Art & About: Wrapped around rainbow

2011/04/02
LUCIEN DE GUISE
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Cambodian tie-dyeing offers a sometimes mysterious snapshot of local life (National Museum of Cambodia)

Sumatra has its colourful rendering of plangi (Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia)

The Malay peninsula tends to opt for sombre colours in plangi (Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia)

Green reminds the eager audience about plangi Tie-dyeing is cheap and cheerful, and there are many fine examples

Sunday, April 03, 2011
New Straits Times (Malaysia)

TALK is cheap, as they say, but art talks go one step better thanthat: They are usually free.

This is, of course, unless they are held in countries such as Britain, where demand is so high that museums can get away with a more entrepreneurial approach.

When events are held by enterprises such as Intelligence Squared, the cost of a ticket can go up to well over RM100 when it’s held in London. Prices are more reasonable in Hong Kong, where this popular entity has now set up shop, at just RM100 a ticket. For that, you get big names such as the Swiss auctioneer Simon de Pury and Stephen Bayley, described as the “smartest man in Britain”.

And for the biggest talks and debates, it’s got to be London or New York, where you can see the likes of Arianna Huffington, away from her post. The Intelligence Squared formula has yet to reach Malaysia, which is probably a good thing as it means nobody is going to consider charging here.

An award should go to the National Textile Museum for the most valiant effort in trying to engage the public. A while ago, I wrote about a presentation there which explained the intricacies of tying a sarong. It attracted a good crowd, but perhaps not as large as the most recent occasion. This one featured the art of tie-dyeing under the microscope.

Gillian Green of Sydney University provided an overview of the “plangi” technique that was scholarly without being dry. It was made all the more exciting by including the sort of details that audiences want to know about: how to avoid being conned when buying supposedly old pieces.

As usual with any event that involves textiles, the audience was overwhelmingly female. It’s great to see such a large turnout at any art talk, but why are textile arts so much more exciting to women than they are to men?

I once had the privilege of showing a prominent collector of Southeast Asian textiles around the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. This Australian lawyer, with a crocodile-wrestling sort of masculinity, was almost overcome with joy on seeing a group of men crowding round the museum’s songkets. He told me that he had once been to a textile conference where he had been the only male out of a few hundred delegates.

Green was at the National Textile Museum to shed some light on the more neglected traditional fabric arts of the region. Plangi, or pelangi which means rainbow, is, as the name suggests, colourful. It should perhaps have been adopted by Malaysia as its national branding if South Africa hadn’t got there first.

It seems that even if the Tourism Ministry missed out on this opportunity, the National Textile Museum didn’t. One of its galleries is called Pelangi, but it has less to do with the technique than with what the museum calls “Malaysia’s different ethnic groups who are rich with their respective textile treasures”.

Tie-dyeing is a technique familiar to many. Cheap, cheerful and usually available near beaches or hippie communes, it has not aroused the same excitement as more regal weaving such as Malay songket and ikat or Javanese batik.

But being the fabric of less illustrious society doesn’t make it any less dazzling as a canvas for the creative craftsman or more typically craftswoman. It’s something of a folk art, and that should not be an impediment to success in an age where royal products are sometimes considered a bit stiff and fusty, in need of the Kate Middleton touch.

Whether it’s Khmer fabrics with their beguiling but rather obscure narratives, or their Malay cousins with a more geometrical approach, plangi has a spontaneity that cannot be found in more formal textiles. The Cambodian works from the early 20th Century show boats, temples and big splashes of colour that could, according to Green, represent the fireworks that are such a significant part of life there. More mundane aspects of life are also included, including a seemingly minor traffic incident between a car and trishaw.

Green explored some interesting cross-currents of influence between Mainland Southeast Asia and the islands to the south, where motor accidents were less important. The plangi technique appears not to have a long history in the Malay peninsula, at least according to British educationist R.O. Winstedt in a 1925 publication that describes in detail the skill of tie-dye preparation in Terengganu.

“Last and latest of the processes practised in the peninsula is a method introduced apparently at a recent date into Singapore by Boyanese craftsmen and thence copied by the nimble fingers of Terengganu craftsmen.”

Although the skill is waning in Malaysia, plangi cloths are still produced in Cambodia, where alarmingly convincing new versions of old cloths are being churned out. Best of all, Green allowed the audience to rummage among an assortment of these that she had brought along. This is a rare opportunity at any sort of talk, and it was a relief to see visitors doing their hands-on appraisals before getting down to the impressive spread of coffee, cakes and cookies.

The writer is curator of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. You may write to him at

luciendeguise@yahoo.com.