Land of the Eternal Smile

In the year 1297, a Chinese official named Chou Ta-kuan was sent by his emperor on a reporting mission to the kingdom of Khmer, in the land that is now Cambodia. The Cambodians, he quickly decided, "are not what we would call civilized people." The women were depraved and old before their time; the marketplaces were filled with homosexuals; and bathing in the nude was something of a national obsession--an obsession, Chou Ta-kuan was sure, that accounted for the high rate of dysentery and leprosy. Chou Ta-kuan could find almost nothing good to say about the Cambodians. Had he only spent some time contemplating their art, he might have written a different account of his journey.

This week, Manhattan's Asia House opened a show of Khmer sculpture assembled by Gallery Director George Montgomery from museums and private collections all over the U.S. It is the first Khmer exhibition ever held in this country, and it is a delight to see. The Khmer artists, though much influenced by India, developed a style of their own that outshone anything produced in what was to become Indo-China. The great temple of Angkor Wat, still Cambodia's most admired show place, was their work, but it and the other ruins of Angkor are so dramatic and overwhelming that the individual pieces of sculpture and bas-relief tend to get swallowed up. It is the virtue of the Asia House show that the individual pieces can assert themselves and be evaluated on their own.

Beautiful As the Moon. Near the end of the 8th century, the mighty King Jayavarman II founded the first great dynasty of Angkor, and for the next 300 years the Khmers added steadily to their glory. They were prodigious engineers: their moats, canals and reservoirs made the land so fertile that hunger was virtually unknown. One inscription honors a king, not for his conquests but for creating a reservoir "beautiful as the moon, to refresh mankind and to drown the insolence of the other kings."

The Khmers thought of the earth as a great quadrangle circled by a necklace of mountains, beyond which stretched the unknown oceans. Their gods resided on a sacred mountain called Meru, and the highest temple in any city was meant to represent Meru, while the city itself, surrounded by its walls and moats, stood for the earth, its mountains and its oceans. One temple had 18 high priests, 2,740 officiants, 2,202 servers, 615 dancing girls. It contained five tons of gold plate and almost as much silver.

Masterpieces of Impassiveness. The artist ranked high in the kingdom, was sometimes even a member of the ruling class. One minister was called "the first of living artists," and there were princes only too happy to bear the title of mason (architect). In subject, the artists favored the deities of Hinduism and Buddhism, which flourished with the Khmers. Like almost all Oriental artists, they modeled their own work largely on what had been done before. The stance of the gods was apt to be ritualistic, and rarely did a Khmer statue show movement.

The figures at Asia House--whether gods, or dancing girls, or Buddha himself--are masterpieces of impassiveness, each face a study in noble calm. The people of Khmer built temple after temple, until they literally exhausted themselves; their kings fought other kings until "the dust of their armies blotted out the sun." But the faces of the gods never changed expression. Their gentle, enigmatic smile was always there, the smile of perfection and of eternal peace.

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