THE TEN COURTS OF THE KINGS OF HELL
Simon Redington on his jouney
to the heart of moral allegory
One early spring morning in March 1997, on my first visit to the Far East I found myself wandering through the ornate and impressive colonial building on Nguyen Thai Hoc street that has become the Museum of Fine Art in Hanoi, Vietnam. I walked through large rooms filled with lacquered statues of Buddhas and heroic paintings of the victorious North Vietnamese army marching through the jungles down what was formerly known as the Ho Chi Minh trail, the colours gold and red predominant. I entered another large room where I was confronted by a row of ten images framed closely together and collectively entitled 'The Ten Courts of the Kings of Hell'. I was immediately struck, drawn in by the labyrinthine depth of these austere and cruel paintings. Lacquer- painted on wood, they had been executed 300 years previously in Ha Tay province bordering Hanoi. An inscription below each frame named each king represented but this was the only information available. The paintings had the same format; a long, thin, vertica l rectangle, a traditional Chinese visual device used for both perspective and storytelling. The images are divided in half by a desk with a king sitting behind in judgement, his clerics and mandarins by his side in all their finery, holding festival flags or scrolls of parchment. By contrast the lower section of the paintings contain hugely inventive displays of macabre torture. Scenes of brutal carnage counter the elegance of each intricate pageant as grotesque demons with animal heads chain dead souls together, beating them towards their designated fate. Scenes from the work of Hieronymus Bosch hold obvious comparisons, however these paintings are very oriental in form and content: a different cultural narrative, both exotically alien and curiously familiar. So dreadful are these punishments they appear almost as 'Punch and Judy' pantomime. Although profoundly solemn this sense of theatre is continued in the uppermost part of each of the ten scenarios with the top curtain of a proscenium arch. Could it all be just an eerie masquerade? The unraveling of fragmentary and often contradictory information thereafter relied on a series of chance encounters and detective work. Over the next few visits to Hanoi I started making hundreds of sketches standing in front of the paintings, collecting drawings of the myriad curves and folds of each design. Afterwards I would make full-scale transpositions from my sketches so as to map out the formal arrangements that enable the allegory to unfold. On my travels around the country I visited pagodas and temples where I would discover other images of the same ten kings; often presented as mannequins or in bas-relief rather than paintings.
At this point I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Professor Phan Ngoc Khue. He spent time with me talking through the Buddhist concept of the circle of life, day and night, yin and yang, reincarnation and so-forth: the laws of causality, a dense subject. I had always related Buddhism to the acceptance of a benign peacefulness, one of the least damaging religions, the religion of non-religions no less. I was surprised to see such grizzly icons. Professor Khue explained that the allegory of the ten kings was a moral code similar to the Ten Commandments or the ten laws of morality set out in the Koran. He said however that statements of Buddhism should not be seen as final teachings but rather the opening strategies of dialogue.
After spending the morning with Professor Khue I elaborated on my interest in the subject. I explained that I was an artist not a Buddhist scholar and therefore looking at the paintings with an artist's eye. I enthusiastically expressed my hope to make full-size drawings of them in print and return to Hanoi the following year with a folio of the finished result. 'So soon!' was his quizzical reply…
Over the next few years I continued drawing from the image, transposing the design from colour to line and then tones of black and white employing the richness of the etching medium. An unfamiliar 'hands off' approach letting the medium transform the image.
The folio took over five years before completion; working in intense periods of time at my studio in London where I have the facilities for etching and letterpress, then back to Hanoi. I have never worked on a folio of images so closely interlinked. Orchestrating the details, twists and curls of all ten motifs simultaneously at stages became mind-boggling.
The universal resonance of these moral allegories led me to make comparisons with other descriptions of Hell. Although written in 14th century renaissance Italy, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri proved to be a compelling source of insight. On the interleaving pages that complete the folio are printed ornaments of Buddhist symbolism with oblique quotes from The Inferno. Combining these grandiose decorations with lurid prose provide an affidavit of uncanny synchronicity, which help guide the viewer through the myths surrounding the images.
The Ten Courts of the Kings of Hell are no light testament. It was their serious, quiet solemnity that first beguiled and intrigued me, and makes them particularly relevant today. They are representations of the acceptance of a natural order, the order that confronts us all. If we are to believe in remorse and redemption then we must also believe in the consequences of our actions. The awe-inspiring sense I gathered from the myth displayed in these images however does not just come from the consequences of one's own.
