An exhibit at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies fuses installation art with a transcendent haven. Wesleyan University is fortunate enough to host, for a time, a unique and moving piece that penetrates the mind both artistically and spiritually.
The “Lady of the Lilies” exhibit is a cross-cultural hybrid of music, dance, painting, and spirit. Movement performers Eiko and Koma collaborated with twelve senior art students at the non-profit Reyum Art School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This exquisite union led to brilliant results.
The Reyum School is a forum for research, preservation, and promotion of Cambodian arts and culture. Much of the mission of the Reyum School is to promulgate ancient Reyum tradition. Eiko and Koma, on their website, describe their work as “present[ing] [through dance] archaic landscapes, eons older than the world we occupy, in which we (humans) can rediscover our essential selves.”
The concept of the collaboration reflects the artists’ ability to complement one another’s objectives. Cambodia provides an “archaic landscape” for Eiko and Koma to explore. They breathe new life into ancient Cambodian ritualistic painting.
The piece occupies a room in the Mansfield Freeman building. Viewers enter the room through gauzy black curtains. Once the curtains have closed, they are consumed by an aquatic ethereal nightscape. Two chairs by the edge of the installation invite rest and meditation in the otherworldly surroundings.
Several large sheets of canvas are spread over the walls, floor, and ceiling, entirely covering and transforming what was once an ordinary room. The floor is painted to appear like a dark and rippling pond. Bright pink lilies, some blooming and others not, float in it. As the canvas moves up the walls, the pond becomes a night sky, riddled with stars.
There are four stools in an arch on the left side of the room. In the center of the room stands a spotlight, pointing toward the ceiling. In the pool of light, it creates a stark white circle, the moon. The back wall features a dramatic sunset. The water becomes a band of bright orange and white sunlight. Rising out of the sunlight is a beautiful woman. She is not so much emerging out of the water and light as she is a part of it, growing from it, face upward, kissing the sky.
Currently the installation itself is the only piece available on campus. On Friday April 28, however, the young Cambodian artists will join Eiko and Koma in the CFA for a live performance at 8 p.m. The creation of an action painting (not unlike that in the Mansfield Freeman gallery) on a larger scale will begin the performance. The evening will also feature music by Cambodian ethnomusicologist and Macarthur Fellow Sam-Ang Sam (PhD ’89).
The installation is available for viewing through Tuesday May 9, and admission is free. Even without the music, movements, and storytelling of Eiko and Koma, the Cambodian painting speaks for itself.
Ingrid Muan, a founder and co-director of the Reyum Institute, died very suddenly and shortly before the “Lady of the Lilies” project began. The piece serves just as much as a memorial to her as it does an artistic endeavor. When one passes through those curtains, there is a sense of wandering into both a living painting and a place of worship.
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