Art on Angkor (modern)

[baboe]

You probably all know the Bayon, the big temple inside Angkor Thom with 216 (or something like that) faces in stone. In order to promote tourism, Apsara, the organization who takes care of Angkor, has invited many Khmer artists to 'decorate' some of the faces as they want. When I was there 2 weeks ago, one of the faces had been painted. This was just a test, it runs for 3 months and if the evaluation is good, they will decorate more faces (for 1 year or so, the paint is organic so it doesn't harm the stones).

To be honest, when I first saw this, I was completely shocked!!! :shock: I couldn't believe this to be true. In my eyes they completely raped this beautiful old temple... But as I spend quite a lot of time at the Bayon photographing, I could hear the reactions from many tourists there. For some it was even more shocking as to me (I could hear words like 'disgusting'...), others seemed to like it. I guess it was a 50/50% separation. And I have to admit, after 2 weeks I was not shocked anymore and I still didn't really love it but I did look at it in a more positive way.

So, if the evaluation turns out positive, in a couple of months many of the faces will be decorated for a while. Must be a strange sight... But I don't think I want to miss it (reminds me a bit of 'arts on cows' where they put a lot of wooden cows all over Brussels, all of them were painted/decorated different).

So, what's your opinion about this project? And suppose maybe that you can decorate one of those faces, what would you do? (I'm thinking of just making up one of the faces : lipstick, eyeshadow, blush, ...)

[sunsnow]

Quite interesting to combine modern art this way to old temple that is considered as art these days. I combine this art form in my mind to those of scenic artists, one big famous, cant remember his name, who "packages" manmade objects or natural objects for example. As you seem to mention, this is not permanent painting, and seems it has made people think, is it good or not, and most probably also experience this as a fascinating artistic experience. So I think this is fulfilling perfectly the artistic objectives. I give thumbs up, this gets you thinkin' of modern arts relation to historic buildings that are considered now art.

(But for sure, the last photo especially looks like you did all this in manipulation . Manipulated or not, still good)

[koolbreez]

It would be interesting to see what Crystal would do with it. The same guy who did the running fence in California, the covering of that building on the border of east, and west Berlin when the wall came down, plus others.