Mexico's lacquerwork shows a glorious legacy
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): Fortunately, there is a flip side to everything.
If colonialism was the creation of greedy traders and globalization is predominantly an enterprise enabling businesspeople to further fatten their pockets, lives have also been enriched by the constant intermingling of people from around the globe.
A colorful exhibition titled La Casa de Mexico displaying indigenous lacquerwork of Mexico from five states -- Guerrero, Michoacan, Chiapas, Durango and Jalisco -- is an example of how fruitful it is to keep sharing ideas with others.
Lacquerwork has been a thriving art in Mexico since pre- hispanic times. At that time, simple geometric designs featuring just three colors were used, along with varnished wooden objects made with several coats of paint derived from different animal, vegetable and mineral-based pigments. These objects were used for storing drinking water or as receptacles used at rituals.
The ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica used this technique for other everyday objects, such as earthenware bowls or gourds meant for drinking water, or atole, the hot maize drink, and calabash bowls for washing hands or for straining food.
Dazzled by the beauty of these objects, royalty demanded them as payment; in one area alone it is estimated that 20,000 varnished lacquerware items were paid annually in tributary taxes. While luxury pieces were reserved for members of the elite, there were also plenty of items available to the common person for their daily use.
According to ancient chronicles, priests carried elongated tecomates on their backs. Lacquered and set with turquoise, these gourds were used for ceremonial purposes. Without abandoning their own roots, lacquer artists assimilated esthetics inherited from three centuries of Spanish presence in Mexico. Artists adopted new objects for decoration such as bowls, chests, trunks, boxes, furniture and items for the church despite their technique remaining rooted in the past.
"With the establishment of a trade route connecting Mexico to the Philippines in the 16th century, a new aesthetic style entered the artistic panorama of Mexican lacquerwork: Oriental art," claim art historians Sonia Perez Carrillo and Carmen Rodriguez de Tembleque from the University of Madrid.
The influence of an Asian aesthetic was assimilated through commercial exchange routes. The first one joined Asia and the New World by way of the Pacific Ocean, which facilitated the arrival of objects from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, Cambodia and Indonesia and the second one opened in the 17th century when lacquerwork crossed the Atlantic to arrive in Spain.
It may be from colonial times that Mexican lacquerwork came to be prized elsewhere but one theory suggests that there may have been interaction between the ancient Chinese and the ancient Mexican people via the Bering Straits.
Mexican lacquerwork seems proof of the migration of the ancient Chinese to the New World, centuries, perhaps millennia, before the Spanish invasion. Scholars continue to associate the pictorial technique, particularly from Uruapan in Michoacan, with the East, particularly China.
Keeping the debate alive on its exact origins is the other school of thought that insists that Mexican lacquerwork did not come from the Orient and that the ancient people of Mexico produced these goods prior to any outside influence.
Whatever the reality, lacquerwork is said to also be one of the earliest crafts of Asia. It became highly developed in India, the Chinese mastered inlaid lacquerwork with ivory, jade, coral or abalone.
The art spread to Korea, then to Japan where it took new forms, notably gold lacquerwork. Fine Asian lacquerwork may have more than 40 coats, each being dried and smoothed with a whetstone before the application of the next. The ware is decorated either in color, gold or silver and enhanced by relief work, engraving or carving.
Inlaid lacquer is the most complicated and highly regarded work. Incised or grooved lacquer involves several coats before the lacquer is rubbed down to a smooth, glossy finish. Designs are cut through or grooved through the top layer just deep enough to reach the colored layer below and painted lacquer is simply the painting of colored designs like flowers and birds with oil paint on a base of several coats of lacquer. The last is the simplest technique and the one that is now most commonly practiced by commercial artists.
Viewers here are therefore lucky to get a glimpse into some rare pieces that are not produced anymore as they require highly specialized skills that are no longer practiced. Artisans seldom use the original chia oil, obtained from a type of sage and a traditional mixture of soils and plants. What is available in the market today is mostly plastic plastered over wood and decorated in oil paints.
Lacquerwork has already been reduced from utilitarian objects to exclusively decorative pieces, a further signal that the artisan's heritage is in danger of extinction.
The exhibition of 80 pieces of lacquerwork will remain on display at La Casa de Mexico, Jl. Panglima Polim III, No. 1-3, Kebayoran Baru, between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., until June 15.