TAASA Review Issues

The TAASA Review is always pleased to publish original research and our opening article on Cambodian textiles by Gill Green is a prime example. Gill is reporting on the results of her research identifying the ethnicity of the wearers of a group of silk textiles found in Cambodia commonly referred to as kiet, tie dyed textiles worn as head covers and waist wraps by Muslim women. Her investigation suggests strongly that the producers of kiet were Muslim Chvea women living in Cambodia with ties to Malaysia rather than Cham people with ties to Vietnam as previously thought.

Textile enthusiasts will also enjoy Valerie Kirk’s article, a follow-up to her recent talk at the NSW Textile Study Group. Valerie’s article is basically concerned with the current challenges facing traditional Lao textile production and it explores the opportunities which are currently being created through innovative design and better marketing.

Elly Kent’s article On Tradition: Contemporary art from Indonesia is also a follow up from a recent TAASA event where members were treated to a guided walk through this exhibition. Elly discusses her curatorial challenges in exploring the role of traditional art forms in contemporary Indonesian art and covers works exhibited at both the Delmar Gallery and at 16albermarle Project Space.

Carole Cains, too, explores the way in which art related to traditional life can engage with the contemporary world without loss of identity and traditional ways. Her article covers the first Taiwanese International Austronesian Art Triennial RamiS: Tracing Origins which she was lucky enough to visit earlier this year. Twenty-five indigenous artists were drawn from across Austronesia, an archipelagic region encompassing communities of over 400 million people reaching from Madagascar in the west, Okinawa in the north, New Zealand in the south and Easter Island in the east. Concerned with exploring common roots and connections, the exhibition’s intent was also to point to shared futures and the prospect of a regional identity independent of Euro-American histories.

Assembly is another recent exhibition, this time in Canberra’s China in the World Gallery at the Australian National University, discussed by its curator Olivier Krischer. The exhibition brought together eight Hong Kong-born artists who left Hong Kong between the late 1960s to the present. Though their shared origin was the starting point for selecting these artists, the exhibition aimed to eschew glib assumptions regarding diaspora and identity, recognising the tension between individual and collective experience.

Josh Stenberg’s article on the work of the Chinese Indonesian painter Lee Man Fong may, for many readers, be an introduction to this painter whose initial success was subsequently obscured by the anti-Chinese policies of the Suharto era from the 1960’s. Artists such as Lee Man Fong were elided from accounts and exhibits of Indonesian art history. Josh Stenberg argues that Lee Man Fong’s work, with its ‘heady blend of oil brushwork, Chinese composition and Southeast Asian themes’ deserves the renewed attention it is currently receiving.

On quite a different note is Mark Erdmann’s summary of lectures given in Melbourne in May by two distinguished scholars of Japanese art from Harvard University. Their lectures—The Ise Shrines and the Metabolism of Japanese Architecture given by Lippit at the University of Melbourne and Genji and the Power of the Panorama by McCormick at the NGV—offered, as Mark Erdmann puts it, complex interpretations of two very different pillars of Japanese history, art and architecture. As well as other engagements, these scholars gave additional lectures in Sydney on different topics.

Two further articles complete this issue. Jim Masselos discusses his rather unusual and charming collection of Indian matchbox labels, serendipitously acquired from a second hand bookshop in Perth. Jim points out that, though distributed in vast numbers, such labels have survived haphazardly and are only rarely collected despite the rich insights they provide into social mores and popular culture generally: insights he amply shares with us in this article. Ann Proctor provides a book review of a most unusual publication: a carefully researched and beautifully illustrated book that traces the history of the use of gunpowder and associated weapons in Vietnam.

And finally, we publish our tribute to Judith Rutherford, recognising her contribution to TAASA and to the serious study and promotion of Chinese textiles as a scholar, collector, dealer and donor.

On p27 is a brief report on the TAASA AGM while the list of current TAASA Committee members can be found on this page. A big thank you to outgoing members who have contributed so much to TAASA’s work and welcome to new members.