Cambodia’s Artistry in Silver on Display in Long Beach

Like pale reminders of a bygone era, the silver objects filled the room with their gentle hue.

Clustered toward the front were an array of tiny boxes in the shapes of elephants, deer, birds and turtles. Nearby in a glass case, a set of bells decorated with dancing girls daintily adorned a shelf. Scattered throughout were intricately carved tea sets, serving bowls, vases, platters, lip balm containers, cups, salt shakers and wedding sets.

Speaking reverently of the artifacts, on display at the FHP Hippodrome Gallery in Long Beach, Tha Yin allowed himself a moment of emotion. “Many of the pieces have sentimental value,” said Yin, a Cambodian refugee who has been in the United States since 1982. “They show that Cambodia is a civilized country.”

Conditions were decidedly uncivilized, however, when Yin and his family crossed the Cambodia-Thailand border in 1979 with bits of the family silver hidden in the handlebars of a bicycle. Having barely survived the brutal Pol Pot regime, which had attempted to stamp out Cambodian silversmithing and other traditions, the Yins had concealed some heirlooms in pouches under their clothes, inside a dried fish and in small containers disguised as lunch pails.

“They would have taken it all away,” said Yin, of Lakewood, who works for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Service.

Kenneth T. So had slightly better luck. Now an engineer living in Mission Viejo, he was able to take many pieces with him when he left Cambodia in 1970, before Pol Pot came to power. “They are disappearing very fast,” So said of such silver artifacts, which are often kept in a family for generations.

In what organizers say is the largest exhibition of its kind ever mounted outside Cambodia, more than 150 of these prized objects can be seen at the Long Beach gallery through the end of this month.

“It’s of monumental importance because it’s never happened before,” said Father Nazarin, a San Francisco-based Catholic monk who has made several trips to Cambodia to collect silver artifacts. (He is known by his first name only.)

Heather Green, the show’s curator, said: “It’s a way for Cambodians to have pride in their own beauty, and to show everybody else the beauty of their culture.”

Cambodians have a history of working with silver that goes back to AD 1296, historians believe. Before 1945, they say, most of the silver was obtained by melting coins. Later, government cooperatives were formed to import silver ingots from France, China and the United States. During the 1950s, experts say, nearly 2,000 silversmiths worked in Cambodia, many of them in shops along a Phnom Penh road that became known as the “silver street.”

The art form was nearly ended with the coming of Pol Pot in 1975. Determined to create a “classless” society, his Khmer Rouge regime placed little value on Cambodia’s cultural achievements. And because the intricate silver objects were expensive and therefore generally found in wealthier homes, the Communists viewed the art objects primarily as bourgeois symbols of the very class distinctions they intended to obliterate.

According to Cambodian survivors, thousands of the priceless artifacts were seized and melted down for the value of the silver from which they were made. And thousands more, they say, were hidden by families who later perished in the waves of killing, taking their secrets with them.

A few pieces, smuggled out by refugees, made it to Thailand or Europe and ultimately to the United States. After Pol Pot was overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1978, the handful of Cambodian silversmiths who had survived the years under the Khmer Rouge began painstakingly to revive the ancient art form.

The idea of an exhibition in Long Beach first came to Vora H. Kanthoul, president of the city’s Cambodian Business Assn., during a 1983 visit to Thailand. There, he noticed that local antique shops were selling Cambodian silver pieces. “The refugees didn’t have any money,” he recalled, “so they were selling their personal family possessions. To get rid of (something like that) is pretty serious--almost taboo.”

With monetary aid from the Public Corporation for the Arts, a nonprofit Long Beach agency, the business association gathered artifacts for the show at the FHP Hippodrome.n

“It is very sophisticated,” said Ingrid Aall, a professor of Asian art history at Cal State Long Beach who has studied some of the pieces in the show. “It connotes the (Buddhist) notion of harmony between living things. It puts Cambodian art on the map.”

Among the most prominent objects--some of which are believed to be as old as 400 years--is an array of boxes carved in the shapes of animals and used to store betel quid, a red paste made from nuts and leaves that is chewed by Southeast Asians during social functions and court ceremonies. Other objects range from elaborate ceremonial wedding sets--silver swords, pedestals and covered containers for cylindrical cakes--to vases with serpent handles.

To Cambodians, the impact of seeing such treasures often is highly personal. “It makes me think of the past,” said Naysru Ly, who has been in the United States since 1980. “We miss our country very much, and I feel so painful.”