A Space of Refuge

Growing up, I took my house, my home, for granted. It was a space to play, to eat, and to sleep, but I rarely thought about it as an object of significance. But after speaking with a Bhutanese refugee named Sed, I was reminded that much of the world was not so lucky to be born into my situation. For Sed, a house meant everything.

For the first seven years of his life, Sed lived in impoverished, oppressive conditions as his family tried to flee from Bhutan. He described this period of his life as “very sad”, but didn’t elaborate. Things changed when he and his family became refugees in Nepal. The Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal meant at least temporary safety and some stability for Sed and his family. 

Sed told me that he does not remember much about his early childhood, but he does remember clearly when his family built their first house Nepal. Being a young child, Sed did not help much with the process of building the house, but helped to carry materials to and from the site. In 1993, the WFP (World Food Program) began to provide food and land to the refugees from Bhutan, causing more and more families to come to the camps, Sed’s among them.  Sed and his family built their house with their own hands, working day and night, often with little food, to finish construction. All this hands-on work and craftsmanship made the house all the more significant to Sed, and rendered a sense of pride and connection to the dwelling.

The sides were made of tall bamboo stalks placed vertically close together, held in place with string and a tacky mud and clay mixture. Bamboo and roofing material were provided to the refugees, and then assembled by the family. Heavy rain and wind slowed the building process, but once the house was finished, young Sed was relieved and overjoyed. Although simple, the house offered welcome shelter, accomplishment, and security. It had space for a small cooking device, five beds, and even a modest altar to show the family’s dedication to their Hindu religion. There were no decorations, but when the walls leaked they were patched with paper and plaster, and Sed often drew pictures with charcoal on the paper to serve as “something special to help us be happier”. 

A Bhutanese refugee camp

The shelter was the center of livelihood for Sed and his family. Small and cozy, Sed’s house was situated between two other almost identical ones, as part of a long row of refugee homes. Being in such close proximity meant that the house became a way to connect and help other people in the same situation. “Good luck to me for being a refugee”, were Sed’s words when I asked if he ever was unhappy with his house, his situation. He assured me that the ten years he spent in that house his family built were difficult at times, but “happy and whole”. Having a house was less about the actual building and space inside (Sed told me he actually spent very little time inside his home), but more about the community and friends he had because of it. Building and living in the house meant that you shared a community. If you were sick, you could go to your neighbor’s home and they would give you whatever they had to give, be it extra food, water, or just care. When they were unwell they trusted you to do the same. The small house gave him a bigger family.

Now Sed owns a different sort of house: an American apartment. He says the community cannot compare to the one back in Nepal. He misses washing his clothes in the river with his mother, misses sharing rice with his neighbors at their rice shed, and misses the simplicity of his life when his happiness was defined by safety and food in his stomach. Sed was the first of his family to leave the Nepalese refugee camp, and he is grateful for his modern, technically “better” life here, but still remembers his first house, and how it became an important home. His experiences and view about happiness and necessity are humbling, and I felt fortunate to hear his story. Sed’s incredible strength and positivity inspired me to look at my own home in a different way, and broadened my view of what happiness can be.

Death and Life

Visually, it’s easy to connect Gustav Klimt’s painting “Death and Life” to its title. Looking from left to right, the title of the piece delivers its promise: we first see a darkly robed skeletal figure, “death”, and our eyes then move to the right and come to rest upon the rosy-cheeked woman death has come to claim, as well as the billowing group of sleeping figures who envelope her, together representing “life”. As an artist of the Symbolist period, Klimt centered his painting around the grand and universally recognizable theme of mortality: the opposition of life and death. Many artists (and humans in general) have been fascinated with the portraying mortality. Gustave Klimt chose to depict the universally shared theme with his usual decorative and complex, yet balanced style. 

The solid green background of the painting recedes, and presents flat, undefined space, forcing us to focus on the shapes of life and death only. Death appears on the left as a vertical column robed in an eerie pattern of black crosses, and bears the hands and head of a skeleton. Clutching his scepter, death leers at “life”: the woman on the right. The woman’s face is placed on the center vertical axis of the painting (symbolically suggesting a border between death and life), and is part of a larger shape that extends behind her and almost fills the right half of the composition. Light-hued patterns hold the somewhat simplified, slumbering people behind the woman together, forming a distinct shape which balances death’s. 

In “Life and Death”, Klimt uses strong asymmetrical balance to dramatize the opposition between his two subjects. Although death occupies less physical space than life, their visual weight is equalized using two principles of balance. Life’s form is larger, but lighter in value, and death’s form is thinner, but rendered in much darker value, so our eye views them as balanced. Symbolism is the second key element which balances the two shapes. For the viewer, the idea of death (clearly displayed in the grave markers on the left-hand figure’s robe) carries more emotional weight, and contributes more subtly to the balance of the overall composition. 

Klimt also creates a striking stylistic balance in his use of abstract and representational forms. Although their nude bodies are simplified, the faces of the sleeping figures appear almost naturalistic in their accurate proportions and the careful shading of their features. The skull displays the same naturalistic quality because of its shading and detailed individual teeth. Klimt contrasts this quality with expressive abstraction throughout the rest of the painting in the form of detailed (and sometimes symbolic) pattern. These repetitive abstract patterns envelope and complement the detailed faces and lend a dreamlike quality to the piece, transforming the composition into two main forms of symbolic pattern against a simple backdrop. Klimt was careful to make the painting representational, but ensured that it could not be categorized as naturalistic because of the simplified bodies and obviously abstract patterns he utilized.

The gaze that passes between death and the woman whose life he has come to take links the two halves of the painting together. The implied line of sight between them pulls up toward the left corner of the composition, and Klimt balances this by bringing the shape on the right down and to the bottom right corner. This intense stare is also important symbolically. It represents the crossing of the often invisible line of mortality. The waking woman death has come for does not appear frightened, her open features display curiosity more than anything else. The men, women and child behind her (the “life” she is part of), all sleep soundly in their folds of bright, lively patterns, oblivious to the dark, cross-clad figure who has come for the woman who shares their world. The gesture of the woman’s hands imply an innocent inquiry, which death answers with his steady and morbid leer. 

In his interpretation of the interaction between the two sides of mortality, Klimt philosophizes on the delicacy of life itself, and how easily we can be swept away from it. He portrayed life and death equally, and showed the viewer how he imagined the decisive and macabre moment of their first meeting. Although precarious, there is a balance between the two concepts in Klimt’s composition, perhaps a subtle comment from the artist on the balance of life and death itself.