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On display at O.K. Store, the OK Family (2015) billboard painting places Xxxxxx father, Suwan, at the centre of the Rawanchaikul family. It also Navin's references the communities it has passed through and resettled in.
Home Truths Navin Rawanchaikul’s Chiang Mai retrospective is a must-see celebration of a colourful career, but behind the self-possession lurks a mid-career artist’s nagging self-doubt. by max crosbie-jones avin Rawanchaikul is covered in sweat. We all are. “It’s 42 degrees outside!” bleats someone, as a droplet hurtles down my chin and cascades on to the floorboards of O.K. Store, his father’s fabric shop and the former family home. Standing here, in an airless room in the pell-mell heart of Chiang Mai’s Worawot Market, the heat is unforgiving, but Navin, a white hand towel for patting himself dry hung round his neck, looks oddly energised. More than okay. Happy. In recent months, this Indian-Thai artist and the team at his art-studio company, Navin Production, have been preparing for one of the biggest shows of his career: a super-charged retrospective spanning three venues, one of which is this sweltering ’70s shophouse. Old works have been brought out of storage, crated in, dusted off; new ones in a range of media created. Handwritten letters, a key but easily missed part of his practice, have been penned; video interviews of Chiang Mai’s last remaining rickshaw drivers, one of whom used to drive Navin to and from elementary school, have been shot and edited; and new paintings – vast billboard-sized ones and smaller ones – completed. A motley crew that includes Navin’s family, former collaborators and friends as well as players from the Thai art-world – artists, collectors and media – are here today to see what he’s come up with. And so far, reactions are good. “I’m still absorbing it all,” says Nalin Advani as his daughter stares into a somber monochrome painting of Navin as a child. “In a sense it’s very typical Navin…expansive, but the scale is bigger than anything I’ve seen so far.”
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His parents' bedroom, located just above the O.K. Store. Site-specific new paintings occupy the walls and wardrobes.
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Others I meet during the opening call “A Tale of Two Homes,” as the show is titled, “nostalgic,” “personal,” “sentimental” – and in hushed tones that make it clear they mean that as a compliment. And some say nothing at all, just quietly amble between rooms, taking it all in – the paintings hidden in wardrobes or hung next to piles of family detritus; the heart-shaped arrangement of rose and jasmine flowers on an old bed; the O.K. playground, complete with see-saw, up on the rooftop; the projector beaming old family photos in the hallway. Me: I’m struck by the many poignant references to his wife and daughter. Both appear in paintings and sound installations, but aren’t here in person. They live in Fukuoka, Japan, he explains, as he does much of the year, and can’t be here today. I am also drawn to the dust. Thirty years of it covers the floors, and from it Navin’s team have created ghostly sketches of found or missing keepsakes – a walking stick, and also a hi-fi his sister “gave to the recycling man,” much to his chagrin.
Rarely has the fabric of family life – one family’s life – been so intimately unspooled for all to see. I wonder outside and find Navin’s father sitting beneath a canopy erected in the busy street. Along with guests here for the opening, he is sitting enjoying a tub of O.K. Store ice cream while watching “I’m Not OK,” a knowingly camp music video in which Navin sings a catchy 1960s pop inflected number alongside local band Harmonica Sunrise. As people walk past looking puzzled, wondering if a Bollywood star isn’t in town, a half-smirk flashes on his face as he spots himself making a cameo. He’s old and frail now, and this show – with all its site-specific trimmings – is a surprise 80th birthday present for him, as well as some other things: a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Navin Production, and also, in mid-career artist terms, a line in the sand. “I’m not sure, but I think he enjoyed himself,” says Navin later on, once his dad has left and the evening’s festivities begun.
orn in Chiang Mai in 1971 to parents of Hindu-Punjabi origin, Navin has long been one of the frontrunners of Thailand’s underperforming art scene. It’s not just the fact that he trained at Chiang Mai University under the late Montien Boonma – the influential installation artist. Its also that Navin’s multicultural upbringing as the son of Indian diaspora – and the angst stemming from it – has taken contemporary Thai art to exciting new places. Bubbling under the lurid and ebullient, Indo-Thai Pop culture surface of his work is a genuine tension, a seriousness of theme that speaks to people. “I grew up unhappy,” he once told an interviewer. “I just wanted to be a Thai.” As a youngster he was constantly being reminded that he wasn’t Thai and never would be: of his different skin, of his different heritage, of his just being different. He was fluent in Thai, of course, but that didn’t stop the kids at school from calling him “khaek,” a pejorative word for people of Indian descent.
In the early pages of comic book Who is Navin? (one of the few in his back catalogue that doesn’t spin us a magical realist yarn), his late mother reassures him, saying “Don’t worry little Navin, believe in yourself and don’t forget who you are.” Much of his work is an attempt to bridge that sense of dislocation, a dislocation he says was later heightened by his moving to Japan and having a daughter who also felt she didn’t quite fit in. His big break internationally came in the mid-nineties, when he devised a novel form of presenting art: taxi galleries. In Bangkok, Vienna, London, New York and about half a dozen other cities, these exuberantly painted cabs roamed the city, surprising passengers who hailed them with rotating exhibitions. Later, there came a quixotic quest to find other Navins, a name that has its linguistic roots in Sanskrit, and is therefore fairly common in South and Southeast Asia. This global search powered comic books, billboards and music videos that teemed with wit, self-mythologising
and alter-egos, and climaxed with the founding of Navinland – a borderless state for fellow Navins – at the 2011 Venice Biennale. These and other projects were Navin’s whimsical way of taking art out of the cloistered gallery and bringing the general public into the fold. No art-filled taxi cabs feature in this exhibition, sadly, but Navin’s skill at elevating his own experiences into grand, quasi-mythical narratives does. Among the treats on show is a video work called Navins of Bollywood. Occupying a room on of the second floor of DC Collection – the bucolic venue for satellite exhibition “Tales of Navin” – it is 11 toe-tapping minutes of tabladriven song-and-dance interspersed with guest turns by a cast of fictional Navins. Watching this furiously edited and very funny travelogue-musical we see what Nicholas Bourriad was getting at when he wrote in Navin’s Sala that Navin’s “fictions attenuate reality and allow us to read it differently.” Navin’s draftsmanship, and the skill with which Navin Production has, over the past 20 years, deployed the tropes of Indian visual culture – vivid and intense colours, iconographic saturation, grand panoramas – and appropriated pieces of art history is also in evidence in meticulously hand-painted billboards such as SUPER(M)ART (2004). Making these massive works all the more impressive is the contemporary bite of the themes they broach. Instead of merely aping tradition, they are vessels for Navin’s complex set of contemporary concerns. SUPER(M) ART, for example, squeezes the main players from the provincial Thai art scene into a reimagining of Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana. Its scale, its pomp, its busyness is a form of bitterly ironic commentary – Thailand’s art scene is far from grandiose, a minnow in need of a miracle – and it wryly depicts the cliques and the chicanery. For the show, it has been expanded to bring it screaming loudly into the present day. Recent years have seen Navin
OK Land (2015) surveys the old toys of Navin's youth and sits, in the old family playroom, above a selection of them.
creating fewer of what his longtime collaborator Steven Pettifor calls “elaborate egocentric narratives that blur fact and fantasy.” Instead he’s been focusing on more earnest community projects in destinations such as Dubai, Philadelphia and remote Japan. For these projects, Navin meets locals, spends time finding out the social history and cultural dynamics that make each community what it is today. Often he gravitates towards the elderly – those with a generational vantage point, but whom society has largely forgotten. Discovering communities in this manner appears to be yet another way of him effacing his own lifelong sense of alienation and dislocation. Many of the resulting paintings now hang on the walls of studiOK, his new studio set back from Chiang Mai’s lethargic Mae Ping River. Interestingly, most are rendered, like the paintings back in the shophouse, in a downcast monochrome. Something has changed. The allusions to globalisation, immigration and postcolonialism are still there, but gone is the retina-popping colour palette pulled straight out of a Technicolor movie. The tone is solemn not tongue-in-cheek. The exuberance and joie de vivre have given way to a brow-furrowed solemnity. ’m interested to see what he does next,” says a guest at the Saturday night opening party for studiOK. “This feels like the end of something.” Indeed, it’s hard to shake the impression that Navin is entering a new phase, one that’s less concerned with the theatrical obfuscation of fact and fiction – one that’s more heartfelt and honestly autobiographical. After a Buddhist ceremony to bless the new studio building, a Boonmaesque pyre – a rectilinear sculpture of thin wood – is torched beside the river at dusk. After much prodding, it crumbles in a heap, ash drifting up and over the river in a poetic display that leaves onlookers silent.
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Painters from the Navin Production team work on the extension of SUPER(M)ART (2014-15).
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Tales of Navin (2014-15) series.
Four sepulchral new paintings depict the funeral of Navin’s former selves. In the first, they unite in an “egomaniacal requiem.” And in the last, there is only a red spider lily – Japan’s flower of death – glowering radiantly under an ominously moonlit sky.
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Later that night, Navin joins the band for a rendition of “I’m Not OK.” It takes no small amount of self-possession for an artist to stage his own retrospective, and even more to get up on stage to sing while clad in a loud khao par mar suit, but the lyrics tell a different story – reveal a nagging self-doubt and disquiet. The crowd whoops and Navin jigs, but the words are cut through with the sort of guilt that only families and ageing parents can inspire: “What my heart wants is not easy to find, because my dad needs an heir, a successor to his store to sell his fabrics forevermore. My dad’s OK, but I’m not OK, because I want to go my own way.” And again and again the specter of death rears its head. At DC Collection, Boonma’s Charcoal Pagoda with Pots sits yards from Navin’s installation of clear glass bottles, each containing a photograph of an elderly Chiang Mai resident. Most of them have likely passed away since the
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work was created twenty years ago, giving the title, There is No Voice, and the form the bottles resemble, a Buddhist pagoda, a heavy pathos. And at StudiOK, four sepulchral new paintings entitled Tales of Navin depict the funeral of Navin’s former selves. In one, they unite in an “egomaniacal requiem.” In the next, the same neo-classical setting is filled with their effects – the Mao-inspired busts, the comic books, the “Who is Navin?” signs. And in the last, there is only a floating red spider lily – Japan’s flower of death – glowering radiantly under an ominously moonlit sky. The message could hardly be clearer: Navin, as we have known him, is no longer.
Navin and the Chiang Mai-based Harmonica Sunrise band perform as the OK Band.
“A Tale of Two Homes” runs through July 31st at O.K. Store and studioOK. “Tales of Navin” is on view (by appointment only) at DC Collection 057 until October 31st. See www.navinproduction.com for venue addresses.
There is No Voice (1993) and Montien Boonma's Charcoal Pagoda with Pots (1994). Framed on either side of these works are two of Navin's letters, one to Montien (2010) and one to his own daughter (2011).
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Scent from Above Behind each company, every global brand, is a story. But few are as riveting as the one behind Florence’s Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. The Magazine discovers the trials – and the heavenly fragrances – behind this storied Tuscan perfumery, founded by medieval monks and now being led, by business tycoon Eugenio Alphandery, into its fifth century. by max crosbie-jones
The cool and high-ceilinged Sala di Vendita, or Sales Room, was renovated in 1848 to accomodate the rising number of patrons.
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oday, scents are splashed and sprayed with wanton disregard – mere playthings for the most neglected of our five senses. But in Europe during the Middle Ages, they were something different: precious substances at the heart of an arcane practice known as alchemy, ones with rarified properties that seemed to straddle the line between earthly and ethereal, the real and the magical, the tangible and intangible. People would lock themselves away in aeries and cellars, trying to unlock their secrets. Their aim: to discover the quinta essentia – the spark of divinity – at the heart of all matter, and so move closer towards creating the elixir of life, with all its tantalising promises of wisdom and perpetual youth. Not that everyone was embarked on this proto-scientific olfactory odyssey. For the pragmatic monks of Santa Maria delle Vigne it was the curative – not transcendental – properties of fragrances that mattered. Shortly after their arrival in Florence in 1221, the friars of this charitable Dominican order began cultivating herbs in the nearby gardens – medicinal ones that would allow them to make essences, potions, lotions and balms for their convent’s Ceiling frescoes in the sales room. small infirmary. “The city was booming, and attracting lots of homeless,” explains Gianluca Foà, the commercial director of the global perfumery that has grown out of these humble ecclesiastical beginnings. “To take care of them, the monks started to make preparations that were a mixture between alchemy and the first experimentations with chemistry. The idea was to create something to heal people afflicted with terrible diseases.” The worst of these was the bubonic plague, or Black Death. It swept across Europe in 1348, killing millions. Florence was no different, with about two thirds of the population of 100,000 lost. It was a grim time to be mortal – a time when mothers closed the door on boil-covered children and walked away, a time when, as Giovanni Boccaccio wrote at the beginning of his famous Decameron, “enormous trenches were dug in the cemeteries of the churches, into which the new arrivals were put by the hundreds, stowed layer upon layer like merchandise in ships.”
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Unsurprising, the monks turned to natural matter and the distillates extracted from it in hope of a miracle. The result, in 1381, was (drum roll): rosewater. “The rose itself has antiseptic properties that defend the petals from insects,” explains Gianluca, “so they thought that harnessing these antiseptic properties could save people from the plague. Of course, it didn’t work.” Today, over 600 years later, bottled rosewater still sits on the shelves of Santa Maria Novella’s old pharmacy room – albeit without any claims to being anything other than a fragrant tonic with refreshing and toning properties. Joining it are many other ancient formulas, each with its own story that brings the company a bit further out of the Dark Ages and into the present day. Take Eau de la Reine, which is now known as Acqua Santa Maria Novella Profumo and one of the company’s flagship fragrances. This was commissioned in 1533 by Catherine de Medici, daughter of the most powerful family in Florence during the Renaissance, to mark her marriage to the future King of France, Henry II. It was a perfume that changed the destiny of the company, says Gianluca. Her patronage – and this fresh, citrusy, bergamotbased fragrance’s compositional ingenuity – helped spread the renown of its products beyond Italy. “For the first time in history, the monks had the intuition to use alcohol as the ingredient to transmit fragrance on the skin,” he says, while walking us around the company’s headquarters. “At the time, essences were blended with almond oil, olive oil and vinegars, and so the French, whose customs were a bit higher than those of Italy, appreciated a perfume that left their skin fragrant and dry but not oily.” These and other stories come alive on visiting this historic building. While many of the outlandish claims of Santa Maria Novella’s traditional elixirs have dissipated with the onset of modern science – a concoction once given to hysterical women, particularly jittery brides, is now merely a “good antioxidant” – the medieval setting where they have been sold for centuries is
While many of the more outlandish claims of Santa Maria Novella’s traditional elixirs have dissipated with the onset of modern science, the medieval setting where they have been sold for centuries is largely unchanged.
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I was fascinated by the smells that hit you when you enter the sales room, but I wasn’t really interested in classical things such as perfumes. I was into sports and motorbikes. largely unchanged. From the worn stone façade exterior of Via Del Scalla 16, a hallway leads into the grand sales room, its high ceilings lined with stunning frescoes. Moving into the old pharmacy where ancient preparations, as well as liquors, are sold, a cloister that backs onto nearby Santa Maria Novella church is visible, just, through the rear door. Meanwhile, in the Green Room, where a member of staff stands behind a counter of pot pourri, the walls are lined with crests and portraits of former directors, including one of Fra’Angiolo Marchissi, the monk who opened the pharmacy to the public in 1612 and so set the company on its modern, secular trajectory.
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et to make an appearance on those walls – but destined to one day – is Eugenio Alphandery. A suave and jovial Florentine with a rich, gravelly voice and infectious laugh, he is the 66-year-old businessman now transforming the company, perpetuating its traditions while also dragging it, by the scruff of its ruffled shirt, into the 21st century. In some ways, his relationship with the company seems an odd match. As a child, his grandmother would bring him into the store unwillingly. “I was fascinated by Xxxxx the smells that hit you when you enter the sales room, but I wasn’t really interested in classical things,” he says, sitting in an armchair up in the office, that very same room visible through a glass porthole below us. “I was into sports and motorbikes.” His first dalliance with the business side came in 1989, when he was contacted by his neighbour, a daughter of the family which has run the company since the late 19th century. “I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and she wanted my help repairing the machinery they use to make herbal pastilles.” What he discovered shocked him: these old machines could churn out a miserable 50 pastilles a minute. He investigated further, took a look at the contraptions used to press soap and distill essences, and discovered that no maintenance had been done for over 60 years. One of the city’s most commercially viable treasures was going to ruin, fast becoming a museum piece.
It transpired that the machines had been neglected because plans were afoot to sell Santa Maria Novella. Eugenio interjected, on learning the price offered, saying: “Are you sure that it is the right price? In my opinion, Santa Maria Novella’s old jars alone are worth more than the price of the company, so think about it.” They thought about it, had the jars valued, and the rest is recent history. From consultant, Eugenio has gone on to become Santa Maria Novella’s president and controlling co-owner – the visionary moderniser of a once failing business. Though the offwhite packaging and florid fonts found on it reek of provincial Tuscan nostalgia, Santa Maria Novella is now a truly global and hi-tech concern. Some of Eugenio’s achievements include opening a second store in Bologna, then a third in Paris, then lots more (today there are more than 65, plus 300 counters, worldwide). He has introduced hi-tech touch screens that make customer transactions smoother, and spent large sums having ancient frescoes by the early Renaissance painter Mariotto di Nardo – which line the walls of the Via del Scalla premises’ old church sacristy – restored. But his most profound change has been to the production line. He has transformed the company from technological laggard into a diminutive but nimble skincare industry champ that is the envy of its heavyweight competitors. A few years back, he shifted production from the headquarters to a Liberty-style facility on Via Reginaldo Giuliani, about three kilometres away. “It’s like visiting five different artisan workshops,” he says. “Our production and research labs are comparable to those of the bigger cosmetic companies. I’m proud to say that I’m investing my profit in the company rather than using it for personal needs.” Though soap bars are still aged for at least 30 days before being chiseled into shape and then packaged by hand, many of the monk’s artisanal techniques have been streamlined using machinery Eugenio created. “Our laboratories are built like surgical rooms,” adds Gianluca. “The air is exchanged six times per hour, because
Old machinery – only recently retired – in the room devoted to sweet-smelling pot pourri and ornamental displays.
A decommissioned church sacristy, Santa Maria Novella's library is lined with frescoes by early Renaissance painter Mariotto di Nardo.
Vases, family crests and oil paintings of the laymen and monks involved in the company occupy the walls of the Sala Verde, or Green Room.
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having other perfumes or influences in the air can affect our analysis.” The product line is expanding too. Slowly but surely, Santa Maria Novella’s traditional elixirs – the dietary supplements, sweet-smelling tonics and liquors to “revive weary and lazy spirts” – are being eclipsed by its growing range of contemporary skin-care products, oils, food stuffs and perfumes. Spa treatments are hot, says Gianluca, as are SPF creams, facial products and skin peels that women customers can use “before they take the children to school or go to work.” He assures me that many of these items are as technologically sophisticated as any you might find advertised in some slick TV advertisement by some multinational cosmetics brand. If Santa Maria Novella was, until recently, standing still, it now resembles one of those Renaissance cherubs up on the frescoed ceilings. Set aloft by the wings of hard-won history, it is soaring confidently into an unknown future. t starts strong, Melograno. Almost too strong. On spraying this best-selling Santa Maria Novella cologne about your person for the first time, you’re left wondering if it’s not a tad too sweet, too overbearing. You leave the house wondering if you’ve Melograno eau de cologne. overdone it. But then something happens. Quickly the domineering top note of pomegranate fades into something more subdued, more tantalising. The reason for this depth of character is simple, believe Eugenio and Gianluca, and the company’s almost cultish following. Unlike many of its competitors, Santa Maria Novella is a sworn disciple of natural, as opposed to synthetic, fragrances. While some essences are sourced internationally (patchouli from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, etc.), most of its raw ingredients are grown in its own botanical garden in the centre of Florence. After being hand-picked, these plants, roots, petals and saps are carted off to the production facility to create the atoms of perfumery, the very building blocks with which complex and evocative scents are created – natural essences. Crafting perfumes out of these was until recently, Gianluca explains, educated guesswork. A fine art, yes, but a subjective one.
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Because natural essences are irreducibly complex, contain traces of other elements that cannot be captured by formulas, they are unpredictable. However, now that the company has what Gianluca calls an “electronic nose,” consistency is no longer a pipe dream when it comes to its 40-plus colognes. Using gas chromatography, this expensive machine analyses the different ingredients of a perfume batch to see if, as he puts it, “they respect and match our requirements of intensity and quantity.” In other words, it isn’t the right perfume until the machine says so. In all other respects, though, these perfumes are as traditional as they get. “We are the only ones to put our perfumes in a barrel like white wines,” says Gianluca. “Other companies crystalise and add antioxidants to the recipes so that whenever or wherever you try the perfume, it always smells the same. With our perfume it’s not like that; our perfumes have a life and age in the bottle just like a wine. This is not a defect. It’s something that industrial companies cannot replicate because it’s very, very expensive.” The end result: Santa Maria Novella’s fragrances seem to mix with your body chemistry, evolve on the skin and over time. Unlike synthetic perfumes, what you smell in the first instance is not always what you get. In Essence & Alchemy, Mandy Aftel writes eloquently and expansively about all of this: the power of natural essences. For her, this power stems as much from their complex histories as their ineluctable earthiness and bioactive vitality. “Holding a vial of essential oil to the light and admiring its jewel-like colour,” she writes, “inhaling its complicated fragrance, one imagines the people and places who have known and used it, the history and rituals in which it has played a part.” Similarly, holding a bottle of Santa Maria Novella perfume to the light and inhaling its own complicated fragrance inspires the very same sentiment. They stoke the imagination as well as our sense of smell. They beckon us into a world of ancient histories and arcane secrets. They make alchemists of all of us.
Unlike synthetic perfumes, what you smell in the first instance is not always what you get.
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Givenchy at the Chinese Gallery.
Breaking Glass “China: Through the Looking Glass” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art takes a look East through the lens of clothes created in the West. by mikelle street
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collective gasp was heard on the Internet when international pop star Rihanna walked onto the red-carpeted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May for the institution’s annual Met Gala. Settled around her shoulders and trailing behind her – fluffed, pushed and straightened by three assistants – was a gold fur-trimmed cape embroidered with scrolls upon scrolls of flora. The look was nothing if not intense and will undoubtedly go down in red-carpet history. When it was revealed that the Beijing-based couturier Guo Pei had designed it, the jawdropping dress became, for many, the most appropriate look of the night, particularly because the museum was launching its new exhibit, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Except it wasn’t. Not exactly. Pei is a 26-year veteran of the fashion industry. Over this period, she has installed herself as what many believe to be the first modern
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Chinese couturier. The team she helms at Rose Studio, her studio/office in Beijing, is comprised of 450 pairs of hands that design, embroider, sew and drape about 3,000 to 4,000 pieces a year. The level of aweinspiring creativity and expertise of her designs have landed the 47-yearold with monikers such as the Charles James, Alexander McQueen or Coco Chanel of China. Pei’s work has caught the attention of Chinese celebrities like Fan Bingbing, Zhang Ziyi, Li Bingbing, Miss Universe China Ji Dan Xu, and even Lady Gaga, the latter of whom, though interested, has yet to wear the designer’s creations, as they prove too cumbersome for stage performance. The gold fur cape Rihanna wore, constructed over a 20-month period, weighs 55 pounds on its own and was paired on the runway with what can only be described as oversized, ornate block high-heels that seemed derivative of the Manchu style.
It’s a China based on second-hand observation and conclusions. It’s China through someone else’s lens; China through a looking glass.
Robes and red-carpet regalia.
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Dancing, singing and moving around a stage in something similar could prove difficult for Lady Gaga, if not impossible. But Guo Pei is Chinese. She was born and raised there – no matter the fact that she currently sources her silk from Italy, seemingly at odds with the thought that her native land is the ideal for this fabric. She made and continues to make her bread and butter there, in China, first by designing for different clothing brands and now by managing a chain of shops in Beijing that mostly cater to Chinese clients. Because of this, Rihanna’s decision to wear a piece from her 2010 collection wasn’t as on-theme as many said it was. “[‘China: Through The Looking Glass’] is not about China per se but about the collective fantasy of China,” explains Andrew Bolton, the curator at the Met’s Costume Institute who was partially responsible for the exhibit. And indeed, the theme of the Met Gala and the exhibition it opened was not focused on China. What the museum has instead dedicated 30,000 square feet to – equivalent to three times the size of last year’s Charles James exhibit – can be most succinctly described as Orientalism. It’s a virtual China filled with exaggeration, half-truths and 168 warped perceptions. It’s a China based on second-hand observation and conclusions. It’s China through someone else’s lens; China through a looking glass. Pei is from the real, actual China. She is an insider, looking inward and at her surroundings. She is not a Westerner looking East. The name of the exhibition refers to Lewis Carroll’s 1871 book Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In this vein, the set-up at the Met also hosts mirrors, beautiful sights and even a mad hatter in the form of famed British milliner Stephen Jones, who customised all of the headpieces for the exhibition. Attendees find themselves passing through scrolls and scrolls of calligraphy, a courtyard built by the craftsmen and engineers of the Soochow Garden Administration of the People’s Republic of China, and even a red-hued boudoir. The three levels of space spanning over 10 Jean Paul Gaultier at the Wuxia Gallery.
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Modernised takes on the qipao.
galleries is definitely a wonderland of sorts. When the exhibition was first announced in September of last year, fashion trade journal Women’s Wear Daily announced that it would be named “Chinese Whispers: Tales of the East in Asia, Film and Fashion.” The name was a nod to the game, known to Westerners as Telephone, wherein a message is whispered from person to person and typically becomes distorted in the process. Though it was likely abandoned because of its offensive presupposition, the accuracy of the original working title is clear. Take for example the room of calligraphy. Calling in experts like the museum’s assistant curator of Chinese painting and calligraphy, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, the room, fully wallpapered with scrolls of calligraphy, features two dresses, one a 1956 design by Coco Chanel herself, the other a 1951 Dior frock displaying Christian Dior’s New Look silhouette. Both sport the artistic brushstrokes characteristic of Chinese calligraphy. Beautiful though it may be, the exhibition literature only glosses ever so slightly over the pleated Chanel frock. Instead, attention turns to the waspy, waisted Dior creation for an examination of the calligraphy that the designer chose to print on the fabric. While innocuously beautiful to Westerners, in this warped game of Telephone, the message is misconstrued. What was aesthetically beautiful to Dior’s eye actually translates in Chinese as a story about a painful stomach ache. Written by Zhang Xu in the 18th century, the letter itself wasn’t preserved; the only record of it might just be Dior’s design. It is through this example that the exhibit makes it clear that it’s not only Chinese fashion that has inspired Western designers but the entire culture. Something as simple as a letter
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complaining about a common ailment – which may have been composed as a fairly mindless deed – has been elevated to high-fashion territory. he exhibit itself is expansive. With no definitive beginning and ending points, the best place to start is at the Anna Wintour Costume Institute. Descending into this proverbial room of mirrors, one is immediately immersed in a set-up designed by Nathan Crowley, the production designer. The largest single installation in the room is a hall of monitors which loop various film clips, a central component in the exhibit. “Films frequently were the first lens through which Western designers encountered Chinese imagery,” says Bolton. Because of that, the exhibition’s artistic director Wong Kar Wai edited clips to be screened in every room. These films provide an audio-visual pace, causing some rooms, like the calligraphy gallery, to come off as serene while lending an air of dynamism to the Costume Institute’s Tisch Gallery, which has been set in an “Imperial” theme. In this gallery, the dresses of Western designers like Yves Saint Laurent by Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren and Maison Martin Margiela are posed against Chinese inspirations. These inspirations aren’t ephemeral or intangible. It is clear that everything, from the use of yellow silk-satin to the iconography embroidered on an 18th-century semiformal robe worn by the Qianlong
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Emperor, heavily influenced a 2004 Tom Ford design. Likewise, the flat waves of a robe for the Jiaqing Emperor sees a modern-day reinterpretation as a Margiela jacket. Prints from Chinese inspirations at times seem as if they were copied outright, even if the fabric is draped in new ways. These Manchurian robes hold quite a bit of significance (some are on loan from the Palace Museum of Beijing). As the clothing of emperors, they would have been some of the best designs of their time. In fact, the centrepiece of the entire room is the robe worn by Henry Pu Yi during his coronation as the last Manchu emperor of China in 1908 at the tender age of two. Apart from these robes that hang on the walls, China doesn’t seem to get enough play in these galleries, and this is a feeling that lingers throughout the exhibition. Yes, the name may be “China: Through the Looking Glass” and the opening statement may speak of a dialogue between East and West, but that feeling isn’t adequately sustained throughout the galleries. It increasingly feels like a game of Telephone, with China giving the first iteration and Westerners largely interpreting and distorting the message. A room adjacent to the Tisch Gallery does reveal a little back-andforth dialogue. Themed around the qipao, the one-piece, high-necked Porcelain-inspired couture at the Frances Young Tang Gallery.
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Magnificent Gold by Guo Pei.
The other Guo Pei dress is a lotus flower. Named Magnificent Gold, the creation, which took 50,000 hours to complete, is a gold brocade gown featuring a full, oversized skirt. It is a sight to behold.
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dress that characterises traditional Chinese wear, the room definitely presents one of the most sophisticated collections in the exhibit. Clips from Chinese films set the scene: The World of Suzie Wong (1960), Lust, Caution (2007), and Kar Wai’s own The Hand from Eros (2004) and In the Mood for Love (2000). Here, Western takes on the qipao by the likes of Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and John Galliano at Christian Dior are displayed. The versatility of the qipao – it can be rendered in a variety of fabrics and textures such as gold-silk damask and rose embroidery – has allowed for many iterations from Western designers. Opposite these are a number of traditional qipao from the mainland. Revealing how the garment has been modernised over the years, this collection depicts the traditional dress in looser cuts and in more painterly prints, and presents softer takes on those worn by Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love, scenes of which are projected on the wall. The tactic sadly isn’t as effective or potent as one would have hoped. Elsewhere, designs from Chinese designers are few and far between. There is a Lawrence Xu dress in the Tisch gallery: a creation with one golden shoulder and a short train of blue-and-white sea waves. It was notably worn by Fan Bingbing for a 2010 Cannes Film Festival appearance that shot her into the international fashion scene. And then there are a pair of Guo Pei designs. One, posed at the end of the porcelain chinoiserie gallery, was first worn by Miss Universe China Ji Dan Xu in 2012. It is a dress with origami-like folds, a sweeping train and a Dior evening dress at the Anna May Wong gallery.
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Traditional qipao at the Douglas Dillon Gallery.
beautiful porcelain-inspired white-and-blue print. The other Pei dress is a lotus flower in a room of Buddhas. Named Magnificent Gold, the creation, which took 50,000 hours to complete, is a gold brocade gown featuring a full, oversized skirt. It is a sight to behold. Lawrence Xu and Guo Pei are the only two Chinese designers in an exhibit of over 40 names that include Dior, Saint Laurent, Cristobal Balenciaga, Margiela, Rodarte, Giambattista Valli, Valentino Garavini and even one of the newest designers to debut, menswear designer Craig Green. “In this exhibition we did not shy away from these [inauthentic depictions of China] because they are historical fact in their own realities,” says Kar Wai. And while that’s true, one would think that a celebration of Asia would not merely use China as a metonym for China, but would also display more of the treasures of that place rather than just objects inspired by it. It’s quite an ethnocentric way to celebrate China – through the view of one’s own lens – but then, China is not all that’s being celebrated. On another level, this show is an intellectual discourse on self-awareness and cultural adaptation, one marking the centennial of a department that houses the largest collection of Chinese art in the Western world. Still, it adds up to something awe-inspiring. With one gallery resembling a court, a tableau of six Peking Opera-inspired John Galliano for Dior designs, and another gallery featuring poles of light to create an ethereal forest of bamboo sticks (inspired by wuxia, the Chinese martial art), “China: Through the Looking Glass” is quite the beautiful adventure, if a tad narrow-minded in its pursuit of spectacle over dialogue. “China: Through the Looking Glass” runs through August 16th at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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A PASSIONATE PAGEANT Each August, Sri Lanka’s old royal capital puts on one of Asia’s greatest shows, the Kandy Esala Perahera, a 10-day pageant of intense feeling and brilliant colour. by keith mundy
An ornate interior at Kandy's Temple of the Tooth, the spiritual and physical epicentre of the Esala Perahera festival.
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andy is a sleepy place most of the year, the old royal capital lying peacefully in its hollow amid the western foothills of Sri Lanka’s central highlands. Set around the calm and coolness of an ornamental lake, this attractive city has a special place in the hearts of Sri Lankans as the repository of Sinhalese royal tradition and the focus of the nation’s majority religion, Buddhism. Kandy bears its burden of heritage with quiet dignity, welcoming a constant stream of pilgrims to the nation’s holiest shrine, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic – Sri Dalada Maligawa in Sinhalese, usually trimmed to the “Temple of the Tooth” in English. A fortress-like construction washed in yellow ochre, with crenelated walls and a green water moat, Sri Lanka’s premier Buddhist temple houses the country’s most sacred relic, an eye tooth of the Buddha. Few persons ever see the relic itself, for it resides within a reliquary inside a series of golden jewel-encrusted caskets. At certain times of day, pilgrims may enter the Inner Temple, reach the Hall of Beatific Vision, and file past the doorway of the reliquary chamber to catch a brief glimpse of the tooth’s outer golden encasement. That much is the relic held in sanctity.
For ten nights, starting each dusk when the old cannon booms at the Temple of the Tooth, a great elephant-adorned parade takes to the streets. Kandy's Temple Dalada Maligawa, or Temple of the Tooth, seen from edge of the adjacent lake.
The devout crowds can barely control their excitement as they file towards their goal, then get their brief awe-struck view of the glittering reliquary shaped like a towering Dagaba, or Sri Lankan stupa, and decked with jewelled necklaces. But at one time in the year, in the lunar month of Esala which straddles July and August, Kandy’s serenity turns to spectacular celebration, as intense drumbeats and blaring horns herald a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic festival. As the moon begins to wax, the old royal city gives itself up to the splendour and excitement of a grand spectacle called the Esala Perahera. For ten nights, starting each dusk when the old cannon booms at the Temple of the Elephants get their fill before the Perahera Festival starts.
Tooth, a great elephant-adorned parade takes to the streets, growing longer, grander and more intense each night, until the pageantry and passion reach a magnificent climax. The whips crack like rifle shots, the flaming torches gild the moonlight, the drums beat a tattoo down the crowd-lined streets, the oboes wail and the conches bray into the night air, the dancers prance and shimmy, their silver breastplates quivering and glinting, the nobles and dignitaries strut by, the pious onlookers cry “sadhu!,” the gorgeously caparisoned elephants stride past with gigantic pomp, until there comes the glittering majesty of the Maligawa Tusker carrying the golden casket of the Sacred Tooth, riding high over all else in its gazebo-shaped howdah. Few spectacles, if any, in the world surpass this annual feast of sight and sound, motion and commotion, custom and ritual, colour and aroma. Sri Lanka is a land of peraheras, or festive processions. Among a people steeped in tradition, a perahera of some sort, celebrating some event, festival or anniversary, will take place somewhere in the island every day. But the Kandy Esala Perahera is something special, unparalleled in its splendour and magnitude, a dazzling event which not only draws people from all over the island, but from all over the world.
hy such an extravaganza? The signs point in a variety of directions, and the exact origins are lost in the mists of time, but some central threads are very clear. Like so many traditional festivals worldwide, the perahera is aimed at ensuring the continuity and security of the society, and it does so through religious devotion. In this, it mixes Hindu, Buddhist and animist beliefs in a rich brew of symbols and rituals. Centrally, it is an homage to the Buddhist and Hindu guardian spirits of the old kingdom, the protectors of the island – an annually renewed insurance policy for the people and the nation. And never was filling out an insurance policy so exciting. The festival has undoubtedly changed down the centuries, and it has moved location as the royal capital has shifted from place to place. Its beginnings are placed in the reign of King Kithsiri Megawanna, 303-331 AD, in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura, when the monarch received from India the Sacred Tooth, a relic of the Buddha, and placed it in a casket within a shrine. This relic became the symbol of monarchy and was venerated to bring blessings on the king and his people. A king-elect had to pay homage to this shrine before being crowned. The Mahavamsa, an ancient chronicle, records that King Kithsiri decreed that the sacred
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An elephant decked in fairy lights and other festive finery leads the Esala Perahera procession.
Sri Lanka is a land of peraheras, or festive processions. But the Kandy Esala Perahera is something special, unparalleled in its splendour and magnitude, a dazzling event which not only draws people from all over the island, but from all over the world.
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and inauspicious. Instead, the priceless symbol was replaced by another stupa-shaped golden casket, containing some lesser relics. A king lacking control of the Perahera has devolved to the authorities of the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, chief amongst whom is the Custodian of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the Diyawadana Nilame. These lay officials have a major organisational task in arranging their own pre-eminent procession called the Maligawa Perahera, and in coordinating the Esala Perahera as a whole. In olden times, the participants had a duty to take part, in fealty to the king and in adherence to their faith; today many must be hired and paid for their services, including many elephant owners whose Kandyan dancers in traditional dress participate in the Kandy Day Perahera.
tooth be taken around his capital city of Anuradhapura once a year in a great festival. This decree was faithfully adhered to by succeeding kings, as the 5th-century Chinese traveller Fa-hien confirmed. Once Anuradhapura was replaced as the royal capital by Polonnaruwa in the 10th century, then by other cities and eventually by Kandy, presumably the procession continued to be held annually, and an English eye-witness confirms that an annual Perahera was certainly in place in Kandy in the 1660s, performed by devotees of the four Hindu guardian deities, or devalas. Though Buddhism has been the dominant religion in Sri Lanka since the third century BC, the Esala Perahera had become largely Hindu in character in the Kandy period leading up to 1775, owing to close royal connections to India. In that year, seeking reform for the island's degenerating Buddhism,
King Kithsiri Rajasingha invited Siamese monks to Kandy to advise him, and these holy men from Thailand were pivotal in resetting the character of the Perahera. Witnessing that the chief religious celebration in the Buddhist royal capital was by the Hindu devalas, the Thai monks protested. The king responded by ordering that a solemn annual procession of the Sacred Tooth relic should become Kandy’s chief rite, and that a procession of the four devalas should follow in one grand homage. Today, despite the intervention of 150 years of British colonialism and the deposition of the monarchy in 1815, the Perahera maintains this tradition – and expands upon it – with one surprising exception. For several decades the Sacred Tooth relic was carried in its casket in the procession, but this was ended because the public exposure was thought unsafe
Granite relief elephant head decoration at the entrance to the Temple of the Tooth.
annual maintenance costs are very high. But the Custodian’s first ritual task is not onerous: he fixes the times and dates of all the rites in consultation with the temple astrologer and according to the lunar calendar. The Perahera is held in the lunar month straddling July and August, or Esala. Each night it departs precisely at the auspicious minute decided, announced by the resounding boom of the temple cannon. or the first five nights, the procession is known as the Kumbal Perahera, and is performed by the devotees of the four Hindubased devalas, setting forth from their shrines close to the Temple of the Tooth. First comes the Natha Devala, the tutelary deity of Kandy, also revered as the Buddha-to-be;
KANDY TRAVEL FILE Getting there Sri Lankan Airlines flies twice daily from Bangkok to Colombo, details at www.srilankan.com. From Colombo airport, it’s just 100km (2 hours) by road to Kandy.
Staying there Queen’s Hotel Kandy’s grand old lady, centrally located with the best viewing position for the Perahera. 4 Dalada Veediya; tel. +94 11 471 4825; www.queenshotel.lk The Kandy House Luxury in a heritage mansion set in lush grounds on the outskirts of town. Gunnepana; tel. +94 81 492 1394; www.thekandyhouse.com The Elephant Stables A superior boutique hotel created from a colonial manor house in the countryside. 46 Nittawela Road; tel. +94 11 288 8450; www.elephantstables.com Manor House Kandy A luxurious hotel inhabiting a grand colonial-era house way out in the country. (aka Aluth Walauwa), Nugawela; tel. +94 81 563 8062; www.manorhousekandy.com
The Festival
The Kandy Esala Perahera takes place this year from August 20th to 30th. The official web page is www.sridaladamaligawa.lk/KandyEsela-Perahara. Booking prime seats for viewing the Perahera can be done at these sites: http://kandyperaherabookings.com www.kandyperaheraseats.com www.queens-hotel-kandy-sri-lanka en.ww.lk/kandy-perahera.html
Elephants aglow like candles during the Kandy Esala Perahera procession.
Like so many traditional festivals worldwide, the perahera is aimed at the continuity and security of the society.
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then follows the devala of Vishnu, the deity entrusted with the care of Buddhism; third is the devala of Kataragama, the Sinhalese war deity who defends the island; and lastly the devala of Pattini, the female deity of health and chastity. Each devala has its retinue of dancers, drummers, flute players, flag bearers and costumed officials, as well as fleets of caparisoned elephants, the most important of which carries the devala’s sacred objects. It is only a shadow of what is to come. On the sixth night, the Randoli Perahera begins, named after the randoli, the golden palanquins in which the king’s consorts formerly travelled, adding lustre to the pageant. The four golden palanquins now represent
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the four devalas. From this night onwards, the circuits increase in length and the trappings in grandeur, until on the tenth night the Kandy Esala Perahera reaches its magnificent climax, including sixty or seventy elephants and thousands of human participants, while the streets are thronged with excited spectators, for whom this is the event of the year, rapt in attention at the unfolding spectacle, up to three hours in length. With great fanfare, the procession is now led by the Maligawa Perahera, which proceeds from the Temple of the Tooth. The way is cleared by whip crackers and fire whirlers, then on the first elephant comes the Peramunarala, the official who formerly carried the royal mandate to hold the perahera. Then drummers, musicians and dancers herald the modern monarch of the Perahera: the magnificent tusked temple elephant known as the Maligawa Tusker, adorned with sequinned satin cloth, decorated with little electric lights, his tusks sheathed in shining brass. Above all, he carries on his back an illuminated howdah with the golden-stupa-shaped casket containing sacred relics that is the safe substitute for the sacred tooth reliquary. Escorted by two equally impressive and beautifully adorned tuskers mounted by costumed A shrine at the Temple of the Tooth.
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riders, the Maligawa bull elephant carefully and deliberately treads the carpet of white cloth (pavada) laid on the road before him as a mark of respect. From time to time the riders on the escort elephants spray sweetsmelling jasmine flowers over the golden casket in a gesture of honour and obeisance. High above all, a coloured canopy is held aloft on long poles over the howdah. Now there follow more mesmeric drummers, upping the tempo, swaying and beating, and the human stars of the show, Kandy’s stunning ecstatic dancers. Dressed in white cotton sarongs, scarlet head-dresses and cummerbunds, burnished steel armplates and beaded breastpieces revealing sweating brown torsos, their arms flail, their feet prance, they shimmy forwards, they shimmy backwards, they slow into a calm, they burst forth in a frenzy. Theirs is the most intense of rites, all the more astounding for the contrast with the steady pace and the sober demeanour of the great beasts who precede them and the high dignitaries who follow. At the end of the retinue, representing temporal authority in the glittering brocade coat of his office, walks the Diyawadana Nilame. In measured step behind come the other high temple officials, in sumptuous costume too. Then the devalas make their processions, now expanded to great length, packed with colour and drama, gathered again around the solemn pace of elephants and high officials. Martial drums and festive drums and temple drums, each with its special tone and special technique, echo in the surrounding hills. Ves dancers, uddekki dancers, pantheru dancers and naiyandi dancers perform with a fervent devotion whose spirit descends to us from the distant past. Elephants drift by, “the clouds who walk the earth.” The spectators keep a tally: “Sixtytwo, I saw!” says one. “Sixty-seven, I counted,” disputes another, while a third insists on 71.
And everything is lit by the golden flames of burning copra, held in braziers atop long poles, and all the night air is sharply aromatized with burnt coconut oil. The copra torchbearers work hard and long with their heavy red-hot loads, often wrapping their red headscarves round their mouths and noses against the acrid coconut husk smoke, leaving just weary eyes peering out. The Perahera is concluded on the eleventh day with the watercutting ceremony, a ritualistic purification of the Kataragama deity’s sword. After dawn a small procession leaves for the Mahaweli River at Getambe, in Kandy’s outskirts. Here the water of the river is parted with a circular sweep of the sacred sword, and four clay pots – one from each devala – are filled with water from within the circle thus drawn. These water pots are preserved throughout the ensuing year. Should any of them go dry before the next Esala festival, it is considered a sign of impending misfortune. The Kandy Esala Perahera is Sri Lanka’s greatest festival. How much a Sri Lankan believes in the efficacy of the Perahera’s rituals varies from person to person, by degree and type of religious conviction, in a nation whose majority is Buddhist but in which there are substantial Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities, not to mention plain non-believers. But one thing is a constant: from out of its patchwork of historical, religious and cultural origins, the Kandy Esala Perahera has come to be Sri Lanka’s grand reaffirmation and celebration of national identity and pride. Anyone who witnesses it cannot fail to be mightily impressed. If there is a more heartfelt, more dramatic, more colourful, more rhythmic and more intense pageant in all Asia, then where is it?
photo: ©corbis / profile
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Jumbo Festivals Domesticated for at least 4,000 years, the Asian elephant has long been held in honour throughout the Indian sub-continent, as several grand festivals show.
Mysore Dasara, Karnataka, India
Never have potentates been so fabulous as the hereditary rulers of India, the Maharajas. Most of them had fiefs in northern India, but there was one splendid princely state in the south, Mysore, and it still has an annual display of regal magnificence in its Dasara (or Dussehra) Hindu festival each October. Brilliantly lit palaces, decorated arches, festooned streets, colourful costumes and cultural shows animate the city. On the last day, the Maharaja leads a legendary procession: caparisoned elephants, decorated horses, stately coaches, liveried retainers, troops in ceremonial uniforms, folk dancers and the gaudy and flower-bedecked images of deities make their way through the streets to the sound of exuberant music and amid billowing clouds of incense. A massive elephant carries the idol of the goddess Chamundeshwari, the presiding deity of the Wodeyar Maharajas, in a glittering golden howdah weighing 750 kg. This climactic pageant is popularly known as Jumbo Savari, a name the British colonialists made from the original Jumbi Savari, meaning “going to the Banni tree,” because the end-point of the procession is the Banni tree located on the city outskirts at Bannimantap. The Jumbo Savari is scheduled for October 23rd, 2015.
Chitwan Elephant Festival, Sauraha, Nepal
Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India
Every year in the Malayalam month of Medam (mid-April to midMay), the southwestern Indian state of Kerala offers an elephant extravaganza. Though Kerala has many festivals featuring elephants, the grandiose scale of the Thrissur Pooram make this by far the biggest event, centred on Vadakkunnathan Temple on a hill in the centre of the city of Thrissur. Almost all Hindu temples in Kerala own one or more elephants, which carry the presiding temple deity during annual festivities and processions called Poorams. Thrissur does it way bigger than any other place, with ten other temples joining in a unified Pooram, sending their processions to pay obeisance to Shiva, the presiding deity of the Vadakkunnathan Temple. Introduced as a spectacle around 200 years ago, Thrissur Pooram features great processions of caparisoned elephants that make their way through the city up to Vadakkunnathan Temple, adorned with gold-plated forehead ornaments, jingling bells and glittering necklaces. Mounted on the elephants, mahouts and priests hold silk parasols, swish yak-tail whisks and swing peacock-feather fans. Frenetic percussionists and other musicians whip up a whirl of sound, colourful floats carry god and goddess images, and huge crowds revel in the spectacle.
Situated in the lush tropical plains of southern Nepal, the town of Sauraha attracts safari-goers with its proximity to rich wildlife and dense jungles in Nepal’s most important wildlife sanctuary, Chitwan National Park. Elephant-trekking is popular with tourists and so in Sauraha more than 50 elephants are kept by hoteliers and cooperatives to provide rides. The great beasts have become a well-loved part of the town, and so at the end of each year, Sauraha celebrates its pachyderm with the Chitwan Elephant Festival. Enjoyed by thousands of spectators, the main event is an elephant race in which 20 animals compete over a 150-metre course. The calves play a football match and partake in various other sports and activities, and there is even an elephant beauty contest. Nepalese animal-rights campaigners complain that these events cause stress to the animals and have asked for more humane treatment. The organisers’ response last year was to add a picnic of fresh fruits and vegetables, which went down very well with the crowds as well as the elephants. Chitwan Elephant Festival is usually held during December 26th-30th.
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