Publicity

Fabric of Life

John Hoskin, for Asia Times (October 1996)

Dark mahogany desks, cracked leather upholstery and dusty rows of ponderous casebooks are the classic surroundings of advocates and solicitors. Not so with Tilleke & Gibbins. Although Bangkok’s oldest and largest independent law company (circa 1893), its present offices, opened in 1987, are light and airy with a tasteful dove-gray color scheme, marble facings and padded aluminum-frame office dividers. Yet housed in this model of modern legal practice is a collection of antique textiles that many a museum would kill for.

"We have one of the best ethnic Thai collections in the world," said Karen Anderson Chungyampin, who is employed full-time as a textile curator at Tilleke & Gibbins. Even a cursory glance at the mounted fabrics adorning the corridors and offices of the law company leaves little doubt as to the validity of the claim.

At every turn, you are confronted with exquisitely-patterned silk and cotton textiles which even the untrained eye can see are woven with a rare skill. The juxtaposition of old fabrics and smart new offices is startling, yet the textile collection was a direct result of Tilleke & Gibbins moving into modern premises.

Karen explained that "David Lyman, one of the senior partners, wanted to decorate the offices in a way that would give a warm feeling; he didn't want it to look like a hotel lobby." Textiles were suggested and Lyman, a collector of Oriental carpets, was immediately enthusiastic and later convinced of the idea when some 50 old pieces were offered to the company. That was seven years ago, and today, the collection has grown to more than 400 museum-quality examples of mainland Southeast Asian textiles.

Although the fabrics have been gleaned from around the region, the collection focuses primarily on the traditional textiles of the Tai, an ethnolinguistic group found in Thailand, Laos and various regions of Myanmar, northern Vietnam and southern China. "It is better to have a small but outstanding collection than a large one assembled from everywhere that doesn't quite make a statement," Karen remarked.

If it can scarcely be called "small", the Tilleke & Gibbins collection certainly makes a statement. "The textiles are a language," Karen pointed out. "There is a meaning woven into the design." Aside from their obvious beauty and the consummate workmanship, woven fabrics speak in a way few other artifacts can match. There is the explicit language of the patterns which, in floral motifs, animals, mythical creatures and other traditional designs, tell of the physical surrounding and spiritual beliefs of the weavers. And there is the implied statement of the weaving process itself.

"These pieces have been woven without the concept of time, without any calculation of the labor required," Karen said. "They were made purely for the people’s own use." Whether skirts, blankets, head cloths or baby wrappers, all the fabrics were intended exclusively to be functional, albeit produced with a certain pride and a degree of vanity in an age when production is for profit and time is of the essence.

It is this which largely accounts for the value of the textiles. Weaving skills may still be found today, but the purpose and context of production are no longer the same. Ironically, the weavers of the past were never aware of the aesthetic value of their work - it was simply traditional and necessary - and it was this absence of artifice that gave purity to the language of textiles.

While every piece in the collection has been selected for its high quality of design and execution, many of the exhibits are unique examples of their kind. The pha piaow (head cloths) of the Tai produced during the early 20th century, for example, are particularly superb, especially one extremely rare silk-based indigo cloth. Among the Cambodian textiles, the sampot hol (ikat hip wrappers) and pidan (ikat wall hangings) are examples of a very high quality weft ikat that is no longer produced these days.

Karen speaks enthusiastically and knowledgeably about Southeast Asian textiles as she guided me around the collection - a task she is happy to perform for anyone who cares to make an appointment. As I suddenly came to appreciate the unexpected fascination of the fabrics, she explained her own initial attraction.

"I was brought up at the Chitrlada School in Bangkok and so was familiar with Her Majesty the Queen’s SUPPORT program and other royal projects promoting the preservation of traditional rural handicrafts. But although I had been aware of the weaving tradition for a long time, it was only after I had joined the National Museum Volunteers Group and attended a study group on textiles that I came to see the fabrics from a Western point of view and appreciated their aesthetic and social values."

Lecturing on textiles to the National Museum Volunteers was American expert Dagmar Painter and it was she who first fired Karen’s enthusiasm." I found the subject totally fascinating," she said, "and when the study group ended, I kept going back to her, borrowing her books." Coincidentally, it was Painter who had begun the textile collection at Tilleke & Gibbins, and when she left Thailand, she asked Karen if she would like to take over what was then a part-time curator’s job.

Neither Karen’s new-found interest in the textiles nor the need for office decoration accounted for the law company becoming a major collector. That was a pure accident. "I was cleaning the textiles one day," she said, "and thought it was such a shame for the company to pay me to look after something that would eventually fade so badly that it would have to be thrown away.

"I mentioned this to senior partner David Lyman and suggested the problem could be solved if we had more textiles and so could rotate those on display. The suggestion was accepted and when a collector offered 100 pieces to the firm, overnight I became a full-time curator."

Karen was sent to the United States for a crash course in textile preservation and while in the US, she visited several museums where she was shown storage areas and taught how to mount and display fabrics, as well as how to protect them from the harmful effects of light and insects.

The experience proved invaluable. "It gave me a whole new way of looking at textiles," she said. "I was taught to look at textile as a piece of art, something to treasure and preserve; not a piece of cloth, something you feel and touch. My teacher was a perfectionist. Before we examined a fabric, we were told to remove all our jewelry, tie our hair back and reminded not to touch the piece unless absolutely necessary."

Today, armed with this expertise, she keeps some 50 to 60 textiles out of the 400-plus collection on display at any one time, rotating them every six months. Even with rotation, great care still has to be taken to preserve what are extremely fragile works. The pieces in storage are kept rolled up on paper tubes and protected with polyester.

Those on display are regularly vacuumed to save them from air pollution and are protected from the office lighting by ultraviolet filters fitted to all the light bulbs. Newly-acquired pieces may be washed with a special detergent. "It’s a delicate process," Karen said, "and the washing is not so much to clean as to stabilize the material so it won’t deteriorate any faster."

Aside from the natural enemies of light, air pollution and insects, the biggest problem in preserving the collection is framing. "Finding someone who can do the job to my specification is not easy," she said and recounted that once, when removing a textile from its frame, she discovered to her horror that the framer had cut, stitched and glued the fabric to the mount. Whereas most people can easily come to like a painting, even without necessarily understanding it, textiles are often less readily accepted, primarily because to the layman - as to the weavers themselves - they are seen as practical household objects rather than works with aesthetic value.

"At first, the office staff resented our display of textiles because they are seen as old and dirty-looking," Karen said. "So one of my first jobs was to give the employees a guided tour of the collection. Now when I remove a fabric from the wall for rotation, staff will often ask: "Where has my piece gone ?"

So what makes a collectible textile?" Age is not necessarily the main consideration," she said. "A very old piece might be so faded as to have lost its aesthetic value. The oldest pieces we have date approximately from the turn of the century. It is more difficult to put a latest date you can expect for quality work, although generally, the good pieces ended sometime around the 1930s and 1940s when socioeconomic change began to affect production." As for telling an old textile from a modern work, the motifs in the latter tend to be blown up while in the former, the patterns are smaller, tighter and more dense. "You really have to look at the whole piece," she said. "Newer textiles are more obvious, as if the feeling behind the weaving has changed, whereas if you study an old fabric, you will start to see hidden designs."

The more you look, the more you see. To illustrate the point, she shows, in one piece on display, how a seemingly random pattern is actually the flowing form of a naga or mythical snake. It is like looking for pictures in clouds, although here the forms are cleverly contrived, not merely accidental.

Although silk is usually considered the more desirable, cotton textiles can be more valuable as they require a lot more skill to spin fine threads. Like other artworks, collector-quality textiles are not cheap. For a good Tai piece, you should expect to pay upward of 50,000 baht (US$1,965), whereas Cambodian fabrics, which suddenly became popular about five years ago, now command a starting price of 50,000 baht to 80,000 baht. Karen is reluctant to put a total value on the Tilleke & Gibbins collection, saying only that the finest pieces are each insured "in the 100,000 baht range.

With textiles enjoying a vogue among collectors, it is now almost impossible to find good pieces at source. "Many villagers consider the traditional textiles old-fashioned," Karen said, "and selling the old pieces is a practical measure, a means of income. Often, every textile in the village is sold, including older pieces previously used as samplers. And if the sampler is sold, the weaving motif and design is completely wiped out because there are no written records of the craft."

As she guided me past the last of the exquisite fabrics on display, she remarked: "It is ironic that to preserve textiles, they must be removed from the environment which gives them meaning, where they are worn or used until they become ragged and tattered."

We should indeed be thankful that Tilleke & Gibbins has eschewed the usual archaic surroundings of the law office and instead opted for something genuinely antique, so preserving examples of a craft that is now all but extinct.