Laos' Textile Revival
Asian Art Newspaper, November 2005
Denise Heywood
http://www.asianartnewspaper.com

IN LAOS'S FORMER ROYAL CAPITAL, Luang Prabang, the courtly tradition of gold thread embroidery is a dying art. But it is being saved from extinction by one of its last practitioners, Tiao Nithakhong Somsanith, who now lives in France but returned to Luang Prabang for an art project.

A Lao prince by birth, Tiao Somsanith is dedicated to preserving an art form that flourished in the royal courts and was a fundamental part of the way of life in this remote place. This precious heritage is featured in The Quiet in the Land: Art, Spirituality, and Everyday Life, a series of long-term community-based events in Luang Prabang that started last year and continues until 2006. It is made up of collaborations between more than 40 artists and educators from within Laos and abroad, under the direction of France Morin and a team including, amongst others, Francis Engelmann, a consultant, Vanpheng Keopannha, Deputy Director of Luang Prabang's National Museum, and Bounkhong Khutthao, Deputy Director from the Department of Information and Culture and Deputy Director of UNESCO. Tiao Somsanith co-ordinated with Dinh Q Lê, a Vietnamese artist who has previously worked with communities of weavers in his native Vietnam (see article page 5), and Dr Catherine Choron-Baix, a French anthropologist, to revive this endangered tradition and to explore its potential in a contemporary context.

Gold thread embroidery was once practised at the royal court of Luang Prabang, and the lustrous, shimmering garments it decorated were worn by kings and queens. Tiao Somsanith is a descendent of the last viceroy of Luang Prabang, the revered Prince Phetsarat, who died in 1959, the same year as Tiao Somsanith was born. When the Pathet Lao communists seized power in 1975, the life of the royal court ended abruptly and the remaining members of the royal family, including the last king, Sisavang Vatthana, died in captivity. Tiao Somsanith moved to Orléans in 1985 as a student, and is now one of the last practitioners of an artistic skill that was once the preserve of women of noble birth.

Queens and princesses wore sashes and skirts of woven silk with silver and gold metal thread, especially around the hems, so ornately embroidered that they were heavy with the weight of the gold. Gold thread is made of silk thread wrapped in gold foil or fine gold leaf. Gold thread embroidery involves using the metallic thread to sew an outline around patterns and motifs in a piece of cloth, thus highlighting and deepening the loops and curves of the pattern with glittering gold. Such complex weaving added shimmer and lustre to royal robes that were worn with gold encrusted crowns, sparkling bracelets and ornaments and bejewelled regalia. Ceremonial coats and jackets were richly embroidered with gold, and Lao princes would hold court on a raised platform decorated with mats and cushions that were covered in silk embroidery and couched gold and silver metal wire.

The weaving was part of a long tradition that dated back to the 14th-century Lao kingdom, Lane Xang, the Land of a Million Elephants. For centuries Luang Prabang was the royal capital and religious and artistic centre of Laos where more than 60 gilded Buddhist monasteries were built, giving the town a jewel-like identity. Other sacred art forms that were prolific here included sculpture, dance, music and silk weaving. By the 19th and 20th centuries royal weavers were renowned for their sumptuous textiles.

Traditionally, a royal weaver would start apprenticeship at the court in Luang Prabang at the age of six years old when the fingers were nimble, coating silk threads with wax to make them straighter and threading them into the needle. They would start by tracing edges to frame designs and learn to decorate the silk cushions and pillows that were part of the embellishments surrounding royal ceremonies. In their teens, they would embroider collars and skirts. As they were usually female, the weavers would also fashion their wedding dresses, as well as ceremonial outfits and burial clothes. By the age of 50 or 60 years old, a royal weaver would stop making secular garments and focus on religious accessories for temples, for silk weaving and embroidery in Laos were imbued with spiritual resonance.

Silk weaving in Laos was, according to legend, taught originally by the guardian spirits, through the intermediary of Khun Borom, the god of the sky. Textiles are more than an art form, they are a manifestation of cultural identity, and silk weaving was a fundamental part of the way of life, linked to Buddhist rites and animist practices, and carried out in rhythm with the annual cycle of rice growing. Weavers were more than just artisans. Guided by a religious framework, their creations embodied powers of spiritual protection and their textiles protected the body from elements in a complex spiritual world. Every stage of the weaving process, including loom, pulleys and shuttles, was designed and decorated to combine technical efficiency with spiritual protection.

Tiao Somsanith remembered the lavish costumes that were worn during many festivals and ceremonies that were part of the life of the court as well as of the countryside. These complex festivities included rites and ceremonies that had been handed down through the generations from a legendary past, revealing the multifaceted layers of mythological, political and religious ideas of which Laos was composed. The king of Luang Prabang was revered as a direct descendant of the mythological founders of the old kingdom. Costumes worn by royalty, woven of silk yarn with silver and gold metal thread, reflected these hierarchies and spiritual beliefs, and embroidered patterns and colours symbolised social status within this mytho-historical world.

When the French annexed Laos as a protectorate in 1893, embarking on 50 years of colonial rule, they safeguarded this way of life, keeping the Lao monarchs on the throne. A grand court style was encouraged, fixing Luang Prabang in a historical time and context. A 19th-century black and white photograph of King Oun Khan and his courtiers shows the king on a raised seven-tiered throne, decked out in silken finery, wearing a tall pointed crown, with tiered umbrellas overhead, brocade fans and kneeling attendants. His son King Sisavangvong (1905-1959), was also photographed wearing a lavish brocaded silk shirt, a chong kraben, ceremonial silk trousers, silk stockings and embroidered slippers.

Although it was about to disappear forever, this was the world into which Tiao Somsanith was born. He lived in Vientiane, the last of nine children, and spent the summers in Luang Prabang with his grandmother. It was from her that he learned embroidery as she worked every morning in a special room in her house, and he copied her embroidery styles. Tiao Somsanith graduated from the National School of Medicine in Vientiane before leaving in 1985 for France. He received his Master's degree from the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Orléans, and his PhD in Psychology from the Sorbonne. France became his home and he pursued a career in counselling there until the summer of 2003, when he started to devote himself entirely to his art.

Tiao Somsanith never forgot the country of his childhood and maintained a passionate interest in Lao arts, especially folk arts, some of which he taught himself, such as wood carving and painting, evoking scenes of Laos. But his greatest achievement was perfecting the art of gold thread embroidery. He embroiders without the use of the wooden templates used by beginners, who attached them to silk and reproduced the outlines with gold thread. Among the diverse royal ornamentation imagery he produces are phoenixes taking flight, birds of paradise, butterflies symbolising the ephemeral, and other pictorial elements remembered from the ornately decorated and stencilled ceilings of the Buddhist temples in Luang Prabang. But his richly ornamented jackets and finely embroidered skirts will never be worn by queens or princesses. Nevertheless he pays homage to the mission of the royal family, which was to protect culture, and is following in that tradition. His art is, he says, the fragile thread that ties him to the land of his ancestors.

To promote his artistic ideas, he appeared in a film directed by Dr Choron-Baix for the French National Research Council, Memories of Gold, Memories of Silk, and returned to Luang Prabang in 2001 - which is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site - to offer a prayer fan, embroidered with an image of the Buddha in gold thread, to one of the most important temples in the town, Wat Sene. It dates from 1714 and is the Temple of the Buddhist Patriarch.

The sacred dimension of his art is of profound importance to Tiao Somsanith. He is concerned that the burgeoning tourist market is tempting craftspeople away from creating objects of religious significance. 'Gold thread embroidery is acquiring a market value and losing its meaning,' he said. 'Women wearing these pieces …. only care about the glittering outer appearance of things without knowing their intrinsic value.' Embroidery is more than a technique, he points out. 'Even a garment that is worn only once during an important ceremony requires an apprenticeship that is so long it builds character,' he said referring to the spiritual context of the creative arts. He recalled how his grandmother, before starting her embroidery, would perform her religious devotions, calling upon the spirits and ancestors who trained her to inspire her act of creation.

In an effort to promote the art of gold thread embroidery, Tiao Somsanith has exhibited in France, Germany, England, Italy, Spain, Stockholm, and the Netherlands. He travelled to the United States for the first time in January last year, to Washington DC and Seattle, specifically to teach younger Lao-Americans, bringing cultural awareness to the Diaspora, and to exhibit his embroidery to raise funds for the Laotian communities there. He returned last spring to exhibit in Chicago. As one of the last masters of this vanishing tradition, he is determined to perpetuate the memories of these skills and to pass them on to a new generation of young Laotians within Laos as well.

Working with Dinh Q Lê and Dr Choron-Baix has brought him closer to these aims as Dinh Q Lê's artistic objectives mirror his own, having produced a series The Texture of Memory. In this Lê, who was born in 1968 during the Vietnam War but escaped to Thailand and then the United States, collaborated with a group of women embroiderers in Vietnam. Their work consisted of portraits of the prisoners at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, embroidered in white thread on thick white cotton stretched over frames, like paintings, in keeping with the Asian tradition of white as a colour of mourning. Lê has continued to explore the concept of memory in his work. He created an installation entitled Headless Buddha, which addressed the issue of displacement between two cultures, East and West, a theme close to Tiao Somsanith's own artistic endeavours. .

The collaboration of these two artists with an anthropologist has proved an exciting and challenging one, and under the auspices of The Quiet in the Land: Art, Spirituality, and Everyday Life Tiao Somsanith has been able to explore ideas as well as preserve a magnificent artistic heritage of gold thread embroidery, bringing Laos's past glory into the future.

DENISE HEYWOOD