The Age of Angkor

The National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh houses an unparalleled collection of art from the Khmer civilisation that was responsible for building the world-famous Angkor Wat. Having barely survived the tragic years of Khmer Rouge rule between 1975 and 1979, the National Museum now faces the daunting task of preserving and conserving its collections under the most difficult conditions possible. Moreover, the Museum's collections have recently been inaccessible to all but the most intrepid travellers. Fortunately, help is now at hand thanks to a highly innovative project recently initiated by the Australian National Gallery.

In August, the Australian National Gallery will become the first gallery in the world to host an exhibition of Khmer art from the National Museum of Cambodia. For two months visitors to the Gallery will be able to view thirty-five magnificent Khmer sculptures dating from the sixth century to the thirteenth century AD. The exhibition is the result of negotiations carried out in Phnom Penh and Canberra over the last eighteen months with the assistance of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Selected by the Gallery's Curator of Asian Art, Michael Brand, The Age of Angkor exhibition represents the first stage in an historic program of collaboration between the National Museum of Cambodia and the Australian National Gallery. As part of this program, the Australian National Gallery will co-ordinate a range of conservation, training and development programs that will help re-establish the National Museum in its role as the protector of Cambodia's moveable cultural heritage.

The quality of the sculptures which the Cambodian authorities have so generously agreed to lend to Australia is extraordinary: none of them have ever been shown outside Cambodia before. As the Director of the Australian National Gallery, Betty Churcher, says, 'The quality and impact of the works selected for the exhibition can be matched only by the great sculptures of the ancient Middle East, Egypt and Greece. I believe that the combination of this extraordinary aesthetic power with the momentous diplomatic developments now taking place in Cambodia will make this one of the most talked about exhibitions to travel to Australia since the Entombed Warriors came from China in 1983'.

The classical art of Cambodia ranks as one of the world's greatest cultural achievements. It has the rare ability to grip and astound of all backgrounds. On the formal level, it draws heavily from Indian traditions, much in the same way that Europe has frequently looked back to the art of Greece for inspiration. As such, it is largely Hindu and Buddhist in subject matter and most often intended for installation in the great temples commissioned by the Khmer god-kings.

From its Indian-inspired origins, Khmer art developed in a highly individual manner and the results achieved by the anonymous sculptors of Cambodia are truly staggering.

Included in the exhibition are a very early image of the Hindu god Krishna lifting the mythical Mount Govardhana, an architectural pediment from the temple at Banteay Srei, a torso from a monumentl bronze reclining image of the Hindu god Vishnu that would have measured almost seven metres in length, and a stunningly serene portrait head from a figure of the great king Jayavarman VII, who rebuilt Angkor at the end of the twelfth century. Oher objects selected for the exhibition are lesser known works now housed in the Museum’s storage vault.

The exhibition grew out of efforts by Michael Brand and Andrew Durham, then Head of Conservation, to develop links between the Australian National Gallery and her sister institutions in Asia. In December 1990, Andrew Durham visited Phnom Penh as part of an extensive survey trip through Southeast Asia cosponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. While in Phnom Penh he held discussions with the National Museum of Cambodia about the possibility of bringing an exhibition from its collection to Australia, in return for which the Australian National Gallery would help the Museum with its urgent conservation and development needs. Andrew Durham's report on his visit is included in this issue of the Australian National Gallery News. The initial Cambodian response was positive, but the Gallery had to check whether such an official exchange could be established with a national institution in a country with which Australia did not, at the time, maintain diplomatic relations. Fortunately, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Senator Gareth Evans, was very enthusiastic about the project and wrote to the Gallery's Director that this exhibition 'would be seen positively by all elements of the Supreme National Council of Cambodia and would be a further signal to the world community of Australia's commitment to the region and of our sensitivity to Asian cultures'.

On the basis of this positive chain of events, Michael Brand visited Phnom Penh in August 1991 to continue discussions. During this visit he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Museum’s Director, Pich Keo, outlining the principles for a program of collaboration between the institutions, and also made a preliminary selection of works for the exhibition.

After the signing of the historic Cambodian Peace Agreement in Paris on 3 October 1991, the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, visited Australia at the invitation of Senator Evans. During his brief stay in Canberra, he toured the Gallery's conservation facilities and at an official lunch hosted by the Deputy Chairman of Council, Les Hollings, announced his full support for the program of collaboration between the Australian National Gallery and the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Shortly afterwards, Michael Brand and Andrew Durham were invited to accompany Senator Evans on his official visit to Cambodia in December. While in Phnom Penh, Senator Evans witnessed the signing of an exhibition agreement in a ceremony in the beautiful courtyard of the National Museum.

Actual work on the exhibition, adopted by the Gallery's Foundation as its first major project, started this April when Michael Brand led a team of five experts to Phnom Penh. The team included Catherine Millikan (Conservator), Simon Hartas (from T.E.D. Packing in Sydney which is designing the shipping crates), John Gollings (a leading Australian architectural photographer from Melbourne) and Nondas Katsalidis (a Melbourne-based architect who acted as Mr Gollings' assistant). The latter two had most generously volunteered their time and experience for the project, as well as making their own way to Bangkok. John Gollings has written a brief account for this issue of the Australian National Gallery News describing the adventures encountered by the team during this visit. As a further manifestation of the interest this project is arousing, Kodak donated film for John Gollings to use when photographing the objects for the catalogue and the Angkor monuments for the exhibition installation. The Royal Australian Air Force will transport prefabricated packing crates from Australia to Butterworth Air Base in Malaysia, then to Phnom Penh. They will then transport the works of art from Cambodia to Bangkok. The Australian commercial airline, QANTAS, will bring the works from Bangkok to Australia. The reverse process will occur when the works are returned. The exhibition catalogue written by Michael Brand and Chuch Phoeurn (Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology, University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh) will be the first work on this subject to be published in Khmer as well as English. As such, it marks a critical step in Cambodia’s struggle to reclaim its own culture.

Information about the National Museum's own struggle to re-establish itself as Cambodia's leading cultural institution will be featured in the exhibition. During Pich Keo's visit to Canberra in March this year, an appeal was launched in association with the Canberra Times to raise further funds to help this wonderful museum.

Sarah Stitt
Curator, Department of Asian Art

In December 1990 1 visited six Southeast Asian countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia — on behalf of the Australian National Gallery and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. My aims were to strengthen some of the links between arts professionals in those countries and Australia, to establish new ones, and to identify areas for mutual help and cooperation in arts conservation. I was looking to set up projects based on practical needs as well as programs for the exchange of expertise and information and for the development of training.

My visit began in Singapore, where I met the Director and Conservator of the newly renovated National Museum. I found that we have the same problems of maintaining constant environmental conditions of temperature and relative humidity, of dealing with a busy exhibition schedule, of storing the collections adequately and of developing the expertise of our conservation staff. The Museum is a vibrant centre that reflects the dynamism of Singapore itself, and there are plans to open new exhibition spaces and to expand activities and staffing.

My second port of call was Kuching in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The famous Sarawak Museum, built in 1888, was designed by the Rajah's French valet on the lines of a town hall in his native Normandy and houses collections of ethnographic and decorative arts, flora and fauna and also the State Archives. The conservators, some of whom trained under the UNESCO program at Lucknow in India, cope with a broad variety of problems, and hope to foster exchanges between their conservation department and our own.

Next stop was Bandar Seri Begawan and the Brunei Museum, where one of the major attractions is the collection of Islamic art recently acquired by His Royal Highness the Sultan. The conservation department is well established here and has specialist conservators for textiles, objects, works of art on paper, books and archaeology. As a result of my visit, the textile conservator has since spent six months working with us at the Australian National Gallery, supported by UNESCO and a grant from the United Nations Development Programme.

I was given a guided tour of several other museums and of the Brunei Arts and Handicraft Training Centre of the Ministry of Culture, where I was extremely impressed by the levels of skill in weaving, woodcarving and silversmithing. Traditional skills are not only surviving but indeed thriving.

A highlight of my journey was to be the train ride through the Malaysian jungle and then on through Thailand and Bangkok. Professional links between the staff of the Thai National Museum's conservation department and their Australian and other international colleagues are well established. It was very interesting for me to see their facilities and to observe the treatments they are currently undertaking — on textiles, books, palm-leaf manuscripts, oil paintings and images of the Buddha. The department has a conservation staff of about twenty including six chemists, and is seeking to expand its analytical facilities with the addition of a scanning electron microscope.

In Vientiane, the capital of Laos, I was greeted by an Australian Embassy official who outlined my itinerary and handed me a copy of A Guide to the Wats of Vientiane, an indispensable publication financed by the Australian Ambassador. The proceeds from its sales are used towards the restoration of the temples in Vientiane and to promote the cultural and religious heritage of the Lao people.

There are no conservation facilities in Laos. The expertise in painting, wood-carving and gilding necessary for the continued upkeep of the temples is, I was told, disappearing. Financial problems, apparent in every institution, are acute here. However, the Director-General of the Department of Museums and Archaeology is fully aware of the problems of conserving the country's artistic heritage and is taking steps to establish an effective conservation program.

We travelled north to Luang Prabang, formerly the royal capital of Laos, and to the King's Palace there with its collection of archaeological and religious artefacts. The diversity and richness of the wats in Luang Prabang alone warrants the attention of conservators, and of particular note are the mural paintings, which are sadly in need of repair. A cave-shrine containing many thousands of Buddhas is also a priority for conservation attention, and we hope that we shall be able to help in its preservation.

My next and final destination was Phnom Penh. The National Museum of Cambodia is home to some of the most impressive works of art from one of the most significant cultures the world has seen. Most of them are sculptures and are fairly robust, but their condition is cause for concern.

A collection of palm-leaf manuscripts has been carefully microfiched and stored in archival conditions, but the collection of glass negatives recording the twentieth century French survey of monuments in the Mekong area requires treatment for mould growth. Fortunately, the Museum's treasures survived the horrors of the PoI Pot regime, but the National Library was gutted and used as a piggery. The Royal Palace survived almost intact and the furnishings and objets d'art appear to be well looked after. In the courtyard surrounding the Silver Pagoda a series of mural paintings depicting scenes from the Ramayana was reminiscent of the murals I had seen in Laos. It was reassuring to see a team of Polish restorers carrying out excellent work to ensure their survival. My initial contact with the National Museum during this trip has resulted in the exhibition The Age of Angkor travelling to the Australian National Gallery, to promote and support the redevelopment of the Museum.

Leaving Cambodia, I returned to Australia to reflect on the superb images I had seen and to bring to fruition some of the projects I had identified. The conservation needs of the area vary as much as rich and hi-tech Singapore differs from tragic Cambodia. The problems in each country are as diverse as their cultures and political systems, but in all of them opportunities for mutually beneficial co-operation, help and exchange were clear to see.

Andrew Durham
Head of Conservation

I relish and specialise in difficult jobs done under impossible conditions. In a lifetime of working in New Guinea, Indonesia, India and China I've struck most of the personal, logistic and photographic problems which could ruin a job. Working in Cambodia for the Australian National Gallery provided some of the most exhilarating and also most frustrating moments of my life. In Phnom Penh I was trying to achieve studio-quality shots of museum objects and, in Siem Reap, to show the context and scale of the Angkor empire from which these objects came.

Phnom Penh was obviously one of the great and charming French colonial cities of Indo-China: elegant, well planned and well serviced. However, following the war, power, water and sewerage are intermittent. The National Museum, for instance, has some wiring but not much electricity. We could ‘hot wire’ the main power board but with not enough amps to run ordinary photographic lamps, so flash had to be used. A generator was borrowed and for the next three days all photography was accompanied by the extraordinary roar of a Honda throughout the museum. Fuel for the generator had to be bought in milk bottles. Even wooden extension poles for my stands had to be borrowed from a museum guard's mosquito net — Cambodia is desperately short of materials. I had assumed the art school next door would have some white paper for reflectors and small backgrounds. But the art school has had no paper for five years. Two hours later we found some paper in one of the markets in town — two tattered sheets of thin white cardboard.

A day in the museum basement — an apocalyptic vision of rare treasures sitting in rows on the flood-prone floor — brought its own problems. There was no light and very little room to set up a studio and because of the stifling heat we had to drink five litres of water a day to stop dehydrating and finally needed a fan to stop perspiration dripping onto equipment and notebooks.

The ceiling in the galleries has been destabilised under the weight of bat droppings. The museum is plagued with bats in the roof, all with bat fleas. The ceiling needs replacing, but there is no budget yet for bat removal. The smell and the discomfort caused by the bats made the long hours of work extremely tiring.

Siem Reap is the nearest town to the Angkor ruins, and flying there was another adventure. However, the pleasure of finally seeing the Angkor ruins was beyond my expectations. They are bigger, more romantic and more impressive than I had dreamt — definitely one of the greatest achievements of mankind — and seemed even more so because of the relative difficulty of getting there.

Tourism is government controlled and prescribed. To wander at will required me to hire a car, a driver and an interpreter and to obtain special photographic permits from Conservation d'Angkor. This was achieved with help from the United Nations forces staying in the same hotel — a 1928 French edifice called Grand Hôtel d'Angkor, now quite the opposite of grand.

My driver strapped on his old police pistol and bullet belt, the government assigned an armed soldier and we set off in a four-wheel drive for the temple of Bantei Srei, to the north of Angkor, in territory still contested by the Khmer Rouge. It seemed harmless enough, but the temple was mined and bullets were flying. It turned out that hungry soldiers were shooting birds.

The heat nearly defeated me. In one temple I recorded 48°C and the tripod legs were almost too hot to pick up. It was only knowing how far I had come and how difficult it was just to get to some of these places that pushed me on.

At night, around the hotel bar, talking to bizarre, expatriate adventurers and contemplating the extraordinary ruins I had seen that day, I thought about how a simple job of photographing sculpture for the Australian National Gallery had become one of the memorable experiences of my life.

John Gollings
Architectural photographer, Melbourne