Dear Family and Friends,

Considering my personal determination to visit art museums, in Thailand uncharacteristically I had not put a lot of thought nor reading nor time into what Thai art and what constitutes Thai art. In Chang Mai I visited a museum but what I didn’t mention earlier was my surprise to find that museum heavy on history and on light art - of any form. The Chang Mai Northern National Museum had exhibits on the Natural and Cultural background of the Lanna people, the History of the Lanna, the History of Chang Mai, Trade & Economy of Lanna, the Modern Way of Life and finally, the Development of Lanna Art Style. Yet by the end of that visit I was left wondering: where was the art? From my eight weeks in Thailand, couldn’t I reasonably assume that a museum would feature ceramics or textiles or elephant tusk carving or wood carving or gold or jewels… and what about painting or sculpture and the evolution of?

Therefore, when I deferred my original Friday plan (a famous mansion), I decided that another trip to a museum was in order. I considered myself warned by Lonely Planet’s opening guiding lines of “[h]ow wonderful would it be if a generous monetary gift transformed Bangkok’s National Museum – Southeast Asia’s largest, no less – into a state-of-the-art facility?” LP went on to say that “Perhaps part of the charm [of the museum], though, is wandering through a veritable attic of Thai art and handicrafts free from meticulous interpretations found in Westernized exhibits.”

What a nice description! The Bangkok Thai National Museum resides in a now run-down palace complex of buildings originally built for King Rama I’s viceroy, one Prince Wang Na, and was converted into a museum by King Rama V (aka Chulalongkorn – son of the King that hired Anna Leonowans) in the 1880s. It does have quite a collection of treasures including a non-impressive room of textiles, a room of tombstones (all Thai, no labels), a room of long iron spears and glass-encased swords, a room of beautiful inlaid objects (today’s pic is from a prayer cabinet) (by the way, pics weren’t allowed but my brain got totally stuffed so I snuck several non-flash photos), a famous throne, a room of gold “treasures” in a glass cabinet behind iron bars, and a room of elephant saddles. I breezed through the “Khmer” historical art section – the real deal is at Angkor. On the museum grounds, there was also a Wat with some of the best preserved, oldest murals in Bangkok, a storage shed of room of royal processional carts (complete with doors in the shape of carts in case they are needed in the future), a Thai royal reception room set with Western furniture, and Buddhas. Lots of Buddhas. I found that the “art” wings of the museum were almost completely filled with Buddhas of varying ages, sizes, and materials. Guess what? Finally, in the almost shimmering heat of a non-air conditioned gallery of stone 13th and 14th and 15th century Buddhas, my Buddha statuary enthusiasm began to flag.

But it also started me on a mental comparative art study. In fact, ask yourself these questions: what is it that you love about art? What do you consider art? Where do you look for art? How do you recognize art?

Honestly, I’ve not satisfactorily answered the above questions – but I believe them to be linked with assessing arts of all kinds and cultures.

To answer my own question: what do I love about art? I love its ability to express facets of life, creatively, meaningfully, often beautifully, and I seek its ability to find beauty in the mundane. By the way, in this context, I expect that my personal definition of life includes the human concept(s) of the divine and other higher philosophies. My understanding of art, formed by European culture, is that it started out religious and every-day life based, it expanded a bit to civic-based art and then evolved to buildings and religious and otherwise. Picture the Pyramids in Egypt, Parthenon in Greece, the Forum in Rome, early remarkable cathedrals. The Middle Ages in Europe saw a continued escalation in religious architecture and sculptures, although it also began to see painters like Vermeer slightly veer away from religious artwork. The Renaissance continued the religious art but the originality contagion also planted the seeds of the plethora of art work that we see today.

As far as I’ve observed, the timeline for Thai is similar to European art work in so far as there were cave paintings, Hindu gods like Vishnu, civic-city building like the moats in Chang Mai. The differences, besides the cultural landscape is that Thai artists did not have a Renaissance and they have never to truly gotten beyond Buddha. To be fair, I’ve been haphazardly studying European art for years and I haphazardly only studied Thai art for a matter of days, so no doubt I missed more than a lot. In fact, LP mentioned a few modern galleries to visit (it sounds like the Thai art scene is thriving) and the museums that I visited were hardly the well-researched and compiled wonders that we residents of the States hope for. Yet whether or not you agree with me on the details, I surmise that Thai art and Buddha are inextricably linked. Hence that many tours of Wats, hence the myriad of Buddhas that I was now ready to leave behind.

I walked past the Amulet market where wrinkled old men were squinting through magnifying glasses to assess little Buddha amulets, Chinese herbs were for sale in illegible bottles, and all sorts of souvenirs were hanging from umbrellas and crowded onto tables. The heat plus all this history, art and contemplation made me dizzy. A shower and Vertigo sounded like the perfect antidote…

--Laura