Source: The new York Times- BAGAN JOURNAL- September 1, 2013
Opening a Door to the Burmese Past, and the Present, Too
Adam Dean for The New York Times
Melissa Chiu, center, museum director of the Asia Society, near a sculpture of Buddha descending from heaven at a museum in Bagan, Myanmar.
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: September 1, 2013
BAGAN, Myanmar — In a delicate operation here, specialists gingerly eased a priceless, 1,000-year-old national treasure — a Buddhist bronze casting in the shape of a lotus flower — from its perch in a museum showcase.
Adam Dean for The New York Times
A bronze lotus flower from the 11th century with images from Buddha’s life in the petals.
A small group of curators on a recent visit from the United States, flashlights in hand, admired the tiny metal hinges that allow the flower to open and close as well as the intricate detail on the miniature Buddhas craftsmen attached to the petals long ago. The piece was found in pristine condition inside a stone box flung to the surface by an earthquake here nearly 40 years ago.
The curators pronounced it a star attraction among hundreds of rarely seen ancient objects in the neglected museums and dusty storerooms they have been scouring across Myanmar as they prepare for a 2015 exhibit at the Asia Society in New York City that will celebrate the nation’s long-hidden Buddhist art.
As Myanmar wrestles with the problems and uncertainty of a nascent democracy, and Buddhist extremists tarnish the image of the country’s dominant religion with attacks on Muslims, early Buddhist art offers a different dimension of a country that until recently languished under a military dictatorship, and before World War II served as a tropical outpost of the British Empire.
The curators rummaged through the humid basement of the Bagan museum, where they found outsize chamber pots used in the princely palaces that once flourished on the banks of the Irrawaddy River. They examined gilded wood monastery boxes that stored palm-leaf manuscripts, the paint now peeling. They peered into grimy glass cabinets at gold-painted sphinxlike creatures in a rundown library in the town of Prome, near where the first Buddhists in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, lived.
“The show will be a coming out for Burma,” said Melissa Chiu, museum director of the Asia Society. “The country has been closed off for so many years, we hope the show will assume a bigger significance, and shed new light on material not seen before. Buddhism is the state religion and plays such a major role in daily life.”
The curators searched in the former capital, Yangon; in the new capital, Naypyidaw; in Prome; and here in Bagan, which from the ninth century to the 13th century was the center of a royal kingdom where the creative energy was so intense that nearly 2,000 brick and gilded temples were built across a vast plain. In Bagan, a popular destination for tourists imagining the glory days among faded temples, farmers still unearth ancient gold jewelry.
The antiquities hunt has the support of President Thein Sein. During a visit to the United States last year, he approved the loan of dozens of artworks for the 2015 show, ensuring that the curators were welcomed in usually off-limits inner sanctums. Of the estimated 70 objects planned for the exhibit, about three-quarters will come from Myanmar and the remainder from collections in the United States, Ms. Chiu said.
In exchange for the right to borrow the art, the Asia Society has pledged to provide training in conservation techniques to Myanmar’s museum employees, who must make do with a scant $100,000 budget that leaves the nation’s museums with little electricity, poor air-conditioning and no money for acquisitions.
Although the visitors had extraordinary access and freedom to choose the objects they wanted, some items were too precious to ship to New York, including an elaborately carved gilt door from the royal court in Mandalay that was salvaged before the British Army looted the palace in 1885.
The door was low, making it impossible for subjects who visited the king to enter without bending in obeisance. The curators coveted it, but it was one of the few pieces that the directors of the National Museum in Yangon vetoed. “Impossible,” said Daw Nu Mra Zan, a former deputy director of the museum.
But that still left many images of Buddha — in stone, bronze and wood — to choose from. Some looked similar to other famous images. A few were judged to be fakes. But with so many remarkable pieces, it will be difficult to make the final selections, the curators said.
A wood carving more than two feet high from the 12th century that shows Buddha descending from heaven after giving a sermon to his mother will surely be on the A-list. “This is very special,” said Sylvia Fraser-Lu, a guest curator for the show, as she admired the movement carved into the piece. “It’s luck that it was preserved. It may have been inside a temple, or on the shady side of a temple.”
The New York Times
For a spectacular object that would impress hard-to-please New York audiences, the curators liked an 11th-century stone sculpture of a jaunty-looking Prince Siddhartha shearing his hair with a sword as he vowed to begin the journey that would lead him to become the Buddha. “It could be the signature piece of the show,” said Ms. Chiu, thinking ahead to marketing possibilities.
Over the years, waves of looters depleted much of the great storehouse of treasures. In the 1885 Anglo-Burmese war, British soldiers plundered smaller items like mirrors, manuscripts and jewelry, said Ms. Fraser-Lu, who lived in Burma in the 1970s. In the 1920s, German souvenir hunters carted away chunks of walls from several monasteries, she said.
Monks told her that during the military dictatorship from 1962 to 2011 they wielded baseball bats to protect the treasures in their monasteries from smugglers in league with the authorities.
Still, many of the stone Buddha images that were too heavy for even the most ardent looters to move remained in the country, so the New York exhibit will be a chance to show the pieces for the first time outside Myanmar. “There is not a single major Bagan-era stone sculpture outside of Burma,” said Donald Stadtner, also a guest curator and the author of books on Burma’s Buddhist heritage.
At the curators’ last stop, the tin-roofed annex of the museum in Prome, a 1,500-year-old bronze Buddha, encrusted with a rough patina from centuries buried in the ground, stood on a green plastic tablecloth under a bare neon strip light. A rice farmer stumbled across it in 2005 while plowing his fields, said U Thein Lwin, the deputy director general of the National Department of Archaeology. “He hit something hard,” Mr. Thein Lwin said. “We are lucky it wasn’t broken.”
Shipping the tough bronze Buddha to New York should not be risky, but the fragile lotus flower at Bagan is another matter, and may need special permission from the government to exit the country, Ms. Chiu said.
Daw Baby, the deputy director of the museum here, said the prized lotus flower should travel to New York.
“All of the collection is in my heart,” she said. “Every day I check the 1,000 pieces in our museum. A temporary loan to New York is not a problem for me. But not permanently.”
No comments:
Post a Comment