NZ Visual Diary - entry 445
Eternity – Tianlongshan Grottoes Bodhisattva, Winged Victory of Samothrace
A current exhibit at the Auckland Art Gallery is a show of contemporary Chinese art across much of visual arts media from painting, photography and sculpture to video and mixed media installations. The exhibition examines how rapid urbanisation, globalisation and shifting social values have reshaped artistic practice.
The gallery’s atrium foyer hosts a large-scale stone sculpture — today’s photograph — which combines a Buddhist figure representative of China’s Tianlongshan grottoes with the form of the Greek sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace.
In terms of scale, curator Hutch Wilco describes it as a 7-metre-high, 3-tonne carved stone sculpture that towers in the atrium foyer — it was so large it had to be jimmied through the back doors with mere inches to spare.
The work fuses two of the supreme icons of Eastern and Western artistic tradition — the Winged Victory representing the apex of ancient Greek achievement and the Bodhisattva representing the highest spiritual ideal of Buddhist civilisation. By joining them head-to-head (literally — the Buddha figure is inverted and grafted at the neck of the Winged Victory), Xu Zhen stages a collision between two distinct cosmologies, neither of which can claim primacy over the other.