Bawa Art Industry: Lunuganga, and Chandrajeewa Atelier: Wennappuwa – II

By Dr. Laleen Jayamanne
(First part of this article appeared last Saturday (02)

As an architect, Bawa, we know, has transformed local craft work and materials that were not coolly modernist, like ‘Sinhala ulu’ for example, into becoming fashionable and beautiful, creating a cottage industry of sorts. ‘Sinhala ulu’, metal work, coconut rafters and pillars, etc., were revived at some scale. And there is now a cottage industry-style museologically-based enterprise generating visitors, income and new work for international artists and locals to exchange ideas at Lunuganga, by working on specific ideas like the recent Gift project focused on the magnificent garden there.

Sarath Chandrajeewa Atelier in Wennapuwa was established in 1990 and the organisation Contemporary Arts and Crafts Association, with patron Harold Peiris. Wennappuwa is also importantly the area where tiles, Sinhala and rata ulu, are manufactured industrially. This link with clay, a cheap material, is also a universal civilisational material (the first writing was on clay tablets), but the people who practise the craft traditionally belonged to the kumbal caste, one at the lower end of the hierarchical Sinhala caste system, which certainly has not disappeared. But the potters who made functional chatty pots for domestic use, in Kumbal Gama (potters’ village), lost their livelihoods when cheap aluminium utensils flooded the market, after the 1977 economic reforms. Prior to that, Chandrajeewa would go to their workshop, during weekends, in his student days, to learn the craft from the potters themselves. How coolly newsworthy! Sarath also works with Bronze casting of sculpture in his workshop, a difficult and rare ancient craft skill now, and hence the need to go to London to be trained by a fellow Lankan! Wonder what Ananda Coomaraswamy might have thought of this and it is also worth noting with Chandrajeewa that it took 60 years for his Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, a foundational text, to be translated into Sinhala. I remember reading that and the Dance of Shiva as an undergrad studying English lit and Classics. His atelier appears to have a craft ethos, providing training, but the links with mass production are still there, even as it looks back into deep history, well past Modernism to the famous Lankan Bronzes. He wrote a doctoral thesis on one of them in Post-Soviet Russia, the Veragala Avalokitesvara, which has been published with images of the icon and a fascinating argument about a subtle distinction between art and craft. Intellectuals I knew from Peradeniya University in the ‘60s who taught in the Sinhala medium and current ones visit this visionary institution and are made to feel welcome. A new generation of intellectuals teaching fine arts in the Sinhala medium (one of whom a research student of mine at Sydney University), look up to him as a fearless scholar/artist who speaks truth to power. These multiple, material and commercial links and singular vision and craft, bring Bawa’s work into an alignment with Chandrajeeva’s, I believe. And, of course, historically sculptor has been an essential part of architecture, for example, the Greeks, the Cholas.

But beyond this historical relationship there is a material, intimate, temporal exchange between these two artists. Chandrajeewa sculpted Bawa’s head (portrait sculpture), as part of his 1994 exhibition ‘Hundred Impressions on Bronze’, at the National Art Gallery of Sri Lanka. According to newspaper reviews and articles it was a major landmark event in the history contemporary art in Sri Lanka. However, I am not aware of any historiography of contemporary art as yet, which documents this work. At the exhibition, the unknown and the celebrated, (e. g. Tissa Hami from a Veddha tribe and Dr P. R. Anthonis, the brilliant surgeon for example), the famous and the not so famous artists and many others were sculpted by Chandrajeewa as his response to the 1987-89 violence of both the JVP and of the State, where people were beheaded and their heads arranged ornamentally on a roundabout of a campus or impaled on stakes. Like Bawa once said about this period, his response to extreme physical violence was to amplify that which was beautiful. The wall of heads, not all Lankans (Arthur C, Clarke appears as an honorary Lankan), were all there looking at us in strange unfamiliar ways addressing us silently in those very dark times, an activist, craggy collective work in Bronze!

So, having seen numerous Youtube videos of Chandrajeeva’s process of sculpting heads, one in an art school in Florence, it occurred to me that the sheer speed (anywhere between one hour and four), at which he moulds a clay portrait, is what made it ‘performance art’. Not the avant-garde variety done at the time but modelling clay at the speed of unfettered thought. There is no drama and no soliciting of attention in the performance, but an absolute focus of self-forgetfulness. The film star Anoja Weersingha, also popular in Pakistani cinema, who is usually all smiles, on seeing her somber, craggy, sculpted face, exclaimed that her heart had been imprinted on her face. An art historian can ask why Chandrajeeva called his work, seemingly counter-intuitively, “Impressions”.

How is he like the French impressionists who tried to paint light and time, both elusive forces difficult to grasp. I think that not being there but able to see clearly on YouTube videos his process in real time, he is sensing some intangible quality in the visage of the person he is modelling, and trying to capture that instant or nano-second, on the yielding earthy clay. Afterwards, he castes it in the less yielding bronze, to honour these citizens of Sri Lanka and a few foreigners, who have helped to make it a flourishing culture.

Now that Bawa’s sculpture is in Lunuganga gardens, I am told, its companion appears to be a sculptural sundial (not like the ancient Lankan sundial or suriya thati), which may have, as far as I know, escaped curatorial attention, though not the tourist promos of the garden. I know of the sundial sculpture’s existence only through a mention in a scholarly book co-authored by Chandrajeewa with Anoma and Nimal Jayasingha, An Investigation of the Sundial at the Abhayagiri Monastery in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka (2021). Geoffrey would have known that the Lunuganga sundial sculpture was in the lineage of an ancient piece of technology to show time from the movement of sunlight and shadow. The book is about the sundial excavated at the Abhayagiri Vihare in Anuradhapura and now in that museum. It shows the complex maths and calculations required to build one but also how monastic and international exchanges were regulated there by this shadow clock. So now it is a sign of deep historical time and as such a conceptual object in the garden. Even Bawa’s sculpture portrait may not have had any curatorial attention, again as far as I can tell from research on the internet. So, I imagine the sundial and the bronze head are probably nestled in some shady spot out of the sunlight. These two objects create an unexpected civilizational link between Bawa and Chadrajeewa, contemporary architect and sculptor, across a vast social and historical divide. I think that imaginative conceptual and historical research on art and culture can come out of acknowledging this reality, as a first step.

When Bawa used lowly local indigenous craft materials by turning to traditional architectural models for inspiration, Asian academics with a taste for theory, swiftly and cannily crafted the concept, ‘Tropical Modernism’, a boom area for business and a boon for ‘third world’ architects in the ‘60s. But, alas! when Chadrajeewa exhibited ‘Creations in Terracotta’ in 1990, an applied art, and later his ‘100 Impressions on Bronze’ in 1994, despite the popularity of these shows and the insightful and stylish writing in both the Sinhala and English press by the likes of bilingual Edwin Ariyadasa, an important film critic and Professor of English and specialist in drama, A. J. Gunawardana, it appears to have been ignored by the western art establishment, such as it was then. His work was subsequently dismissed by some prominent academics and artists, as being ‘traditional’ making ‘lots of money’ and getting ‘a lot of media attention’. That was then, but now, being popular is not considered unseemly and painting on traditional bricks is fine, a beautifully crafted, reflexive political act. And, of course, making money and getting media attention is just a part of the art game at top galleries and the most prestigious European Biennales, the norm.

If per chance, Chadrajeeva is invited to respond to the Lunuganga, Gift 2 project (announced at the end of the first), one hopes that he might feel like coming out of retirement to address his bronze Bawa, in the light of the sundial perhaps hidden somewhere there amid the grass. Bawa would have loved this I am sure. Just look at his expression of child-like delight, captured in a photograph, (I hope this paper will publish it here), when he saw his metal head at the ‘100 Impressions on Bronze’ exhibition 1994. That’s on page 13 of the catalogue of the exhibition, Path of Visual Arts (at Barefoot Gallery, 2005), by Namal Avanthi Jayasinghe. It was an exhibition organized by his former students, as a gift, when he turned 50. What a gift!

In a private correspondence of 23-3-22, Chandrajeewa said the following:

“Bawa has visited my studio twice.

Once came to see a Bronze casting session.

One time he had a party with us in Lunuganga garden. Harold Peiris also participated.

I went to Lunuganga before the Covid pandemic in late 2019. It happened after I was removed from the post of VC.

With a group of my students who are not at university, a happy day.

That was the last time I observed the sundial at Bawa garden. It is a modern Sundial. But not properly working with the sunlight.

Can’t get the clear shadow marking from it. I think some part or parts are missing from the construction.

This is a garden sculpture rather than a Sundial.”

But his first invited visit to Lunuganga was in 1991.

I cite these to indicate Bawa’s interest in and appreciation of Chandrajeewa’s work, his methods, his hands-on deep craft knowledge. But Chandrajeewa’s multifaceted scholarly and artistic work does not need Bawa’s authorization for the people of Sri Lanka to appreciate it. They already know why he matters to them in a multilingual, multicultural Lanka, with a deep cross-cultural history connected to the world as far back as the silk routes and even beyond during the time of the Mahavihara and Abhayagiri vihara of Anuradhpura period. But, arguing from the unassailable authority of Bawa as the genius, starchitect of Lanka may be the only way in which the art world might pay attention. While, as an intellectual I try not to argue from authority, but from reason, in this loaded instance, I feel it’s just worth a try to see if it would make a difference. I will hazard my amateur opinion for whatever its worth: ‘Sarath Chandrajeewa seems be the Geoffrey Bawa of contemporary Sri Lankan sculpture’. (Discuss!).

And lastly, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a collection of Chandrajeeva’s terracotta sculpture, pots and benches in the garden and lamps lit at sunset around the vintage Ena de Silva house, with a touch of Walauwa nostalgia, now lovingly preserved. However, Bawa’s tropical, ecological garden, inspired by the 18th century British architect and landscape designer, Robert Adam, with its European lineage, now can also suggest generative multiple rhizomatic connections (wild like the way grass grows, or the way a potato sprouts, not rectilinear), closer to home. The bronze head and the sundial suggest Sri Lanka’s ancient connections with a larger Asian and Arab-Islamic world and their profound mathematical knowledge. The sundial book is fittingly dedicated to: “The Unknown Masters of Ancient Sundials of Sri Lanka”.