Chair: Caverlee Cary, University of California, Berkeley

The Ayutthaya period of Thai history was one of consolidation and formation for the Thai state. Further, the Ayutthaya period straddles a long and crucial era in Southeast Asian history, one of extensive and shifting patterns of international contact and exchange. The reinventions of kingship and religion, and the artistic and architectural forms that participate in this process, evolved into a unique configuration of state and belief.

Interpreting art objects and archaeological sites, ever a fraught venture, is particularly problematic in the context of Ayutthayan culture. More complex still is the representation of Ayutthayan culture in the context of Thai studies at the millennium, when new forms of communication are widely available.

The papers of this panel look at Thailand’s art historical legacy from a spectrum of viewpoints. Close readings of images yield insights in the complexities of Ayutthayan belief. The particularly important and unique Wat Ratchaburana, its spatial arrangements and unusual artifacts, reveals subtle shifts in artistic and religious currents. The discussion of mural painting spans the centuries which divide the artistic imagination of Ayutthayan painters and that of contemporary Thai artists. Finally, a discussion of the possibilities and problems in representing Ayutthayan culture in the digital age.

Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

In 1959 the Fine Arts Department of Thailand discovered a large number of gold attributes, costumes, and accessories at the center of the main prang of Wat Ratchaburana (Ayutthaya). After that, nine other rooms were discovered, including three decorated with mural paintings. Each of the rooms was filled with many thousands of votive tablets placed neatly one on top of the other, and each hoard was topped by images of the Buddha from Thailand, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Nepal, including some Hindu images. A total of 618 images and over one hundred thousand tablets were recovered. The Thai Buddha images originate from several periods of Thai art prior to the fifteenth century.

According to the Phongsawadan Luang Prasert (Luang Prasert Chronicle), the Ratchaburana temple was used as the cremation site of the two brothers of King Boromarachathiraja II of Ayutthaya, dating to 1424. To commemorate this occasion, the main Prang and the east congregation hall were constructed.

Considering its significance, very little research on Wat Ratchaburana has taken place. My aim is to investigate King Boromarachathiraja II and his religious practices, and the status of this temple. I will also focus on the Buddha images and votive tablets—note that a large number of tablets were made in a medium not commonly used prior to this temple and reproduced styles of older tablets (e.g., Sukhothai, Khmer and Srivijaya) from other regions. In addition, new types of Ayutthaya tablets with distinctive appearances and iconographic programs were created.

Caverlee Cary, University of California, Berkeley

Mapping of time and space raise issues of representation on many levels. Of particular concern is the evolution of cultural conceptions of space as reflected in such records of spatial information as have come down to us. Our age has gone far beyond that of mechanical reproduction to simulation in myriad "virtual" forms. For art history, the debate about authenticity has only intensified, with simulation simultaneously enabling widespread art historical study, yet arguably undermining the very aura upon which the primary significance of art objects rests.

The Ayutthaya Art and Culture Project is the working title of a collaborative project which is producing digitized information on the Ayutthaya period of Thailand’s cultural history for display on electronic maps. The project combines material on religious images, historical sites, crafts, and trade, along with geographic information. Undertaken jointly by the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative at UC Berkeley, and scholarly and technical associates in Thailand, the project will demonstrate new possibilities for research in an increasingly digital age.

The Ayuttaya project, organized in tandem with a major upcoming exhibition of Ayutthayan art in the United States, focuses on a period of cultural consolidation in the context of extensive international contact. The richness and complexity of its achievements and the evolution of its culture over several centuries presents a challenge for the visual representation of its legacy.

The Ayutthaya project is a component of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), an international scholarly collaborative project involving the collection and dissemination of cultural data in electronic form. By combining global mapping, imagery, and texts with digital technology, ECAI will provide scholars and other users with a research resource able to present complex combinations of data from multiple disciplines visually and immediately.

Art History has tended to be a relatively conservative discipline, with a strongly positivist approach. The Ayutthaya Art and Culture project explores possibilities and problems regarding the use of new technologies in research on and teaching of Southeast Asian art.

Sandra Cate, San Jose State University

Why is the "past" important in the "present" of Southeast Asian art? This paper revisits Wat Ratchaburana in Ayutthaya, Thailand to understand contemporary representations of the "past" at Wat Buddhapadipa, a Buddhist temple in Wimbledon, England. The contemporary Thai artists who painted its murals (completed in 1992) sought to legitimate their "modern" interpretations of Buddhist narratives by connecting them to an ancient "tradition" of Thai mural painting. The murals at Wat Ratchaburana in Ayutthaya, painted more than 500 years earlier, anchor this "tradition," providing some of the earliest extant models for what art historians teach (and Thai art students learn) as the essence of Thai painting—Buddhist iconography, a two-dimensional decorative surface, a lively line, and an idealization of form. Yet the art at Wat Ratchaburana exhibits diverse cultural influences. In the contemporary art worlds of Southeast Asia, artists and scholars alike seek the presence of the "past." The "past" as national or local history, in material, theme, or symbol—grounds artists with a sense of cultural identity. In a context of a globalized arena for the display and sale of art—at biennales, in regional exhibitions, through international artist exchanges, and on the Internet, the specifics of such pasts, are vital in challenging the dominance of Euro-American paradigms of artistic modernism. The contrast and comparison of Wat Buddhapadipa and Wat Ratchaburana reveal how Thai artists reflexively appropriate and transform the past, seeking position in the politics of the present.

Boreth J. Ly, University of California, Berkeley

Hinduism (or Brahmanism) is no longer practiced in contemporary Cambodia but its legacy in still visible in both the architecture and sculptures produced during the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya period. Moreover, Brahmanism existed side by side along with Theravadin Buddhism and it still plays a major role in the stately ritual of present-day Thailand.