Located just outside the town of Lampbang, an hour southeast of Chiang Mai, Idin Paper Mill occupies farmland given as a wedding gift to Acharn Supan Promsen and his wife Praewpan Promsen, a writer, by her mother. Acharn Supan has transformed the land into a papermaker's garden by planting saa (known as "Thai kozo," from the same mulberry family as Japanese kozo), banana, bamboo, heliconia, and papyrus. Over tea and paper samples in Supan and Praewpan's sunny new house, we discussed bringing art students from the University to Idin Paper Mill and having Acharn Supan teach in the new papermaking program. As I shared some samples of flax papers from a workshop led by Helmut Becker, Tepsiri Sooksopa acknowledged that he knew Becker's work. Supan spoke of a recent visit by Elaine Koretsky and of his membership in the Friends of Dard Hunter. Quiet and unassuming, Acharn Supan moves among his workers, who likewise appear in no hurry. He occasionally directs them in a voice not much above a whisper. "Steady as she goes" could be Acharn Supan's motto. Yet since 1986 Idin Paper Mill has grown like bamboo�one of the fastest growing plants�into a respected papermill that exports artist papers, stationery, and books to customers in Europe and Japan. As his first career, Acharn Supan taught high school physics in Pitsanulok, Thailand. His disillusionment with teaching led him to his other love, writing. While attempting to publish a new journal of contemporary Thai literature, he read an article that changed his life, by the prominent Thai painter and papermaker Kamol Tassananchalee. Kamol, a long-time resident of Los Angeles, is well known for his paper and multi-media constructions, which combine native American motifs and traditional Thai and Buddhist imagery. Following Kamol's instructions for recycling art papers, Acharn Supan made his first sheet of handmade paper. He later studied the craft of papermaking from books that friends gave him. His teachers-in-print included Vance Studley, Dard Hunter, Jules Heller, and Timothy Barrett. Acharn Supan's science training serves him well. Part of what makes him a quality papermaker is simple scientific methodology. He understands the chemistry involved in the cooking, washing, bleaching, and coloring processes, and he keeps careful records of his experiments. His experience growing saa, banana, bamboo, and other fibers gives him a command of the process, and results in the highest quality papers I encountered during my research in Thailand and Laos. In contrast, the other papermakers I saw around Chiang Mai give little care to fiber quality or paper integrity: the time-consuming step of cleaning the fiber has been abandoned and harsh cooking, chlorine bleaching, and chemical dyes produce lifeless sheets in strident colors. Other paper fibers used at Idin Paper Mill include pineapple, rice straw, and dtow hi, a gampi-like fiber that grows only at Thailand's highest elevations. The first-hand knowledge gained from growing and experimenting with these and other fibers make Supan a valuable source of information, and makes Idin Paper Mill an ideal place for the visiting paper artist. I will return to Idin Paper Mill to learn better how to use these fibers in my own work. Because the mill uses as much as forty kilograms in a day, the farm's harvest of saa fiber has not been sufficient to meet production needs. Therefore, the mill purchases most of its saa from a distributor in Sukothai, Thailand. Today saa fiber originates predominately in Laos, where it is not yet depleted and where labor is cheaper. Earlier, in a tiny village along the Mekong River, I had seen small bundles of saa bark, apparently awaiting transport via one of the large riverboats to Luang Phrabang. Walking along the Mekong in this stunning ancient Lao capital three days later, I watched truckloads of saa being graded and packed inside a giant warehouse. The woman in charge told me the price: only about twenty-five cents per pound! She confirmed that the saa being loaded onto large boats was bound for Chiang Mai. Idin Paper Mill is the only place in Thailand where I personally saw a scale used to measure caustic additives for cooking fiber, although I know that some other Thai mills use them. Acharn Supan cooks saa fiber with either 5-10% caustic soda or 10-15% soda ash. The whitest fiber requires little or no bleaching; the darker grades are bleached, after cooking and washing, in an 8-10% hydrogen peroxide bath. The bleaching is enhanced by adding sodium silicate, which retards the escape of nascient oxygen�the active bleaching agent�when the hydrogen peroxide and water are heated to 90 degrees C. Supan's science background and his dedication to quality are what distinguish his craftsmanship from that of any other papermaker I visited in Thailand. He does not, however, rely on formula to determine when the fiber is sufficiently cooked. Through close attention to the process over the years he has developed an experienced hand; simply by poking and pushing the fiber in the pot with a stick, Supan knows when the cooking is finished. Acharn Supan's first beater was a gift from Tepsiri Sooksopa. Every paper mill I saw in Thailand uses mechanical beaters. (However, at one small Lao papermaking business, in Luang Phrabang, I did see the saa bark traditionally beaten by hand, with wooden mallets.) The machine beating apparently causes no deleterious effects because the beater roll is never lowered close to the bedplate. Since little force is required to separate the fibers of saa, Thai beaters are not constructed to beat cotton or linen. I believe that no Hollander beaters in Thailand are capable of producing cotton papers; I had hoped that Chiang Mai University would acquire the first one. In November, I hastily arranged a second visit to Idin before returning to the United States. My position at Chiang Mai University had fallen victim to drastic budget cuts forced by Thailand's economic crisis. Just a few days before I left Thailand, I went to Tepsiri Sooksopa's studio to ask for Supan's phone number. He informed me that a group was working at Idin. During our first meeting Acharn Supan had mentioned the prospect of hosting a tour group led by Elaine Koretsky. Since November 1996 I had corresponded off and on with Koretsky about my project at the University, but we had yet to meet in person. Pure coincidence put all of us at Idin in November 1997. Koretsky has researched and written about papermaking in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, for more than twenty years. For the last few years she has conducted small study tours of China, Burma, and Thailand. The workshop at Idin Paper Mill concluded a group tour through Burma and Thailand. The group included Giselle Mandl (Switzerland), Miriam Londono (Colombia), Randi Studsgarth (Denmark), Renate Habinger (Austria), and Neal Bonham and Suzanne Ferris (Seattle). After the workshop, Koretsky described the experience to me in a letter: Although I was enormously impressed with Supan Promsen's papermaking when I visited him in 1996, I was still nervous about bringing my group of eight highly individual artist/papermakers to Lampbang, particularly after our rigorous trip through central Burma. But I can only say that the three days at Supan's workshop were truly splendid...we had loads of fun, certainly learned how to make paper Thai-style, enjoyed the beauty of the place and the warm hospitality of Supan, his wife, and the papermaking staff, and we had an unforgettable lesson in bookbinding that featured the use of just three tools, namely, a sharp knife, a china teacup and a toothbrush! After the tour group went to their guesthouse for the evening, Supan invited me to join him for dinner at a table outside. Leaning back-to-back across the lawn, drying on Idin's traditional bamboo moulds, the group's colorful pulp paintings spoke of the day's melding of Thai papermaking and Western artistry. In the soft evening light, Supan showed me a photograph of his largest project to date: a hautsadeeling the size of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. This mythic, Phoenix-like creature has a bird's body and an elephant's head. Its function is to transport a deceased soul to heaven, and is affectionately referred to as a "spiritual jumbo jet." Commissioned for the January 1995 cremation of an important monk in Chiang Rai, the beautiful skin of red and white saa paper covers a bamboo armature. Acharn Supan worked for months making this hautsadeeling, being paid merely enough to cover his expenses. Construction was taking much too long, and the day of the ceremony, during which the structure would be burned, was fast approaching. Acharn Supan told me: I asked the bamboo craftsman making the hautsadeeling structure to speed up, to make it more quickly, with less quality. He said "No, this is how I work." I think he is right. Once you have made high quality, you do not want to go back and make lower quality. It was dark by this time. I had to hurry back to Chiang Mai and finish packing for my return to Baltimore. Acharn Supan once again invited me to come back to Idin to work in his studios, and to bring other artists with me. I look forward to accepting his invitation in November of this year.
