Recontextualising the Dong Duong Buddhist art gallery at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 29/10/2021

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series.

Speaker:  Duyen Nguyen (SOAS)
Discussant: Rie Nakamura (Asian Cultures Research Institute)
Chair: Conan Cheong (Asian Civilisations Museum)

Constructed in 875 CE under the reign of Indravarman II, the Đồng Dương Monastery was once the largest Buddhist sites of the Champa kingdoms. Excavations conducted by the École française d'Extrême-Orient in the early 20th century unearthed numerous Buddhist artefacts dating to around the 9th and 10th centuries, which are today exhibited at many museums in Vietnam and abroad. This lecture critically examines the Đồng Dương Buddhist gallery at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. It argues that the current display is an attempt to re-contextualize the original landscape of the Đồng Dương monastery and the significance of the Đồng Dương Buddhist art tradition. However, due to the employment of modern “museological devices”, insufficient interpretation and the gaps caused by absent objects it is argued that what results is a de-contextualized display which is largely inaccessible to museum viewers. My analysis of the display also aims to provide a context within which we can see problems in the curation of this gallery from the colonial to the post-colonial period.