16 July 2010 | The Phnom Penh Post | Peter Olszewski
 |
| A restorer painstakingly fixes a painting at Bakong. [Photo by: Peter Olszewski] |
It’s a magic morning at the Bakong temple grounds, with the prodigious Khmer tower framed by blue sky, and a riot of purple bougainvillea blooming at its base.
Cows graze on rich green grass beside the mirror-surfaced moat, monks chant in their monastery and, in the almost ruined Prasat Wat Bakong, work hums as a team of restorers patiently re-render the many religious wall paintings.
While almost all of the restoration at the Angkor temples revolves around the ancient Khmer edifices, at Bakong there is also a restoration team working on 20th century buildings in the complex – the “working” monasteries as such.
Some of these monasteries in Cambodia are festooned with dozens of brightly rendered religious wall paintings highlighting often lurid scenes from the life of Buddha and the Jatakas (tales of the previous lives of the Buddha). Often, however, these paintings are overlooked or dismissed as kitsch, unworthy of being classified as serious art. Some of the more gruesome paintings, sort of Bosch-gone-Buddhist renderings, are often rejected as grotesqueries.
But that’s not the viewpoint of Restaurateurs Sans Frontiere, a cultural NGO established in 1981 that began work at the Bakong site in 2007 at the instigation of Dr Vittorio Roveda, co-author of the book Buddhist Painting in Cambodia.
[ ... Read the full article >> ]
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire