation in Phralak-Phralam, A Previous Lifetime of the Buddha: The Lao Ramayana, Mural Paintings at Wat Oup Mong (2001, interactive e-book, English, French and Lao).
For a long time, Vat Oup Mong, a temple in Vientiane, Laos, served as a kind of Sistine Chapel of the Phra Lak – Phra Lam, a Laotian Buddhist retelling of the great Indian epic Ramayana. No other temple in Laos devoted its interior so fully to such images. That is, until a demolition project destroyed it in 2000.
“While Ramayana illustrations and sculptures from the Indian, Khmer and Thai, as well as the Lao traditions, are everywhere in (temple) décor here, this was a rare structure totally given over to the many stories comprising the beloved epic.”
Built in the 1920s, the temple gained importance in 1938 when Thit Panh, a talented draftsman-monk, and seven “boy novices” adorned its 125-square-metre sima (interior) surface with impressive murals. In the e-book, Thit Panh modestly says, “My parents were too poor to send me to high school, and I never had learned how to draw.” But the merits of his work, still “perfectly intact until the walls came down”, appear obvious. Yet for decades, “the vat and its wonderfully decorated vihaan languished completely as a local cultural attraction”.
By the dawn of the 21st century, the masonry building had cracked, its woodwork showed termite-damage and the roof structure and tiles had decayed. “By this time, Vat Oup Mong's ceremonial center of gravity had already been shifted to a brand new, flashy kitsch multi-storied sala on the opposite side of the temple grounds and the old sima was only rarely used for actual worship.”
So the demolition proceeded, as seen in an e-book video of a tractor pulling down the walls bit by bit. There at the time, Potkin, an adjunct professor from Northern Illinois University's Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, documented the frescoes and preserved a few fragments. Detesting the destruction, he denounced it as a “world-class act of vandalism”.
“Over the next days, I came and went with still and video cameras, breaking only for meals, for recharging the batteries, for replenishing film and tape, trying to square the party atmosphere around the demolition with my own rage and despair. I started from ‘your children will curse you for doing this evil thing, your children's children will curse you, etc.’ Since I spoke in English, not Lao, nobody was overtly offended, although I was in quite a state.”
Potkin even realized “the brilliant fantasy of filming from inside the vihaan while the very walls were pulled own and outwards around me.
“The most surreal moment was midway through the demolition process when I found out that the French cultural attaché was right then mounting a big international meeting at the Ministry of Information and Culture on ‘conserving Buddhist treasures’, just three kilometres on the other side of Vientiane, totally clueless as to what was happening over at Oup Mong.”
But at least “the illustrations, the specific manuscripts being illustrated, the architecture, the structural details, and the process of demolition were all systematically archived in digital format”. The e-book, with images and text that click to other pictures, pages and videos, catalogs the Oup Mong frescoes, complete with a panoramic slideshow of the former interior.
Now plans are nearing completion to use modern means to reproduce the original frescoes at a new location in Laos. Aficionados of religion, art and history should appreciate Potkin's sentiments and efforts.
For more information: email: alan.potkin@comcast.net
(May 7, 2009)
ARCHIVES
|
While documenting, Alan Potkin denounces
a 'world-class act of vandalism'.
|
