Laos Essential Artistry

Favorite Photo Series, Laos Summer 2010: Khuts and Naks and That Luang

We always love taking photos when we go to Laos and although we've taken hundreds of photos of That Luang, if we're in the neighborhood we'll take some more. This day we were nearby to visit our friend Steve, owner of Lao Mountain Coffee, whose roasting operation is within a quarter mile of That Luang, plus we were scouting for any khuts guarding the entrances to the wats surrounding That Luang. Above you will see a khut (garuda in Thailand and not as common in Laos) bolstering the corner facade of Wat That Luang with a nak guarding the stairs to the sim. Below are two photos we took of That Luang the same afternoon. One shows That Luang framed by the front gate with two naks perched above protecting That Luang, and the one below that was taken within the cloisters and we love the blue sky and clouds framing the that.

 

A Laos Essential Artistry first – Jewelry Pins featuring Nagas, Hongs and more!

It’s a long story, but a year ago when we were in Vientiane we visited a gallery opening featuring painters, including our own Khamla Phanyasit, and we saw a young woman wearing a naga pin on her blouse.  The saying goes that “Weaving cloth is weaving nagas” and many of our textiles feature naga motifs as seen in the photo below of a section of one our Birds and Nagas Textiles woven in Muang Vaen.

We had never seen any jewelry that we liked featuring nagas until this evening when we saw the young woman wearing the pin and we asked her where she got it and she told us, and luckily she had purchased it right here in Vientiane. Bai and I went the next day and saw that there were actually other styles of naga pins too, just as beautiful. We loved them, bought all they had, which was limited at the time, but got contact information and over the last year, through email and by phone made arrangements to pick up a selection of pins when we were in Laos this summer. It sounds like it should have been straightforward, but it wasn’t and we came to the realization that the Thai can be very Lao-like (these jewelry pins are made in Thailand).

We love these pins and although they are relatively inexpensive, the quality is excellent and there is no where else you’re going to find jewelry pins featuring Lao and Thai mythological figures like these. We are so excited to find a source of jewelry pins like these that complement our textiles so perfectly. It will probably take us a couple of more weeks to get them on our Yahoo! Store website, and we'll write a post when they’re finally available for sale so you'll need to keep checking back, or better yet subscribe to our blog!

We’re including photos of several styles of the naga pins and one style of the hong pin. Patricia Cheesman writes about the hong that “In Buddhism, hong is the local name for the mythical hamsa bird from the Himmaphan forest, representing the flight of Buddhist doctrine to all realms; symbolizing nirvana and the end of suffering. The hong can be seen on the ends of temple roofs either with a bird head or a naga head gracefully pointing to the sky." Below you can see a photo we took this summer at Wat Chan in Vientiane of hongs at the end of the temple roof and one of our Hong jewelry pins.

 

 

Nagas are ubiquitous in Laos and one of our favorite designs in the textiles we feature at Laos Essential Artistry. Nagas are dragon or serpent-like beings with the word Naga coming from the Buddhist language Pali and in Lao it is called Nak. Nagas are often seen as benevolent beings that protect and save humans from illnesses, hunger and bad spirits, and Buddhists revere the Naga as he saved Buddha from the floods. Below is a photo of a muchalinda naga (a seven-headed naga) protecting Buddha from the back with two nagas framing the pool taken at the same wat as the hong photo above.

Below are examples of our naga jewelry pins that will be for sale on our website (All our pins will be $12 each which we think is a great deal). We've include a photo of each pin with a dime to show the size of the pins.

We will also be offering kinnari, kinarra, siho/lassasee, nyak/yaksha and elephant jewelry pins

 
 

 
 

 

 

 

Cosmic Creatures: Lao Textiles from Sam Neua, Sam Tai and Muang Vaen

We actually got the idea for the title of this post from an exhibition curated by Patricia Cheesman at the East-West Center Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii titled Cosmic Creatures: Textiles from Northeast Lao Communities this last summer. We substituted Sam Neua, Sam Tai and Muang Vaen for Northeast Lao Communities, because these are the towns most associated with Northeastern Laos and the towns we are very familiar with and will be visiting on our June 2010 Laos tour.

If you're a regular follower of our blog then you probably are familiar with Patricia because we recently wrote a post recommending two books for our tour participants to read to gain a better understanding of the history, complexity and artistry of Lao textiles and one of them was Patricia Cheesman’s Lao-Tai Textiles: The Textiles of Xam Nuea and Muang Phuan. In the exhibition mentioned above Patricia writes in the handout that, “This exhibition gives us a glimpse into the heavens of the peoples of northeast Laos where serpents are powerful allies and can become human; birds can turn into elephants, serpents or boats, through an art-form created by women.”

We’ve isolated the diamond shape piece above from a tapestry-style textile woven in Sam Neua because we too are fascinated with these magical (cosmic) motifs. But what do they mean? Luckily, we've had the opportunity to guide Elli Findley, a professor at Trinity College through northern Laos the last three years as she has been researching the use of Tai Daeng (Red Tai) textiles in rituals such as weddings and funerals, and we asked her if she would provide insight into the possible meaning of the motifs used in this diamond shape piece.

She wrote us back saying, “This brightly colored diamond shape is called a "lantern" and is often found on such Lao-Tai textiles as shoulder cloths (phaa biang) and door curtains (phaa kang). Here it may come from a funeral panel. The central design is a saang hong (or siho) that represents a mythical being that is half elephant (see the trunk) and half bird (see the legs). In the center, the siho appears in a mirror-reversed design, and again on each side in two smaller versions.

The siho is pregnant with double-headed serpent or ngueak (naga) in its belly, and on its back is a candle house with a figure inside -- representing a boat taking someone to the other world. The figure is either a recently deceased member of the community or the shaman accompanying him as guide into the after life. Notice the five-fingered hands of the figure and the naga heads on either side of him. Rainbow patterns occur in the candles on top of the houseboat, in the “S” designs representing baby nagas, and in the hooks of the sihos’ hair. There is one story that says that such a design can occur on coffin covers of fathers who die before their children are grown and that the double headed naga in the siho’s belly represents the youths who must mature before the mourning process helped by this textile can be completed."

Elli writes that the siho is  "pregnant with double-headed serpent or ngueak (naga) in its belly." Patricia Cheesman in the handout mentioned above writes about the naga (nak/ngeuak) that,  “The serpent is the oldest symbol known to have been a totem of the ancestors of the Lao-Tai peoples and was shared by the Chinese in the Yangtze River basin over 6000 years ago. Whereas the Chinese told of the male serpent hunder god controlling rain, storm, earthquake, and flood, the Lao talked of their mother ngueak, a serpent goddess that had a human face and could turn into a human at will. She had the same powers over water, a crucial resource for growing rice and the source of life force and well-being of the people. The serpents guarded the treasures of the earth, living in caverns full of gems and crystal water and often ventured into the realm of humans, seducing and procreating with them. They are loved as ancestors of the Lao-Tai peoples in myths and legends. In the textiles these serpents are shown with colorful crests, bodies that curve into ‘w’, ‘v’ or ‘s’ shapes and appear to be spiraling in a criss-cross game or passing from one realm to another in procession. The crested serpent is the active, aroused form of the serpent mother.

In Buddhist iconography, there are serpents called nagas. The most famous naga protected the Buddha from floods at the Enlightenment. The naak, which is the Lao pronunciation of naga, is represented on temple steps and roofs as the link between the realm of the gods and humans, the profound and the mundane. They can also become human, protect and bring rain. The correlations between the Buddhist naak and the shamanic serpent mother ngueak are as entwined as their bodies on the textiles. The cosmic serpent is still the most popular motif on Lao textiles today and represents female energy, the power of nature, and the earth.”

Join us in June to visit Laos, "Land of the Naga!"

 

Recommended Reading List for Laos Tour (June 2010) Participants - 1st Book

I occasionally come across reading lists about Laos, but it’s pretty apparent they’re put together generically, culled from looking at books available on Amazon, etc. What I'm doing now is putting together a list of recommended books I’ve read that I think really have value in providing important insights about Laos. The list when it is finished will be added to our tour information located  here.

The first book I would recommend is Naga Cities of the Mekong: A Guide to the temples, legends and history of Laos, written by Martin Stuart Fox with photographs by Steve Northup. The book is published by Media Masters in Singapore, so isn’t on the Amazon “shelves,” though it is readily available from other resellers. It's probably about half the price if you bought it in Laos or Thailand, but even at $35 I think it's worth it. Martin Stuart-Fox has written many books about Laos, probably the most popular is The History of Laos, so he knows what he is talking about. And his passion for Laos is clearly evident in the Naga Cities of the Mekong. The book is quite interesting and is a good read and amazingly the photographs are quite good and closely pertain to the text on the page they’re displayed. I learned an incredible amount  from reading this book.

On our tours we've been focusing on the two Naga cities of Vientiane and Luang Prabang. The third, Champasaak is located down south near the Cambodia border and if time and money were no object, I would love to have tour participants visit Champasaak too, especially to visit Laos’s second World Heritage site, Wat Phu and the Khone Pha Pheng waterfalls on the Mekong River which stymied the French from their quest in the late 1800’s of gaining a backdoor into China. And of course I wouldn’t mind taking everyone up to the Boloven Plateau where the finest Lao coffee is grown!

As is written in the introduction, “This book tells the story of these three cities [Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Champasaak], their periods of greatness and decline, and the legends of their naga protectors. It tells of kings and peoples, and of the temples and palaces they built, may of which still remain and are described, each in its historical context.”

Of course here at Laos Essential Artistry we have a passion for the textile arts and nagas are not only one of the most popular motifs woven into Laos textiles, but they are embedded in the psyche of most Lao, including of course Lao weavers. The naga is such an important motif in Lao textiles that Viengkham Nanthavongdouangsy, one of the two sisters who are owners of Phaeng Mai Gallery, wrote a little book called Weaving Cloth, Weaving Nagas: Lao Woven Textile Motifs where she wrote that "The Naga is the most outstanding and dominant motif in Lao woven textiles, artistically created with imagination and respect. It has been so inseparably bound to the livelihood of the Lao people that whenever weavers speak of their work the term "Naga" is spontaneously mentioned first, as in the phrase 'Weaving Cloth - Weaving Nagas."

In the photo below I've outlined a double-headed naga woven into a silk textile by master weavers at Muang Vaen. Each textile tells a rich story in the motifs woven into the textile and here you can see how the nagas are joined at the tail in a diamond shape. Both nagas and the diamond shape are often considered protective and powerful motifs in the Lao cosmology and woven together like this one can imagine their significance. And since both nagas are carrying spirit/ancestor figures, their protective nature is clearly amplified.

But back to Naga Cities of the Mekong. The key word here in looking at the book is context. The book is rich in context and the outstanding photographs add more depth and meaning for the reader. Highly recommended!