Expressing Divinity, Evoking Devotion: Interweaving Networks surrounding Chinese Buddhist Artifacts

Since the mid-1980s, Igor Kopytoff and several scholars have vigorously proposed that studying the social lives of objects can provide clues to their cultural redefinitions and utility. Arjun Appadurai have expounded how “things-in-motion,” like artefacts, “circulate in specific cultural and historical milieus” and are hence encoded with changing social relations and contexts with every transaction, capable of ephemerally gathering moving peoples, objects, and ideas at each juncture.

In this same vein, Buddhist artefacts from imperial China are “culturally constructed [entities], endowed with culturally specific meanings,” yet variously reinterpreted and reincorporated when they transit through different contexts. From their initial production to subsequent circulations, these artefacts have been imbued with manifold values, often as humans’ expressions of divinity and other times, evocative of humans’ devotion. Chinese Buddhist artefacts thus make for promising case studies of transboundary, multi-layered histories and complex social networks.

Principally, presenters in this panel will employ an object-centric approach to revisit the social lives of imperial Chinese Buddhist artefacts, spanning across textiles, sculptures, relics, and books. In doing so, the panel shall spotlight the avid interactions amongst Buddhists, non- Buddhists, artisans, state actors, and others who had influenced the artefacts’ creations and journeys within and without China, from imperial to contemporary times. Further, the panel seeks to re-evaluate these understudied and overlooked networks of diverse communities interwoven by these artefacts, thereby contributing to and possibly challenging notions of transculturation, global art histories, museology, and other disciplines.

Session Convenor:

Guan-Fan Tan, National University of Singapore

Session Discussant-cum-Moderator:

Francesca Tarocco, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Speakers:

Thomas Cooper, University of Oxford

Twentieth-Century Circulations of an Eight-Century Chinese Buddhist Embroidery in Britain

In 1907, an eight-century textile, known as the Vulture Peak embroidery, was stolen from the Mogao Caves complex in north-west China by the archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel-Stein. The embroidery depicts the Buddha Śākyamuni preaching on a rocky peak and flanked by Bodhisattvas. Removed from a site of Buddhist devotion, the textile was then taken to the British Museum, London, where it was conserved by an embroiderer trained at the Royal School of Art Needlework, Miss E. A. Winters, and then displayed in a temporary exhibition organised by Florence Lorimer. Some years later, the embroidery appeared as the frontispiece to the book, Needlework Through the Ages, written by Mary Symonds and Louisa Preece, and published in 1928. This huge book tells the story of embroidery from its prehistoric origins to the modern day, and it draws on disciplines of art history, archaeology and ethnography.

In this paper, I seek to explore what we can learn from following this object’s physical and printed circulations in the early twentieth century. Addressing their entanglements with archaeology, looting, conservation, exhibition display and art historical writing, I address the following: what can this object’s twentieth-century mobilities tell us about the stakes of ancient Buddhist needlework in Britain? What can it tell us about women’s material and intellectual strategies in handling, presenting and historicising this object? And what non-religious values did the object accrue and express in its new home, where it remains for the foreseeable future?

Charlotte Ashby, Birkbeck, University of London

The British Museum Luohan: A Devotional Object re-encoded as Art

Following their theft in 1912 from the Yizhou caves, a group of stoneware figures of luohan, ‘appeared’ on the international art market. One was bought by the British Museum in 1913. This paper looks at the contemporary media presentation of this devotional object at a key moment in the creation of the Eurocentric category of ‘Chinese art’. In its new home within scholarship, museum and the art press, the luohan functioned as a bridge between established nineteenth-century discourses on sculpture and ceramics and evolving ideas of art.

The paper will analyse the mechanisms of this object’s inter-cultural translation as ‘Art’. This process took place in the context of transnational scholarship across Britain, Europe, American and Japan, which was marked by exchange, but also nationalist competition. It was used to contest the previously-constructed emphasis on Greek influence in Buddhist sculpture. The object-ness of the figure was emphasised in the absence of understanding of its original context and it was used to ratify new, institutionally-based expertise centred on formal analysis and new agendas about art. The discussions reveal a moment in art history in which competing values were in flux and objects from China were instrumentalised in the search for new authorities. In this manner the luohan was accorded a new value as part of a re-definition of art as a universal form of expression in which both its Buddhist and Chinese identity was minimised as it became ‘great art’.

Xinwei Xu, Edith Cowan University

Buddhist Artefact in Contemporary Art Practice: Artist’s reflection on the Non-linear Temporality, the Stolen Manuscripts and the Earliest Dated Printed Diamond Sutra

My research examines the Buddhist artefact of the Diamond Sutra (868) and my contemporary art practices based on this book. With a colophon showing that this book was printed in 868, the book is identified as the earliest dated printed book in the world. The sutra was initially discovered in Dunhuang, an important oasis town on the Silk Road in Northwest China. This book has undergone multiple restorations, firstly in China before being hidden in a desert cave and then by the British after it was illicitly sold and taken to the United Kingdom in 1909. The restorations have transformed the sutra into a palimpsest of repairs thereby altering the object in terms of containing multiple interventions of matter from the past and the present, making the sutra an object of non-linear temporality.

To understand the non-linear temporality of the Diamond Sutra (868), two field trips to Dunhuang, Gansu Province, were undertaken to examine the presence and absence of the sutra in the local area. The historical context was investigated, including the translation, pilgrimages and the history of the cave where the sutra was found as well as the restorations. I will also apply Deleuze’s theory of the fold and Chinese aesthetics to investigate how the sutra’s non-linear temporality is translated into artworks in the present through a traditional Chinese handmade paper used for printing since the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368).

Guan-Fan Tan, National University of Singapore

Bonding with Buddha: Art, Religion, and Diplomacy through Famen Temple Museum’s Travelling Exhibitions

Cutting across cultural diplomacy, religious diplomacy, Buddhist studies, and museum studies, this paper underscores Famen Temple Museum’s exhibitions as conduits of Buddhist diplomacy, exercised by China, Taiwan, and Japan, between 1999 and 2011. Beyond enabling Buddhist artefacts to travel across time and space, such exhibitions have engaged with state actors, Buddhist leaders, and masses, attracting immense media coverage in respective Asian polities. They have cemented the temple-museum’s eminence and augmented China’s “soft power” in the Chinese periphery and East Asia.

By conducting oral history and scrutinising primary and secondary sources in Shaanxi, I aspire to answer one central research question: How have Famen Temple Museum’s travelling artefact exhibitions fostered Buddhist and cultural diplomacy between China and its neighbouring polities? Situating these exhibitions within their changing sociopolitical and socioreligious climates, I will evaluate how aforementioned Asian polities perceived these artefacts, exhibitions, and temple-museum through their core symbolic value as Tang Buddhist cultural heritage, which has in turn fostered inter-polity diplomatic ties.

For each travelling exhibition, I examine the significance of select artefacts, especially relics, reliquaries, and Silk Road commodities, foreshadowing their widespread and high-profile reception. Next, I reconstruct existing relations between China and the relevant Asian polity, framing the historical contexts of these exhibitions. Later, I study the exhibition-making process, gathering the diversity of perspectives and manifold values imbued into them before, during, and after these displays. Last, I analyse the efficacy of these artefacts and exhibitions in promoting cultural and Buddhist diplomacy and bolstering inter-polity relations.