| Summary: |
This thesis takes a new look at the art of ancient Champa. Breaking away from traditional
studies, it looks at the art not in its ancient Cham context, but rather through its present and
recent past contexts.
The study asks “What exactly is Cham art?” To answer this, I examine not only the artworks, but
also the museums and exhibitions, the display and classification.
After an introduction explaining the background to the research, Chapter 2 contrasts two statues
of Ganesh in French museums, tracing their biographies and questioning what constitutes Cham
art. In Chapter 3, I examine the architectural line-drawings of Henri Parmentier, which have
represented Ancient Champa visually for over a century, revealing the complex temporality
within which they mediate between the present and multiple pasts.
Chapter 4 looks at the history of the Danang Cham Sculpture Museum through the choices and
decisions of the men who have shaped Cham art into what it is today. In Chapter 5 I investigate
how Cham art was displayed in a series of exhibitions in museums and a department store
basement in the United States, Paris and Brussels, while Chapter 6 is a study of a major Cham
exhibition at the Musée Guimet, examining its narrative threads and historical and colonial
interconnections and its implications for Cham art history.
I conclude that Cham art is much more than just the physical traces of the Cham past. It is the
preserving, displacing, labelling, copying, interpreting and displaying of the art that makes it
what it is just as much as its original functions. I suggest, therefore, that the field of Cham art
studies as we understand and view it today is actually something of our own invention, a largely
20th century construct. We do not yet know, therefore, what the Ancient Cham art of the future
will be. |
