transpositions
This ongoing series explores the idea of dual homelands by placing designs from ancient Đông-Sơn bronze drums into the milieu of a Texas landscape.
Ancient bronze drums have been found throughout mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, southern China, and Vietnam. The subset of these associated with the Đông Sơn Culture (Red (Hồng) River Valley, ca. 1000~100 BCE) have often been held up as evidence of Vietnamese civilization prior to contact with/conquest by the imperial Chinese.
I have always felt an affinity toward these drums, most of which are absolutely covered with natural imagery and scenes from a land of rivers and seas. The depictions of fish, frogs, deer, and all manner of waterfowl are stunning in their liveliness and vitality. Additionally, the many human figures parading, hunting, and rowing across many drum shoulders and tympana shed a rare and precious light into what life may have been like for the people of the Đông-Sơn Culture, whom some scholars consider to be the ancestors to the modern Vietnamese.*
*NOTE 1: Whether this is true is the subject of lively academic debate across many disciplines, not least archaeology, ancient history, and historical linguistics. I want to make it clear that I do not take the Đông-Sơn-to-Vietnamese progression as a given; instead, I aim to emphasize commonalities between the two groups borne of their mutual connection to the landscape of the Red River Valley.
Detail of the famous Ngọc-Lũ drum, which was found in 1893. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Vietnamese History via Wikimedia Commons.
Example of a bronze drum; this one was found at the Song Đà site and is dated to the mid-first millennium BCE. Image courtesy of the Musée Guimet via Wikimedia Commons.
In the Transplant series, I bring pieces of this ancient past into my present homeland: the forests, wetlands, and shores of Texas’s Gulf Coastal Plain. Wherever possible, I pattern directly from archaeological artifacts from the period** and then rearrange elements to suit the compositional needs of the individual artwork. The design is embossed on aluminum tooling foil, antiqued using a variety of paints and patinas, and then hand-stitched into a painting of a local Texas landscape. The juxtaposition of media and art styles invites the viewer to contemplate the nuances of existing as a child of the Vietnamese diaspora in Texas, a landscape in which I, like my subjects, am at once utterly foreign and completely at home.
**NOTE 2: Here I must acknowledge a great debt to the generosity of the curators, collectors, and publishers whose efforts have disseminated high-quality images of a multitude of artifacts. Of particular note are Echoes of Dong-Son Drums by Chan Kieu, a catalog of the Chan & Quynh Kieu private collection (Santa Ana, CA), and Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea by Nancy Tingley (and contributors), an exhibition catalog by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) for an exhibit with the same name, which showed in Houston, TX between September 2009 and January 2010.
A pothole prairie/pothole marsh, a rare type of wetland that happens to occur in several places along the Texas Gulf Coast. There’s one a few minutes away from my house, which was used as the backdrop for “Transplant I.”
