Title

The meaning of Lao culture in my work

Author

Vongpoothorn, Savanhdary

Details

Sixth Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007.

Publication date

2007

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

The meaning of Lao culture in my work
by Savanhdary Vongpoothorn

From the start, Lao cultural references have always been there in my work, interwoven with Australian and other cultural influences. These have been references which people have often read as “traditional”. This includes my use of motifs and symbols from Lao textiles; and the use of perforation as a reference to the physical practice of weaving. It also refers to the use of words, texts and concepts from Theravada Buddhism. This includes my recent use of khaathaa, incantations or spells, which are references to a Lao spiritual tradition, but also are a comment on recent global events. My choice of a khaathaa which protects against “murderous weapons” was probably more than a little influenced by my horror at the carnage taking place in Iraq. For me these Lao cultural references have never been about a standing still sense of tradition or an objectified sense of “culture”. Rather, they come from my experience of living and breathing in Lao cultural, family and religious worlds while growing up in Laos and Australia.

Today I want to talk about a new phase in my work, marked by a new kind of engagement with Lao history, Lao culture, and very recent issues in the Laos of right now. This is an engagement which begins in the work “Floating Words” 2005-06, completed for the Biennale of Sydney 2006, and I will mainly talk about this work today. Through this work I will discuss the past and contemporary relationship Laos has with it’s neighbour Vietnam.

*
When my husband Ashley came back from a research trip to Vietnam in 2005, he brought back with him some Braille magazines, thinking that I might like them. I more than liked them, I loved them. It was the best thing he had ever brought back for me. Feeling the little bumps with my fingertips, I began to think how much we take sight for granted, and that seeing is not just through vision. Part of Ashley’s field trip there was to work with the Danang Blind Association. I had the magazines sitting in the studio for ages, not knowing what to do with them, until I decided to tear off the pages and pin them onto the wall in a grid. At this point I didn’t have any more and was not sure how I was going to get more. Luckily Ann and Andrew Proctor were going to Vietnam and they offered to bring some back for me. They brought six magazines and a Vietnamese translation for sighted people. I found I was going through them very quickly, and luckily Ashley had to go back to Vietnam, and came back with ten more magazines.

At first I was excited by the aesthetics of the Braille. Its tactile quality resonated strongly with my perforated works on paper and canvas. But when the conceptual possibility emerged I felt I couldn’t just use any Braille, it was important the Braille was Vietnamese. The places it came from were particularly important, and especially the way it was obtained. The magazines came from three different places. Ashley got them from Saigon and Danang, where he faced a lot of difficulty in getting the scarce Braille publications. He felt he couldn’t ask straight out for the Braille magazines, to take them and not give anything back, and he entered into an interesting negotiation that resulted in a mini aid project to provide computers for the blind. The fact that the Braille came from Danang is particularly interesting because Danang is on the central coast of Vietnam. It is now a key migration point from Vietnam to Laos. From that region it is the easiest access to Savannakhet in southern Laos, where my father is from. By contrast to the trouble Ashley had, Ann Proctor had no difficulty at all in getting the magazines in Hanoi. In fact, Ann said they were delighted to hear her version of what I was planning to do with them. Hanoi is where the Braille magazines get printed and from where they are distributed throughout the country. The farther away from Hanoi you get, the scarcer they are. I like to think that the Braille magazines were migrating and floating, the way language migrates and floats from place to place, from one translation to another and across cultures.

It was not enough to just ponder the abstract nature of Braille. I was curious to know exactly what it was they were reading. I later asked Ashley to translate the contents of the magazine for me. The magazine opens up with two quotes: “To emulate is to love your country, if you love your country you must emulate, and those who emulate are those who love their country the most” by Ho Chi Minh; and “The results achieved in past years by the blind association are its positive contribution to implementing the social policies of the party and state. I hope that those outcomes will multiply more widely, in greater numbers” by President Tran Duc Luong.

The contents of this publication are a little bit propagandistic, and are from an ideological time warp, but it also contains useful information, poetry and inspirational stories of blind people who have succeeded. One story is about a successful farmer named Doan Nghieu. The story is called Blind people overcoming hardship. It is basically about a man who was not blinded from birth but from an American hand grenade. He lost all his family and later married and had children of his own, but still lived in perpetual poverty until he was asked to join the Blind Association. There he learned farming and animal husbandry. He became very successful and got offered a loan from the National Fund and was able to start his own business in making bamboo and ceramic chopsticks, and employed five workers. His business became so successful that in 2004 he was chosen as the most outstanding peasant producer, and attended the exemplars conference held by the Fatherland Front. The story ends with “…Brother Doan Nghieu is a blind person who has overcome hardship and extended himself to be an excellent businessman, worthy of the teaching of beloved Uncle Ho: ‘Disabled but not discarded.’”

But perhaps there is more than a little embellishment in this story. Part of the way the conceptual possibilities emerged for me was to think of Braille as a metaphor for being blind, blinded by propaganda. At the same time I sympathized with the blind, who had such limited reading material considering the wide and exciting choice of reading now available to the sighted in Vietnam.

Given what is known amongst the Lao about their relationship with the Vietnamese during the colonial period and during and after the Vietnam War, I wanted to find some political writings that reflected this history, and transcribe it onto the Braille sheets. As it happens, I was planning a trip to Laos with my parents and thinking that I might be able to find something “official” in my cousin’s library. Upon arrival I was explaining to my cousin what I was planning to do, but as soon as I mentioned the word “politics” he got a bit wary, so I didn’t dare ask for something “official”.

On that last trip back to Laos in late 2005, I noticed a significant Vietnamese presence, from a Vietnamese Cultural Centre located on a piece of prime real estate in the centre of Vientiane to the travelling sales men and women one encounters everywhere across the country. I also witnessed a growing resentment and fear of what is often experienced as Vietnamese imperialism. This made me think of the colonial period, when the French employed Vietnamese as officials in Laos and encouraged them to migrate there as traders.

After three days in Vientiane, you pretty much run out of things to do, but luckily I love going to the markets. During one of my many trips to the morning market I went to a bookstall and picked up a Lao language primer for Vietnamese speakers. This primer was printed in Danang in 1997 and made its way across over to Laos. Flicking through the pages I was astonished to find quotes from the two revolutionary leaders, Ho Chi Minh and Kaysone Phomvihane dating back to 1966-67. Each quote is written in three languages: Uncle Ho’s poems written in Vietnamese, and then translated into Lao and then the Vietnamese phonetic transcription of the Lao translation. The speech by uncle Kaysone also has the Vietnamese phonetic transcription and then the Vietnamese translation. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding the perfect material. At the same time I wondered if people really still believe in these words, or whether they are just floating in a country that is becoming a capitalist society. I also learnt that the terms for Braille in both Lao and Vietnamese are ‘floating words’. It’s a fact that high-ranking Lao government officials still go to Hanoi to polish up on their Marx-Leninist theory, part of their grooming for even higher positions in the government and party. My cousin was one of these government officials. I asked why he was doing this. He basically says it gives him power, not so much because he believes in revolutionary words, but because of the continued power and importance of Vietnam. This is not only a historical relationship but also very much a contemporary one.

I began to transcribe these quotes, as they appear in the primer, onto the Braille sheets. Uncle Ho’s poem appears in the centre, the left and the right section, bracketing the speech by uncle Kaysone. Uncle Ho’s poem uses the metaphor of shared geography – mountains, rivers and passes – to express the closeness of the nations:

Lao- Vietnamese Friendship

Loving each other we have scaled mountains
Forded rivers, crossed passes
Vietnam- Lao, our two nations
Our affection is deeper than the red river, than the Mekong
[Ho Chi Minh]

Heart- Line, Lao- Vietnam

“…We wish to nourish the special, immense friendship between Lao and Vietnam, to make it ever fresher and firmer, to educate our children ever after, to respect and protect the beautiful and elevated feelings of friendship of the two Lao and Vietnamese peoples, eternally brilliant and loyal, before and after as one…”
[Kaysone Phomvihane]

It still astounds me to find these quotes in a language primer, where normally you would find mundane sentences about the weather. Imagine a Vietnamese person quoting these words in Lao to a Lao person!

When I first started to transcribe these quotes onto the Braille sheets, I used paint and brush. My aim was to achieve a calligraphic quality in the text, and for it to float on top of the Braille, but this soon failed because the text became unintelligible and at the same time, aesthetically, it opposed the fragility of the Braille. It didn’t float enough, it looked big and heavy, it was weighing the Braille down.

What also got me excited about the Braille magazine was that each magazine had a different colour and paper quality. Some had thicker paper and were darker and warmer in colour and some had finer paper and were cooler in colour. Initially I had a system going where I arranged each book according to the colour tones, from dark to light, and I was careful to keep the pages in order and in five sections or five books. But the more I worked on it the more this system broke down, as a result of which all the pages are now mixed up. Before I began to transcribe the text on top of the Braille it was necessary to first get the ground and the colours right, and in the end I decided to transcribe the quotes using sharp coloured pencils. Up close it appears like it is floating but a few steps back and it has a lost and found quality, which sits in harmony with the fragility of the Braille. I had a lot of extra sheets lying around in the studio that I hadn’t included in the wall piece so I thought it would be nice to do something that was touchable. The material was so seductive; I thought people might like to touch it. But I changed my mind and decided at the last minute not to do this. People touched it anyway! Nine sheets went missing! In this stacked section there are 240 sheets, the same amount of sheets as in the wall piece. The stacked sheets are both the prehistory and a continuation of the wall piece.

At first, the material as a beautiful and mysterious object excited me, and I wanted to maintain the integrity of the material. There was struggle trying to do that. I found with Floating Words I could keep going and going. Through experimenting, so many possibilities opened up to me, and for the first time working on each individual sheet on a table and then pinning it next to all the other sheets was a little tricky to handle in terms of tonal variations and achieving a subtle rhythm in space.

In my last solo exhibition, entitled Incantation (Martin Browne Fine Art in 2005), I was using text in my work for the first time. The text used is called Khaathaa, meaning incantation or magic spells. The Khaathaa consist of phonetic transcriptions of Pali words into Thai script (Thai-Pali). My father transcribed the Khaathaa from Thai into Lao-Pali for me, and I then transcribed that onto my perforated canvas. Different Khaathaa have different meanings and are used for different purposes. There are good khaathaa, used for curing, blessing and protection. And then there are spells…
What excited me in my last exhibition was the process of transcription and translation. In that body of work the religious mantras were painted repetitively and calligraphically. Similarly, the political speech in Floating Words is used a bit like a religious mantra. This was also applied repetitively, but it is important that it is legible. This exercise showed how (alarmingly) easily the two very different languages and cultures could be translated because of a shared recent history and a common propaganda language of Marx-Leninism.

There are two kinds of relationship Laos has with Vietnam. Vietnam as the dominant interfering force in Laos, the cause of the war and the major influence on its recent history. Then there are the people to people contact and the cultural exchanges and inter-marriages that have been happening for centuries. Laos is more independent now but there is still a worrying Vietnamese presence, getting larger because of unofficial migration the Lao government is powerless to stop. On the one hand there is genuine fear at the number of Vietnamese in Laos, and on the other hand there is ambivalence. In the end, people are more fearful of the familiar cultural other that is Thailand. However, there are far worse things to worry about in Laos than the Vietnamese presence. The environmental devastation caused by logging, and the upstream damming of the Mekong River upstream in Southern China, are of much greater concern.

On reflection, this work is both political and aesthetic for me. On the one hand I approached it as a painter, trying to add to what was already a beautiful and mysterious object (the Braille) without taking away its integrity. On the other, for conceptual reasons I was trying to work with texts that were not at all mysterious, nor very attractive, and trying to use them as part of one integrated aesthetic. I found at moments I had to let go of ideas and concepts to find the ideal aesthetic.

Amongst the many layers of this work is the fact that Braille is exotic to us (the sighted) but to the visually impaired it is not. In making this work I am keenly aware that how we understand life and the world is not just visual, verbal or aural; it is also a world of touch that is visceral.

I like to end this talk by telling you an anecdote: The curator of the Sydney Biennale Charles Merewether took a group of visually impaired people to touch my work. One man ran his fingers through the Braille pages and picked out the page numbers and the word ‘Vietnam’.

© Savanhdary Vongpoothorn
Paper delivered at the Sixth Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007.
 

Last Updated

13 Aug 2012