Enlightenment Projects: Contemporary Chinese Art-Making and Buddhism

Time: Thursday, 12 March, 2009, 4:00 pm
Samuel Alexander Building: S. 1. 5 (The Poetry Centre), Manchester

Introduction

Museums throughout the world are replete with Buddhist images in stone, metal, wood, clay, laquer, and on paper, cloth and plaster. Buddhist images are common in film, advertising, and on the Web. In East Asia, especially in Korea, Japan and Taiwan, depictions of the Buddhist pantheon are ubiquitous. One can see them in homes, restaurants, taxis and billboards. And, of course, in Buddhist temples: a single complex can house several hundreds images in all shapes and sizes.

This profusion of images is certainly not a new phenomenon, for image worship is central to Buddhism. Although Buddhism is often depicted as a religion of philosophers, some of the earliest writings extant in India, already offer a very different portrait of the Buddhist practitioner as one visually engaging with certain kinds of objects. Visual practices are represented as one of the primary means of cultivating faith, a necessary precondition for proceeding along the Buddhist spiritual path. In East Asia too, Buddhism has been associated with image veneration from the moment of its inception in the first century of the Common Era.

Today, several among China’s most prominent artists, including Zhang Huan, Chen Zhen, Yan Pei-ming and Kan Xuan, make references to Buddhism in their work. This fact raises some interesting and yet unexplored issues. For instance, how do we define an artist who proclaims to be making Buddhist art or Buddhist-inspired art? How do we question the nature of belief and inspiration in the contemporary global art market? Can we say that the works of contemporary Buddhist-inspired artists are any less sincere than those of their predecessors?

Certainly, in China at no period was there a single coherent ‘Buddhist art’, just as there was no single centralized Buddhist religious organization, nor a single type of interaction between those engaged full-time in the Buddhist religious life and other members of society. In our global age, at a time when the influence of Buddhism is eroding in some Asian contexts but growing in others, as well as in the West, one wonders if we can use the term ‘Buddhist art’. And if yes, should we then ask if and how this art will continue and what novel types of genres, styles and iconographies will it develop? Is it going to be something radically different from anything created before?

Written by Francesca Tarocco