Textiles of Southeast Asia. Robyn Maxwell
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The textile arts of Southeast Asia reflect these diverse influences: the ancestor figures of earliest legend, the sacred mandala of the Hindu-Buddhist world, the zodiac menagery of Chinese iconography, the flowing calligraphy of Islam and the lace of the West. This book explores some of these foreign influences and the imaginative and exciting local responses to the new ideas and materials.
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The study begins by examining the earliest forms of textiles and the decorative techniques associated with them. Some of the essential raw materials have an ancient history in Southeast Asia and prehistorians and archaeologists provide clues to a number of the earliest textile techniques, designs and patterns. Certain motifs and symbols, still evident today, seem to have had a very long history throughout the region. Since textiles are an integral part of Southeast Asian life, an exploration of the most ancient cultural practices and social organization contributes to an understanding of the functions of cloth.
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It is with this ancient but well-established artistic base that the two earliest and strongest cultural forces in the region - India and China - interacted. Geographic proximity has contributed to this process since certain parts of Southeast Asia have had a more intensive and continuous contact. This is particularly evident where the ethnic, linguistic and cultural influence of southern China is to be found among many of the peoples of northern Thailand, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. A number of ethnic groups are also spread across southern China into neighbouring states. In a similar fashion, the Naga people straddle the border between India and Burma.
tengkuluak; kain sandang woman's headcloth; shouldercloth Minangkabau people, west Sumatra, Indonesia silk, cotton, gold thread, natural dyes supplementary weft weave, bobbin lace 246.0 x 83.5 cm Australian National Gallery 1984.576
This sumptuous ceremonial textile has wide, gold and silk, striped end sections which glow against a rich purple centre. The major motifs are variations on stars (bintang). While cloths of this supplementary weft style have been made for centuries, the influence of European fashion and textile techniques has led to the addition of lace edges and fringes on this nineteenth-century example.
Chinese and Indians sailed the waters of Southeast Asia in the same centuries, although the intensity and directness of their respective influence varied over time and place throughout the region. Indian influence, especially in the form of Indian textiles, continued after the arrival of the Europeans, while the impact of Chinese culture became more direct with large-scale migrations from southern China to the European colonies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Throughout Asia, the history of textiles largely follows the history of trade, and the strategic position of the Southeast Asian region and its bountiful natural resources attracted trade from early times. Islam has been a religious element in Southeast Asia since the twelfth century. Traders from India and Persia, and even China, along with travellers from the Middle East, spread Islam into Southeast Asia where it became a dominant political and cultural force during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.9 I have tried to establish the distinctive contributions of Islam to Southeast Asian textile art.
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European political and economic supremacy afte'r the eighteenth century affected the development of Southeast Asian textile traditions, even though the objects they traded and the symbols of power they manipulated were not always produced by Europeans themselves. Indian textiles, acquired and distributed through European trading monopolies, took on meanings and functions unique to the cultures of Southeast Asia. At the same time, certain local textile designs and techniques were influenced by European textile art. The West is still a powerful force in Southeast Asia and continues to influence textiles into the twentieth century.
TEXTILES, HISTORY, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE
Textiles provide insights into the history of Southeast Asian societies and much of the textile history is closely tied to the conventional accounts of Southeast Asia's past. Sumptuous gold brocades and silk garments were the finest products of those Southeast Asian court centres that were the wielders of power and the patrons of the arts. Legends and court chronicles in Southeast Asia record the meetings, migrations and marriages between local rulers and the courts of India, China and the Middle East, and textiles illustrate the cultural diversity that has developed from such exchanges.
lelangit (?) canopy Peranakan Chinese people, north-coast Java, Indonesia cotton, natural dyes batik 270.0 x 255.0 cm Australian National Gallery 1984.3091
Huge batik canopies were a significant feature of ceremonies within the immigrant Chinese communities along the north coast of Java in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This example is in the rich red dyes for which the Lasem district is famous. The animal motifs, that include the central motif of the dog-lion (qilin, kilin), male and female phoenix, geese, oxen, deer, elephants and butterflies, symbolize the hopes for longevity, marital felicity, fertility and other blessings. Strewn through the field and borders are minor motifs, beribboned auspicious symbols, cloud shapes and Chinese flowers such as the lotus. Such symbols suggest the use of these large textiles at marriage festivities. While the batik's motifs closely follow Chinese models, its general design structure, with wide equal borders and floral sinuous flowering trees in each corner, also appears to have been influenced by a type of painted Indian cotton chintz, which was imported into Southeast Asia for centuries (Maxwell, 1990). The unique Javanese waxing pen (canting) was used to execute the hand-drawn batik.
bi ceremonial hanging Acehnese people, Sumatra, Indonesia cotton, wool, silk, gold thread, sequins, glass beads appliqué, couching, embroidery, lace 64.0 x 208.0 cm Australian National Gallery 1984.1986
This long red embroidered panel (bi) was hung around the bed or throne (pelaminan) at celebrations of weddings or circumcisions in the Acehnese and Malay communities of coastal Sumatra. Among the floral and foliated couched gold thread patterns, other realistic motifs appear. The mythical bouraq (burak), Muhammad's mount for his visit to Heaven, is shown with a female head and the winged body of a horse. Under one burak, a swastika of Buddhist origins can be seen. The embroidered Malay inscription in Kufic script on the creature's flanks, though missing some sequins, seems to wish those who marry happiness (menikah) and good fortune (selamat). The motifs are presented in the formal symmetrical style popular on Islamic textiles such as Mughal hangings and Central Asian carpets, although the structure of these panels is also similar to certain Chinese ceremonial hangings found throughout Southeast Asia. Early twentieth century
kain sarong woman's skirt Eliza van Zuylen (1863-1947), Pekalongan, Java, Indonesia cotton, natural dyes batik 106.0 x 200.0 cm Australian National Gallery 1984.3170
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the immigrant and mestizo European and Chinese women living in Indonesia began to wear cylindrical batik cotton skirts. They added their own preferred motifs to the multitude of existing batik designs. Bird motifs such as the swallow and swan appeared amid bouquets of European flowers, particularly on the contrasting head-panels. Even the lotus is depicted in European naturalistic style typical of these designs. This batik with the studio mark of the famous atelier, E. van Zuylen, a workshop that operated from 1890 to 1946 (de Raadt-Apell, 1980: 13), still uses the traditional north-coast Javanese red and blue dyes against a white ground.
The form and the intensity of each foreign cultural influence changed with time. The art of India under Mughal rule was not the same art that inspired the great Hindu-Buddhist temples of Southeast Asia; Chinese culture in the eighth century was very different from the late nineteenth century; the Spanish in the fifteenth century presented a different image of European culture from the Dutch in the early twentieth century; Islam in India is not the same as in the Arab world.