She has numerous identities and genders.
She was kidnapped, maybe by Picasso.
She lived in the Palace of Versailles.
She spent time in Bonaparte’s bedroom.
Nat King Cole, Cole Porter, Santana, Bob Dylan and Britney Spears sang
about her.
She appeared, twice, in The Simpsons.
She has no eyebrows or eyelashes.
She is the world’s most famous painting. Created by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century, the Mona Lisa (called La Gioconda in Italian and La Joconde in French) has been subject to the highest form of flattery – painters the world over have copied her likeness.
And Ground Zero for Mona Lisa copies is Vietnam. In the hothouse commercial atmosphere of Ho Chi Minh City and, to a lesser extent, Hanoi, Vietnam’s artists churn out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mona Lisa paintings a year.
Kha, a soft-faced 29-year-old artist in Ho Chi Minh, takes about three days to paint a Mona Lisa. “I can do a Monet, Dali, or Van Gogh in one day,” he says over soft drinks at a café, “but the Mona Lisa has more details.” Working as an in-house artist at a downtown art shop, Kha paints about 30 Mona Lisas a year, which sell for around US$50. There are perhaps a hundred painters in Saigon creating Mona Lisas, he estimates.
Visitors to Ho Chi Minh City, can hardly walk 50 meters without passing in front of an art shop. On the walls hang copy paintings of Botero’s fat people with small heads, Warhol’s Marilyn, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and Dali’s melted watches. Like “copy-watches” and “copy-golf shirts”, copy-paintings seem to be just another commodity to be sold in this over-heated economy. But while the latest Hollywood movie or Swiss watch is protected by copyright and trademark regulations, a painting by, say, Rembrandt, is free game.
Few pieces of art have been the subject of so much artsy-analysis. For example, Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University used the Mona Lisa smile to illustrate her theory that the human eye uses two types of vision, foveal (or direct vision, which is good for detail) and peripheral. “The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa’s smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies,” Livingstone said, “and so is seen best by your peripheral vision.”
Like most copy artists in Saigon, Vy Vi, spends his days in the middle of a small shop, sitting on a small stool in front of an easel, copying works of Klimt and Hooper. When he gets lucky a businessman will walk in, set down a photograph of his kids, and ask for a painted portrait that is as close to the original photograph as possible. There’s not much request for creative license in this business. Vy Vi explains that his Mona Lisa usually requires six days, but he sometimes feels uneasy working on the famous face. “It’s so well known that people will see if I make a mistake,” he says. He paints some 20 Mona Lisas a year, which cost US$43, about the standard price throughout the country.
Some of the Vietnamese Mona Lisas are excellent. Some are clearly “just off” in some way – either the color is wrong or the background is too sharp or too soft, or the details on her dress too ornate, or her smile is a bit, well, just not right.
The famous Mona Lisa smile is the trickiest thing to get right, Vu Dan Thang, a Hanoi-based artist says.
The question of what lies behind her half-smile has spurred debate for centuries. She is Leonardo’s secret mistress. She is pregnant. She is an aristocratic lady with her own private secrets. She is following Leonardo’s mischievous instruction to “project an enigmatic image, and thereby keep precious art critics occupied for centuries.” She is Leonardo himself, in drag.
The Vietnamese artists I met acknowledged that they are simply copying art, and trying to do so in an artistically valid way.
So where’s the line between copy-art and fake?
Michelangelo was found guilty of forging a marble sculpture of Cupid for his patron, Lorenzo di Cosimo de Medici, rubbing his newly wrought work with old soil before passing it off as an antiquity. Picasso was thought to have signed off on a painting that wasn’t done by him
Thomas Hoving, former director of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, estimates that as much as 40 percent of art in the market today is either a “half-forgery,” meaning genuinely old works that have been altered to be attributed to a more valuable style or artist, or outright fakes.
Obviously, none of the Vietnam street paintings would ever be confused with the priceless masterpiece hanging in the Louvre. But an artist takes pride in his work, and I wondered how satisfying is it to copy Mona Lisa, day in, day out.
“It’s challenging,” one Hanoi-based artist said. “But I’d rather do my own thing.” I ask if I could see some of his paintings. He sifts among the Gauguins and Magrittes and Renoirs and pulls out a few idyllic landscapes of Vietnamese countryside scenes. They are attractive, although not to my taste. Does his shop sell a lot of these scenes of water buffalo and rice fields, thatched roof houses and temples? “A few,” he says shyly. “But not as many as these,” he admits, pointing to a Klimt’s golden woman and Monet’s water lilies.
Chapter 7
THE SKIES ARE ALIVE IN LANKA
Sri Lanka is Ground Zero for hard-to-explain aerial phenomena
ANGULLGAHA, Galle, Sri Lanka
I was swimming, just after sunset one night, with my friends Dhanapala and his daughter Vidhisha. One of us, I forget who, pointed to the clear sky and said: “Is that a plane?”
No, it seemed, it wasn’t. Nor were about ten other moving lights that shone with the intensity of bright planets but which moved in various directions, taking perhaps thirty seconds to traverse an arc of 90 degrees. Too slow for shooting stars. Too fast and erratic to be aircraft or weather balloons. Just right for UFOs.
Unusual airborne phenomena are not unknown in the southern tip of Sri Lanka.
It was at Kogalle Lagoon near here, some 15 kilometers east of Galle, that a young Canadian reconnaissance pilot performed a feat that Winston Churchill claimed saved “the most dangerous point of the [second world] war.”
On his very first flight in Asia, after being airborne for 12 hours, Leonard Birchall had inadvertently flown his Catalina 450 kilometers off course. By doing so he stumbled across the Japanese fleet preparing to attack Colombo. Birchall managed to radio a warning to Allied forces before being shot down. (He subsequently spent 3½ bitter years in Japanese POW camps). Churchill applauded Birchall’s actions by noting that “[Ceylon’s] capture and the consequent [Japanese] control of the Indian Ocean and the possibility of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring, and the future would have been black.”
As the familiar post-war irony goes, most of the former Allied air base site at Kogalle to which Birchall never returned is now a free-trade zone where Japanese manufacturers make electronic goods to sell to Europe and America.
Not one to ignore the chance to augment an irony, Dhanapala has purchased the historic airbase island and plans to turn it into “Liberation Island”, an “inter-faith center of excellence” where environmental studies would be encouraged. It will also serve as a development base where the 14,000 villagers in the region (some of whom staged violent insurrections in 1971 and 1988 due in part to unemployment frustrations) will participate in a fishing cooperative, a nursery for ornamental plants, bakeries and other simple means of raising community funds and morale.
While Kogalle Lagoon faces threats of pollution and indiscriminate mangrove cutting, the air in Dhanapala’s tea estate which overlooks the lagoon is unsullied. Dhanapala, a former diplomat who now devotes his time to promoting conservation, growing plants used in ayurvedic medicine, and establishing an eco-social-friendly Morris Minor plant, pointed out where he had seen mysterious lights leap between sacred trees. We sought a clarification from Venerable Metaramba Ratanajothi, a Buddhist monk who lives nearby.
“I saw similar lights myself when I was a young priest. I had become bored of sitting at prayers and wandered outside. Then I saw huge bal
ls of fire – light blue and green – dancing between the trees. The head priest told me they had been sent to frighten me back to the temple.”
We asked if he accepted that explanation.
“Not really. Later I learned that they were dewata eliya, light spirits, that remind us of how the tree gods lit the sky as they listened to Lord Buddha, and how grateful Lord Buddha was that the trees had given him shade.”
“You only see these holy lights when the environment is conducive to prayer,” added Venerable Panditha Metaramba. “The air is clean here in the south. You’ll never see those things in polluted Colombo.”
Illuminated tree-gods? This makes exquisite sense in this region which is the adopted home of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted extraterrestrial contact in his film 2001.
Not to mention the fact that southern Sri Lanka has physical evidence of one of legend’s greatest aerial exploits.
The event is mentioned in the Ramayana, the epic poem that has the influence on the sub-continent of the Bible, the Odyssey, Tristan und Isolde and Star Wars combined.
Imagine you are Vishnu incarnate, a man-god-king named Rama. You and your brother Lakshmana are in the fight of your lives against the evil giant Rawana, the ruler of Lanka, who has kidnapped your wife. Lakshmana is wounded and appears to be dead. The only cure: four medicinal plants that grow 3,000 kilometers away in the high Himalaya. Who you gonna call?
Why, Hanuman, the flying monkey god. Taking off from the Sri Lankan battlefield, Hanuman soars to the medicinal-plant-mountain in northern India, which glows golden in the dark. But when he gets there cannot decide which are the right plants. Frustrated, he rips out the entire mountain and carries it back to the evil-empire. The mere smell of the plants cures Lakshmana, thereby enabling the good guys to win the battle, save Sita and so on. (Believe me, it’s not as simple as all that.)
But Hanuman’s job is not over. He might be impulsive, but he is not a litterbug – he flies back to the Himalaya (he is, after all, the son of the wind) and replaces the mountain in its original spot.
It is difficult, however, to soar across a continent with a mountain on your shoulder without bits of earth falling off. Where these clods landed, according to legend, sacred groves and holy forests appeared.
One of Hanuman’s most famous holy mountain clumps became a prominent forested mound near Galle. The hill is rich in medicinal plants. It is sacred. When the moon is right, it glows at night. Why should anyone have suspected otherwise?
Chapter 8
SEARCHING FOR SMALL FOLK AT THE END OF THE TRAIL
A visit with three types of Hobbits on the isolated Indonesian island of Flores
FLORES, Indonesia
Imaginary short people fascinate us, and they take up an inordinate amount of space in literature and mythology. We’re all familiar with the Lilliputians who entrapped Gulliver, Snow White’s pals Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy and the rest of the Seven Dwarfs, the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, the dwarf Mime in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Rumpelstiltskin, and, of course, Tolkien’s Hobbits.
“Stop. Over there. See him?”
Our driver, Antonius, had indeed spotted the tiny man and was already hitting the brakes.
My Indonesian friend Boedhihartono and I hopped out of the car to introduce ourselves to a middle-aged guy named Markus, a perfectly friendly, perfectly articulate, otherwise normal-in-every-way man who happened to stand no taller than my waist.
Illustrating that Americans have no monopoly on rudeness, Boedhihartono and I started grilling the short man about how he felt to be one-meter tall (“OK”), whether his parents were “normal” (“Yes”), if he knew about Homo floresiensis (“What’s that?”).
“Just a midget,” Boedhihartono said as we got back in the car and left the village of Kisol.
I checked later and found that about one in 40,000 children, worldwide, could be defined as a ‘little person’. Uncommon, but not as scarce as the rarities we were seeking.
Most cultures relish their ‘short folk’ stories. The Irish have their leprechauns, the Icelanders their elves, Hawaiians their menehunes, and Scandinavians their tomtar. Worldwide, people have given at least 200 tongue-caressing appellations to imaginary small folk, with some of the most mellifluous being abatwa, blue men of the minch, bugalademujs, and djinn, not to mention Issun Boshi, jimaninas, naiads, nereids, and nixies, and, lest we forget, pixies, selkies, sluagh, sprites, sylphids, vardogls, weisse frau, wichtlein, yumboes and zips.
We had traveled to the eastern Indonesian island of Flores with a simple, albeit esoteric goal – to seek orang pendek, the Indonesian name for “little people”. These small people are the stuff of legends throughout Southeast Asia and Flores is a rich fishing ground for small-folk tales.
But tales told around the campfire are no substitute for the real thing, and Flores, a dramatically-beautiful volcanic island of 1.4 million people that is 2½ times the size of Bali, is home to three items of particular interest to orang pendek researchers.
The first reason to visit Flores is the discovery in 2003 of a child-sized creature that lived just 18,000 years ago (other specimens later discovered lived as recently as 12,000 years ago). The scientists who described the find declared these to be a new species of the genus Homo, and named the group Homo floresiensis. They said that these proto-humans, standing less than a meter tall (about the height of a modern three-year old American child), with heads the size of grapefruits and weighing just 25 kilograms, were contemporary with Homo sapiens, but were not direct ancestors of our species. The investigators dubbed the creatures Hobbit Men.
The second trigger for visiting Flores was to investigate tales of ebu gogo, an orang pendek-like creature that inhabits the folk tales, if not the contemporary forests, of contemporary Flores.
The third, and most compelling reason was a statement that Boedhihartono had made a few months earlier, in which he had confidently declared “there are real Hobbits living in a village in Flores.” To which the only appropriate response was “What are you doing in July?”
Orang pendek-like creatures in Asia are so frequently mentioned in folk tales and anthropological literature – tua yeua in Thailand, ye ren of China, batutut of Sabah, sedapa of Sumatra, uyan of Sarawak, and nguoi rung of Vietnam, that in our book Soul of the Tiger, Jeff McNeely and I dubbed them untrahom (unidentified tropical Asian hominoids), or, more colloquially, “snowmen of the jungle”.
All three reasons for visiting Flores - Homo floresiensis, ebu gogo and real-life Hobbits, are variations on the idea that unusual small humanoids can be found throughout Asia. Reports of wild orang pendek (literally small folk), smaller tropical relatives of the more famous “yeti” or “Bigfoot”, have occurred frequently enough in China, Indochina, Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra to merit a skeptical inquiry. The orang pendek occupy a similar eco-cultural niche in tropical Southeast Asia to the Himalayan “yeti” which is said to inhabit the high mountains of Nepal.
In one frequently-quoted sighting, an Indonesian “short person of the forest” was reported on the island of Sumatra during the 1920s. A Dutch settler named van Herwaarden, who found an orang pendek in the deep Sumatran forest, was quoted by the Belgian naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans:
“The very dark hair on its head fell almost to the waist…(its) brown face was almost hairless. The eyes were very lively, and like human eyes. The nose was broad with fairly large nostrils, but in no way clumsy. Its lips were quite ordinary. Its canines showed clearly from time to time, they were more developed than a man’s. I was able to see its right ear which was exactly like a little human ear.”
Some respected scientists give cautious credence to the possibility that orang pendek might exist. John MacKinnon, the only scientist to have studied the three great apes in the wild, told me that he found footprints in Sabah, Malaysia, of an unidentified primate that were “so like a man’s yet definitely not a man’s that my skin crept and I felt a strange desire to return home.”
Philosopher-scientists have long speculated on man’s relationship with apes and “wild men”. Pliny elevated apes to “wild men”, and Leonardo da Vinci noted similarities between people and animals. Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in man and “trembled with delight” about the links this indicated between man and ape. Darwin at first, fearful of the fallout from creationists, avoided the subject of whether man evolved from apes.
Human-like apes roam the territory of primal myth. Most of us sophisticated city-dwellers have separated ourselves from these remnants of the collective unconscious. But I’ve always been curious about what survival benefits myths and legends have for mankind as a whole.
Among Asia’s forest people, who are in daily contact with “wild nature”, the various forms of ape-men are an ever present reminder of what it means to be man-like, yet not quite human. The creatures of the twilight world live in the forest, away from people, but people fear and respect both them and their forest home.
Even far from the rainforest, most societies tell tales of ape-men, perhaps because we need to be reminded of what our life might be like if we did not have culture, that uniquely human attribute. As the British philosopher Angus Hall suggests: “We need creatures like these to inhabit that strange borderland between fact and fantasy, and our interest lies not so much in whether they really exist but in the possibility that they may exist.”
Whether they exist or not, orang pendek inhabit an arena of research called cryptozoology – creatures in the wrong place or time such as the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, the ninki-nanka, a giant swamp-dwelling reptile reported from the Gambia, and a dinosaur in central Africa called Mokele-mbembe, whose name means “One that stops the flow of rivers.”
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 8