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by Tiane Doan na Champassak.
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Photographs by Tiane Doan na Champassak
the (M) éditions, Paris, France, 2024. French, 224 p pp., 56 photographs, 6½x10¾".
What was your favorite book growing up? This was a question posed over dinner by a multi-hyphenate novelist at an artist residency I recently attended, comprising mostly Young Adult writers who ponder the adolescent reading experience in ways that I, a child-free visual artist, do not. The question intrigued me as it inspired a round-table discussion among accomplished adults — New York Times bestselling authors, screenwriting professors, award-winning composers, graphic novelists — reminiscing over Star Wars and The Babysitters Club with what I can only describe as high-brow earnestness. The obvious fact I had failed to realize until that moment was that childhood stories brand our psyches forever, that what we devour ravenously and repeatedly are one of few choices we are free to make for ourselves at a young age. These fictions can enhance an already enchanting upbringing or salve a bad one. Whichever respectable titles you announce as a respectable adult performing cultural literacy before other respectable adults will never hold a candle to that one book — you know which one — that transformed protracted afternoons into timeless portals a decade or five ago.
For artist Tiane Doan Na Champassak, that one book was Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth — the tale of a German mad scientist who, in search of volcanic tubes extending to the center of the earth, joins forces with his nephew and a subterranean tour guide to dive through Mesozoic strata, prehistoric creatures, and otherworldly phenomena by entering an inactive volcano in Iceland and erupting back to Earth’s surface through an active one in Italy, with all of the requisite lessons and gambles along the way. This literary expedition is punctuated with fifty-six illustrations by Édouard Riou, and together these pictures and words entered the canon of early science fiction.
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Champassak’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, recently published by The(m) Éditions, is in conversation with Jules Verne in as much as it is with the artist’s boyhood self. In it, the photographer sets out on his own journey — not to the center of the earth, but to Laos, home of Xe Bang Faï, one of the world’s largest river caves most easily accessed via kayak spelunking. He documents this geologic wonder on color film and returns home. He then superimposes his pictures over Riou’s illustrations; fifty-six photographs of the river, alternatively processed with unspecified “unusual substances” which alchemize a diaphanous grotto into aqueous abstractions. Was Xe Bang Faï the “center of the earth” for the artist, his own dreamt odyssey realized in adulthood? I can only imagine so.
There are a few entry points into this hefty tome of a Hero’s Journey-turned-artist book. To begin, I should mention that its narrative text is entirely in French. It is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of an early edition of Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre, published in the late nineteenth century in the heart of Paris and presumably mimicking the version Champassak first encountered in his youth. So, if you are a lapsed or aspiring francophone, wanting to level up from Le Petit Prince but not yet ready to delve into Colette or the grammatical Mount Everest that is Proust, alors, ce livre est pour vous.
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Language lesson aside, this reconceptualized version of Journey to the Center of the Earth is a sumptuous visual object; relatively narrow and long, and hardbound in a satiny emerald green. It is substantial, like an imperial object anchored to a grandfather’s bookshelf. The titular front matter is debossed into the jewel-toned cover; an elegant invitation to touch. Each C-print of the river cave is only partially adhered to its corresponding illustration, which allows for a tactile game of hide-and-seek and serves as a reminder that découpage was invented by the French. The pages are matte, textured, and studded with a constellation of ink blots and blemishes, while the photographs that appear every couple of turns provide a counterpoint of saturated, velvety sleekness. If you’ve ever dabbled in papyrophilia, been seduced by stationary too good to use, used the term “chromatic variation”, “cotton rag”, or “GSM” to describe paper in casual conversation, then might I suggest that you peruse the backlog of The(m) Éditions titles. They are a consummate book lover’s book maker.
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Finally, the images: a scavenger hunt of gemstones, brilliantly incorporated into the text and thus easily overlooked as their own sparkling objects. Celadon and cobalt and charcoal swirl and bubble to the photographic surface in a variety of liquified forms, obscuring the mysteriously delineated human silhouettes that occasionally appear like tiny Matisse drawings in a midnight swimming pool. The photographs invite imagination and wonder by suggesting more than they describe, and while they could be renderings of a Laotian river cave or underground volcanic tubes or even the walls of Lascaux, that is hardly the point. To encounter this book is to return ever so briefly to a childhood fantasy, but better, with twice the number of pictures.
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