EAST-SOUTHEAST: Special Issue of Journal18 (#4, Fall 2017)

Journal18, Issue 4 East-Southeast (Fall 2017), http://www.journal18.org/2056. DOI: 10.30610/4.2017.4, 2017

The eighteenth century stands as a neglected period in the study of the mosques of Southeast Asia (Fig. 1). The major scholarly surveys of Southeast Asia’s mosque architecture that go beyond description either focus on examples from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,[1] or restrict their analysis to Java, where examples from these earlier centuries—particularly the mosques of Demak and Kudus from Central Java (Figs. 2 and 3)—constitute the received canon in examinations of the region’s mosque architecture.[2] The short studies that do include mosques from the eighteenth century and after either still give more extensive treatment to earlier buildings;[3] or are descriptive and limited by present-day national boundaries, such as Indonesia.[4] This article thus departs from tradition by comparing a selection of eighteenth-century mosques from Melaka (Malacca), Malaysia; Palembang, Sumatra, Indonesia; and Jakarta (colonial Batavia), Java, Indonesia. It discusses aspects of their spatial and structural characteristics, including the form of their minarets, in order to shed light on the region’s eighteenth-century history, on the architecture of Southeast Asian mosques, and on the built environment of maritime and littoral regions more generally.

in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Volume 2. From the Mongols to modernism, edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gulru Necipoğlu, 996-1022. Series: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History no. 12. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119069218.ch38, 2017

This chapter explores the bases for claiming the formation of a Nusantara Islamic architecture and how the Nusantara case can be situated within larger discussions regarding the constitution of Islamic architecture in general. The exact processes behind the Islamization of such a large maritime region are complex, but they include changes in trade hegemony with the political decline of the pre-Islamic trading empires of Nusantara, the charismatic role of Arab proselytizers, including those based in Indian and southern Chinese ports, and the popular appeal of orthodox Sufi orders (tariqas). The vast archipelago region, or Nusantara, inevitably forms the focus of a survey of “Southeast Asian” Islamic architecture, in contradistinction to the predominantly Buddhist mainland. Ties of diplomacy and trade have linked the maritime communities of Nusantara and West Asia since the pre-Islamic period. One oft-quoted basis for synthesis in Southeast Asian Islam comes from metaphysical speculation and theological debates in orthodox Sufism.

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, 2017

This chapter explores the bases for claiming the formation of a Nusantara Islamic architecture and how the Nusantara case can be situated within larger discussions regarding the constitution of Islamic architecture in general. The exact processes behind the Islamization of such a large maritime region are complex, but they include changes in trade hegemony with the political decline of the pre-Islamic trading empires of Nusantara, the charismatic role of Arab proselytizers, including those based in Indian and southern Chinese ports, and the popular appeal of orthodox Sufi orders (tariqas). The vast archipelago region, or Nusantara, inevitably forms the focus of a survey of “Southeast Asian” Islamic architecture, in contradistinction to the predominantly Buddhist mainland. Ties of diplomacy and trade have linked the maritime communities of Nusantara and West Asia since the pre-Islamic period. One oft-quoted basis for synthesis in Southeast Asian Islam comes from metaphysical speculation and theological debates in orthodox Sufism.

Muslim Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Diversity and Pluralism, Past and Present, 2023

The moments when Islam is adopted by new peoples can be one of the most exciting for Islamic art and architecture. What elements of local culture were adapted to new purposes, and which were borrowed from other Muslim traditions? In the case of Nusantara, where Islam came late and penetrated slowly inwards from the coastal areas, the choices were many, ranging from the decorative exuberance of major cultic buildings of the previously dominant powers in the area, the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire (1293 - early 16rh century) and its Buddhist and Hindu predecessors, to more soberly constructed vernacular architecture, and to the cultures of Arab, Persian, Indian and Chinese traders, Muslim and non-Muslim, who had been plying their wares through the Malacca straits for centuries. I argue that the Nusantara examples’ marrying of the grid plan, based primarily on earlier nine-bay examples, to the Chinese frame system, together with the vernacular tiered roofing system, resulted in a style that the was one of the most original in the Dar al-Islam. One of the wali sanga, Sunan Kalijaga, reputedly employed the Javanese shadow puppet theater (wayang) as an aid to spreading Islam. It is therefore not surprising, perhaps, that the syncretism that is seen in mosque plans is equally evident in decoration. This syncretistism has often been remarked upon, but I revisit some of the most important early examples to argue that Chinese motifs have an almost equal footing with pre-Islamic Javanese ones.

2007

Central subject of this dissertation is the Pair of doors, Lawon kori, dated circa 1560, from the collection of Asian Art at the Gallery of South Australia. The Lawon kori was made in Lampung, a South Sumatra society that embraced Islam in the sixteenth century and so it could be regarded as an example of Islamic art of Southeast Asia. This object was selected for research in order to examine the development of early Islamic art in the region and its relationship to the wider world of Islamic aesthetics. The second part of the thesis is an analysis of the Lawon kori that may be described as among the most important sculptural objects of early Islamic art to survive from Southeast Asia. The visual language of the Lawon kori demonstrably emerges from its anonymous maker's understanding of Islamic belief, which had become interwoven with the local aesthetic traditions of the Lampung community. The work of art is a testament to the diversity of expression that existed within the uni...

in Architectural-ized Asia, edited by Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Ken Oshima and Hazel Hahn, 121-138. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press., 2013

Conventionally, "Asian" or "Oriental" architectural history is narrated according to the groupings "Saracenic" or "Islamic," "Indian" (encompassing the temple traditions of South Asia and Southeast Asia), and "Far Eastern" (covering China, japan, and Korea). Standard architectural surveys of "Asia" have thus inherited categories constituted on the basis of either physical or political geography, or religion. Their continued, uncritical application has obscured the full complexity of links within and beyond "Asia." Nuances in Javanese Indic and Islamic architecture have long befuddled these schemas. Living at the southern limits of Southeast Asia, the Javanese are the world's largest group of Austronesian speakers.' Javanese temples from the eighth to fifteenth centuries present what several scholars have claimed as Southeast Asia's strongest original response to lndic architecture.2 Meanwhile, in Java's Hindu and Buddhist sanctuaries since the eighth century and in its Islamic palaces and mosques since the fifteenth century, one finds hip-roof pavilions on plinths that have more in common with eastern Indonesia and Oceania than with much of Southeast Asia. This essay begins by investigating how various texts have articulated the enigmatic position of Java or omitted it entirely, and reviews the remarks by numerous scholars on the difficulty of placing java in Asia's regional or religious categorical schemes. It then discusses specific typological aspects of Javanese architecture through examples from Java's Indic (Hindu-Buddhist) and Islamic periods that problematize these categories. These examples demonstrate Java's engagement with Asia through their use as structures conveying Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic symbolism and accommodating associated rituals. Yet, their features and symbolism simultaneously indicate continuities with the art and architecture of the Austronesian world to which Java also belongs. Java's embeddedness in its Austronesian context through shared material culture and systems of symbolic meaning has been largely overlooked with the focus on "Asia" as the frame of comparison and analysis. The categories used to analyze the architecture of large entities such as "Asia"---or for that matter "the Austronesian world"---are never immutable or natural, but are contingent and useful for their productive possibilities as comparative frameworks to certain limits. I conclude by reviewing the implications of the foregoing discussion on the limits of "Asia" as a framework for architectural historiography.

Geographical Review, 2013

Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2014

This dissertation reconceptualizes the notion of built environment against the religious culture of East Asia in the early medieval period. Through a study of domical building forms in brick, cave and timber, the author argues, as interior devices domical forms are central to the architectural tradition of East Asia in the creation of sacral spaces. At the heart of this dissertation are three significant case studies which transcend religious and national boundaries. Starting with Buddhist cave temples preserved at Dunhuang in northwestern China, the author probes into the beginning and early permutations of a particular cave type (fifth through the late sixth centuries), which, despite its square plan, evinces artistic endeavors, plastic and painterly, to inscribe a domed circular space within the square. The next case study takes place in eighth-century Nara, then the newly established capital of Japan, where the earliest timber "circular" buildings on record are found, with the qualification that they are, in fact, octagonal in plan and yet are almost unanimously considered circular in contemporaneous documents. Finally, larger issues pertaining to technology, ideology, and the domical form are explored in the contexts of mortuary and ritual buildings in China. On the one hand, the author charts technological advancement in brick construction which laid the ground for the emergence of a complete cosmos in Chinese tombs at the dawn of the Common Era. In the meantime, however, discussions of the series of failed attempts to construct the domical ritual structure of the Bright Hall from this period onwards reveal a case of how excessive expectations on the dome's capacity to signify undermined its own realization in material form. These three case studies, viewed jointly, also afford a picture of the material culture of religious practice in East Asia in this period. Architectural forms are shown to be no mere physical spaces in which religious images are placed. Rather, as representations and enclosures, they enjoyed a meaning and status equivalent to their pictorial or sculptural counterparts. Dissertation Committee: Jerome Silbergeld (Primary Advisor), Andrew Watsky, Stephen F. Teiser, Cary Y. Liu.