Pidan

Pidan, also called hol pidan, is a Khmer pictorial silk hanging, woven in weft ikat and traditionally hung in Buddhist pagodas. The hangings were most common in the south of Cambodia. Many were about 4 meters (13 feet) long and hung from the pagoda ceiling, above the main Buddha image. Their images tell Buddhist stories, and giving one to a pagoda was a way to make merit.

A pidan with scenes from the Jataka tales, Cambodia, late 19th century. Art Institute of Chicago.

Tradition details
Also known as	Hol pidan
Practice type	Craft practice
Subjects	Crafts & Material Culture

Technique

Pidan is made with hol, the Khmer word for ikat. In this method the silk threads are tied and dyed in a planned pattern before weaving begins. Weavers stretch the weft, the crosswise thread, on a wooden frame. They bind small sections of it with strips of banana leaf and then dip the bundle in a dye bath. Rounds of tying and dyeing in deep red, bright yellow and dark blue build up the pattern on the threads. Finally the dyed thread goes onto spools, and the cloth is woven as a twill. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago both describe their pidan as silk twill with a resist-dyed weft.

The pidan master Soung Mich said in 2014 that one pidan holds between 100 and 1,000 ikats, and that the weaver has to plan the height and size of each element of the picture. Depending on its design, one piece takes from three months to a year to finish. Some older pieces carry a design that never repeats along their whole length. Most weavers are women, who learn the story by heart in order to weave it.

Imagery

Many pidan show scenes of the Vessantara Jataka, a story from the Buddha's past lives. Others show Wats, scenes from the life of the Buddha, apsaras (celestial dancers) and nagas, the serpents of Khmer myth. The pidan at the Cooper Hewitt in New York shows the Three Worlds of Buddhist cosmology in three bands. Hell is at the bottom, with mythical lions facing each other among flowering trees and birds. The earth is in the middle, where royal elephants face a pagoda. The pagoda's tall spire rises into heaven, in the top band.

Gillian Green, in her book Traditional Textiles of Cambodia, wrote that pidan were woven in the greatest numbers in the 50 years up to about 1926. Pieces from that time often show a ship, drawn plainly or as a symbol, among sea creatures such as crabs, turtles, sharks and seahorses. Birds, dragons and a tree of life that joins the world of people to the underworld also appear.

Religious use

Until the early 1970s, women in the villages wove pidan and gave them to the nearest pagoda or monastery to make merit. Green wrote that donors, probably wealthy ones given the cost of a fine piece, commissioned pidan to give to pagodas. Pidan were usually hung in village pagodas for religious ceremonies. Khmer people do not wear them, because they regard them as meant for the divine.

History

The Cambodia Daily wrote that the origin of pidan, like that of most traditional arts, is obscure. A curator of paintings at the National Museum of Cambodia said in 2024 that the exact date of the craft's creation is unknown. The writer Jean Morel de Froissart noted that the word pidan appears in Sanskrit inscriptions from at least the 12th century. The Cambodia Daily, drawing on Green's book, wrote that from the 1960s pidan were also made as artworks with no religious purpose.

The Murray Art Museum Albury, in Australia, says on its exhibition page that pidan came close to disappearing because the Khmer Rouge regime targeted weavers for persecution, and that little of the ancestral weaving knowledge survived. Chhay Visoth, director of the museums department, said that the National Museum once held 415 textiles, and that more than 300 of them had gone missing, for unclear reasons, after the Khmer Rouge regime ended. By 1991 no major pidan was left in the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Fine examples were held abroad, among them pieces at Japan's Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.

Revival

Caring for Young Khmer is the Cambodian branch of the Japanese organization Caring for Young Refugees. That organization started teaching weaving in 1980 at Khao I Dang, a refugee camp in Thailand, and a few Cambodian weavers there made pidan from time to time. When Caring for Young Khmer came to Cambodia in 1991, after the Paris Peace Agreement, it found that pidan had nearly been lost and that most weavers did not know of it. Its weaving center is in Trapaing Krasaing village, in Bati district of Takeo province. By 2014 it had trained 172 weavers since 1993, and it had added a pidan course for advanced students, taught by Soung Mich. Eight weavers had finished that course.

The Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles was founded in Phnom Penh in 1996 by Kikuo Morimoto and later moved to Siem Reap province. Both organizations train weavers in the technique and sell their work to tourists and foreign residents. The textile researcher Magali An Berthon wrote that the practice is quite rare in Cambodia and that pidan had become decorative goods, moving away from their religious role in rural life. Young buyers hang them in homes and offices. The National Museum curator said that because of their high price, pidan are seldom bought for religious use.

A group of Japanese volunteers, among them Harumi Sekiguchi, the director of Caring for Young Khmer, held pidan exhibitions and set out to find fine pidan to give to the National Museum. Chhay Visoth said that since 2008, gifts from Cambodian and foreign donors had raised the museum's collection to 72 pidan. In August 2023 a Japanese project team of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts gave the museum 41 pidan.

Exhibitions

The Pidan Project Team and the National Museum of Cambodia held their first pidan exhibition in 2010. Their second, Revitalizing Khmer Treasure – Pidan: Pictorial Ikat Silk, ran at the museum from January 25 to April 27, 2014. It showed 15 pidan, 12 belonging to the team and three from the museum's collection, with photographs and the raw materials for natural dyes. The Tokyo Club funded it.

The same year, the exhibition Reviving Pidan at the Insider Gallery of the InterContinental Hotel showed new pidan by Soung Mich and his advanced students. All were colored with natural dyes. Soung Mich's own piece showed an episode from the life of Prince Siddhartha, who became the Buddha.

In museum collections

Pidan are held in museums in many countries. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a ceremonial hanging dated 1900 to 1930, made in Takeo, with Kampot Province also named on its record. The Art Institute of Chicago has one dated 1875 to 1925. The Cooper Hewitt's Three Worlds hanging is dated 1900 to 1969.

In contemporary art

Since 2023 the Cambodian-Australian artist Linda Sok has woven the series Deities in Temples. Its works re-imagine lost pidan from the written descriptions on old registration cards kept by the National Museum of Cambodia. For some old weavings, those cards are the only record that they existed. Sok said that the word pidan means ceiling in Khmer, and that the hangings were placed on the ceilings of Wats to be viewed from below.

References