The Art of Champa

Introduction

2. Sandstone Garuda in the Thâp-Mam style
(12th Century), standing in front of the
Vietnam History Museum (Hanoi).

Evoking Champa means glorifying death, sanctifying remnants, magnifying clues, singing the praises of mourning, and reconstructing history. Champa only exists now in the memories of a diminishing collection of living people who desire eternal life, in a half-audible melody - necessarily exotic - that is hummed by a few disquieted spirits.

Yet, in defiance of time, held in compassion by it, wreaking revenge on the injustice of the inevitable. Cham statues bear witness to this civilisation that was swallowed up in the meanders of history, profane child of the divine work of destruction.

Civilisations die, but all are fecund. They leave in our collective memory those fundamental notions, impossible to articulate, which are irresolutely infinite and unattainably absolute.

Perhaps, however, the Cham civilisation is a little more lost to us than others: death is not a state of being but a discourse, and Champa has long lacked orators and an audience. Still, what a gesture! A mysterious birth, a stateless ideal, a glorious decadence, a death announced in the name of impossible otherness. Champa is five hundred years of mystery, a thousand of destruction, and three hundred of being forgotten.

The most efficient approach to its rediscovery was to capture its vestiges, its abandoned towers, its forgotten sculptures, its sublime sites where the divine wanders; a pleasant task for the willing traveller, armed with the learned indications of the great ancients and attentive to the unbiased attraction of discovery. Examining a statue, carrying out an authentication, is to interrogate condensed history. All the statues illustrated in this book were closely examined, measured, inspected, and authenticated. All from private collections, often heretofore unpublished, they bring new blood to the observation: in art, nothing is more dangerous than inbred...