Collector Alice Kandell enshrines Tibetan Buddhist artifacts at home

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Ted Loos

Alice Kandell, surrounded by her collection of 17th- to 19th-century Buddhist art.Credit Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

The story of how Alice S. Kandell discovered Tibetan Buddhist art sounds like the plot of a fanciful movie. These days, her Upper East Side apartment features around 250 objects, largely from Tibet. Many are bronzes depicting the Buddha and other deities. The collection includes household objects like teacups, too, and the bulk of the trove was made between the 17th and 19th centuries, what she called the high-water mark of Tibetan art. Most stunning is a dedicated shrine room that is richly layered with at least 100 pieces, including a ceremonial dagger, prayer beads and multiple bronzes, arranged as they might have been in a noble family’s home. [More]

Ancient magic of Tibetan thangka continues to flourish

THE TELEGRAPH
By Zhang Dandan

Lodrui Palsang, a master thangka painter, is one of the few recognised thangka inheritors in Tibet CREDIT: DAQIONG/CHINA DAILY

Thangka paintings, originating more than 1,300 years ago, were traditionally kept unframed and rolled up when not on display. In the early days, these painted scrolls became very popular with travelling monks because of their portability and flourished especially in the 14th and 15th centuries, according to Lodrui Palsang, an inheritor of the Tibetan thangka. Lodrui Palsang is a third-generation inheritor of the art. His grandfather was a famed thangka painter and mask craftsman, who painted and restored plenty of the frescoes for local Tibetan temples. Currently, Lodrui Palsang earns his living by painting murals for rebuilt and expanded temples with no need for extra subsidies from the government. He also teaches apprentices and to date the 35-year-old has taught more than 30 to create thangka. [More]

Happy Thanksgiving in a 21st century remake of Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from want’

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

Ernest Disney-Britton

Maggie Meiners asked her friends, a gay, married couple, to pose for her recreation of Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want.” “I want to expand dialogue,” she said.CreditMaggie Meiners/Anne Loucks Gallery

Seventy-five years after the 1943 release of Norman Rockwell’s four images — Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom From Want, Freedom From Fear, artists are still doing updates of the American idea. In 2012, black artist Hank Willis Thomas enlisted photographer Emily Shur to shoot several images that reimagined Mr. Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want.” That’s what led Maggie Meiners, an artist from suburban Chicago, to create a series of her own. Ms. Meiners, recreated the photograph with two married, gay friends serving their guests. On this Thanksgiving 2018, we are grateful for images of a more accurate, complete picture of the American idea. [link]

Detroit Institute of Arts opens newly expanded Asian art galleries

ARTDAILY

Vasudhara, Goddess of Wealth and Abundance, 1100s, Nepal, copper, gold, gem stones. Detroit Institute of Arts.

DETROIT, MICH.- On Sunday, Nov. 4, the Detroit Institute of Arts debuted newly expanded galleries dedicated to Asian art in the Robert and Katherine Jacobs Asian Wing, highlighting objects and themes that represent diverse art forms, cultural practices, and systems of belief. Works span thousands of years up to the present day in galleries of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian and Southeast Asian art, as well as a gallery for Buddhist art across Asia. In addition to historical masterpieces, such as a graceful bronze sculpture of the Hindu goddess Parvati from southern India (13th century) and Chinese artist Wen Zhengming’s hanging scroll that pairs painting and calligraphy, “The First Prose Poem on the Red Cliff” (1588), the galleries also feature works of modern and contemporary art. [More]

In search of the real thing: China’s quest to buy back its lost heritage

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Scott Reyburn

A 15th-century gilded bronze Buddhist sculpture, which sold at Christie’s on Tuesday for about $2.5 million. Unusually, the figure retained its original sealed base, concealing a scroll and other objects, which were revealed in an X-ray.

LONDON — Perceptions of the art market can often be shaped by the huge prices paid for work by the West’s most famous painters and sculptors. But there is another culture that can also inspire spectacular sales. Last month, at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, a Chinese 18th-century Imperial porcelain “poppy” bowl sold for $21.6 million. At the same auction, an elaborately decorated “fish” vase, also thought to be of Imperial provenance from the Qianlong era, raised $19 million. Buoyed by a surging economy, Chinese dealers and collectors have since the mid 2000s been bidding formidable sums for the finest artworks from their country’s past. But in recent years, as China’s economic growth has slowed, the market for its antiques has become less frothy. [More]

Crime-fighting art expert helps bring stolen Buddha statue back to India

SMITHSONIAN
By Brigit Katz

Image of the 12th-century Buddha statue (Metropolitan police)

Back in March, Lynda Albertson went to the European Fine Arts Fair in the Netherlands, on the lookout for stolen antiquities that sometimes surface at these kinds of events. Albertson, CEO of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), soon caught sight of bronze Buddha statue that aroused her suspicions—and her hunch about the relic’s shady provenance proved to be correct. As Gianluca Mezzofiore reports for CNN, the 12th-century Buddha has been identified as one of 14 statues that were swiped from the Archaeological Museum in Nalanda, eastern India in 1961. And on Wednesday, which is also India’s Independence Day, the statue was handed over to Indian officials during a ceremony in London. [More]

Stolen 12th century Indian Buddha statue found in London

ARTDAILY

An undated handout picture released by the British Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in London on August 15, 2018, shows a 12th century Buddha statue stolen from India 57 years ago that is to be returned to the Indian High Commissioner in London.

LONDON (AFP).- A 12th century bronze Buddha statue stolen from an Indian museum 57 years ago has surfaced in London and is now being returned to the country, police said Wednesday. The statue with silver inlay was one of 14 stolen from the Archaeological Survey of India site museum in Nalanda in the east of the country in 1961. It was spotted at a trade fair in Britain in March this year, prompting an investigation by the Art and Antique Unit of London's Metropolitan Police. They alerted the owner and dealer, who are not accused of any wrongdoing, and who agreed for it to be returned to India. The statue was handed over to the Indian High Commission in London in a ceremony on Wednesday. [More]

Buddhist Spotlight On: David Orr

TRYCICYLE
By Julia Hirsch

Visual artist David Orr in the Philosophical Research Society’s library. Photograph by Emily Shur.

Angelenos have a well-kept secret. For the last two years, the PRS Library has been a second home to artist-in-residence David Orr. An LA-based visual artist, Orr spent countless hours photographing one-of-a-kind religious and philosophical texts from the center’s archives. He then digitally recombined the results to create his latest exhibition, Illumined, an abstract series of mandalas on display at the library’s new art gallery through September 16, 2018. Orr’s kaleidoscopic images—which refract words from sages such as Pythagoras, Plato, the Buddha, Confucius, Aristotle, Jesus, and Muhammad—explore the wide-ranging “belief systems we build to make sense of the world,” Orr told Tricycle. [More]

At the Rubin Museum, the future has arrived. And it’s fluid.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Carter

The Future Buddha (bodhisattva Maitreya), a late 18th- or early 19th-century copper sculpture, in front of “Silhouette in the Graveyard,” Chitra Ganesh’s montage of news clips of wars, protests and forced immigrations, interspersed with dancing skeletons. Credit David De Armas/Rubin Museum

NEW YORK---It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It’s on your side, or it’s not. We’re talking about time, and so is the Rubin Museum of Art, one of the biggest-thinking small museums in town. The Rubin is devoting its entire 2018 season and all six floors of galleries to time as a theme, with an accent on the future, a future which is making some of us nervous these days. If you’re a Buddhist — and much of the historical art at the Rubin is Buddhist, from the Himalayas — time is an especially complex subject because it’s not linear. It’s layered and cyclical, with past, present and future snarled up together. And that’s the way the Rubin presents it. [More]

Buddhism carved in stone

THE NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
By Roshne Balasubramanian

Amaravati sculptures are as important as the Sanchi and Behrut sculptures

If you head to the Egmore Government museum and walk into one of its most popular gallery — The Amaravati — you will surely be transported to a different time and age. Sculptures, pillars and fragments of a Buddhist stupa dating back to the 2nd century BC, astounding art that is of historic, aesthetic, religious, epigraphic value and relevance, all brought to the museum in the middle of the 19th century, from an abandoned city of the Satavahana era, to get its due attention. R Gopu, a popular city-based historian, who will be curating a talk and walk on one of the great treasures of the Egmore museum, the Amaravati gallery, this weekend, gives us a peek into what’s in store. [More]

Bill Viola launches experimental art game to explore a spiritual journey

WALLPAPER
By Jessica Klingelfuss

2018 Alpha Omega Prize Finalist: 
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XQ5S8WL

Video still from The Night Journey. Courtesy of Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab

It is one the first ever experimental art games ever made and for the past decade, Bill Viola’s The Night Journey has been exhibited in venues around the world as a work in progress. Now, Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab have launched the award-winning game worldwide on Mac and Windows PC (and on PlayStation in the US), marking the first time home players have been able to experience it. Using both game and video technologies, The Night Journey tells the universal story of an individual’s journey towards enlightenment. It is cryptic from the start: there is no single goal to achieve, nor a narrative – linear or otherwise – to follow. [More]

Cave survivors becoming Buddhist novices and monks

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
By Kit Doyle

Each week Religion News Service presents a gallery of photos of religious expression around the world. This week’s gallery includes images about abortion rights in Argentina, cave survivors becoming monks and more. Soccer coach Ekkapol Ake Chantawong and team members who were recently rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand have their heads shaved in a traditional Buddhist ceremony in Mae Sai District, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand, on July 24, 2018. The teammates and their coach prepared to be ordained to become Buddhist novices and monks. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Tibet’s embattled Buddhist academy finds resurrection at New York exhibit

TRICYCLE
By Tenzin Dorjee

Larung Gar – 05 by Gyatso Chuteng. Acrylic on canvas

Larung Gar, the largest Buddhist academy in the world, has long been a reluctant theater for the unceasing struggle between Tibetan spirituality and Beijing’s brutality. This embattled mountain hermitage in eastern Tibet is the subject of a New York art show currently on view at Tibet House. Using several thousand fragments of incense sticks, Gyatso has painstakingly produced aerial views of the thousands of mud dwellings that populate Larung Gar—each work resembling an architectural mandala. The completed Larung Gar series is now on view at Tibet House through July 26. Essence also features the works of Japanese artist Yasuko Ota alongside those of Gyatso Chuteng. [More]

The great plundering of Buddhist temples in Nepal

Al JAZEERA
By Steve Chao

Investigating how antiquities stolen from the Himalayas end up in museums and private collections around the world.

On the global art market, Himalayan statues of religious deities fetch millions of dollars. But to the Nepalese, they are living gods who have been stolen from their communities. In this exclusive Al Jazeera investigation, 101 East senior presenter and reporter Steve Chao takes viewers on abreathtaking journey across the Himalayas, to reveal how the art world's hunger for ancient artefacts is destroying a centuries-old culture.As he seeks to expose the international black market in religious treasures, Chao travels across Nepal from its capital Kathmandu to remote and ancient Buddhist temples in Mustang. Since the 1980s, authorities estimate thieves have plundered tens of thousands of Nepalese antiquities. About 80 percent of the countries religious artefacts have been stolen and sold into the $8bn-a-year illegal black market in art. [More]

Pure Land Buddhism and the art of photography

JAPAN TODAY

Monk with a mission: Akiyoshi Taniguchi is the head priest at Chohouin Temple in Tokyo. An self-described 'photo boy,' he built a white room that serves as a photography gallery on the premises of his temple. | DAN SZPARA

Follow the Sumida River southwest from Asakusa and you’ll soon reach Kuramae, an old working-class neighborhood filled with small factories, wholesale shops and temples. The head priest there is 58-year-old Akiyoshi Taniguchi, a monk who also runs a small gallery on the premises called Kurenboh. A photography enthusiast, Taniguchi combines his love of the art with his role as head priest at Chohouin, his family’s Pure Land Buddhist (jōdoshū) temple where he was “born into and grew up in.” After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the monk donated his entire collection — by this time some 700 to 800 prints — to the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.... and now he wanted to share his love of photography and Buddhism with others. [More]

INSPIRE ME! Bill Viola, July's Artist of the Month

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Ernest Disney-Britton

Bill Viola's "Tristan’s Ascension" (2005)

We are long-time fans of video artist Bill Viola, and that admiration has only grown as we've experienced more and more of his work in museums. Viola's works beautifully evoke a human relationship to the four elements of fire, water, wind and earth. Since the 1970s, he has demonstrated the aesthetic and emotional potential of video as art. Raised Christian, he is often cited in articles as either a practicing Buddhist or non-religious. However, there is an explicit spirituality in his work that calms and purifies the experience of the viewer.  He is a video art legend, and his new exhibition, "Bill Viola at La Nave Salinas" can be viewed until September 30th in Ibiza, Spain. Below is a 2015 interview that offers some additional insights into why Bill Viola is our INSPIRE ME! Artist of the Month.

Art project expected to facilitate China-U.S. exchanges

NORTH AMERICA

The ancient Buddhist site of the Mogao Grottoes, in the desert of western China

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23 (Xinhua) -- A Stanford University professor's art project based on the ancient city of Dunhuang in northwest China is expected to promote the understanding of the Asian country in the contemporary age. Xie Xiaoze, the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University, presented his work-in-progress to the public Thursday night at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The project, called "the amber of history," is inspired by the artist's 25 days of artist residency in the summer of 2017 at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, a historic site of Buddhist art on the ancient Silk Road. Mogao Grottoes are hundreds of cave temples carved more than 1,000 years ago in Dunhuang. The caves, decorated with Buddhist murals and sculptures, are a World Heritage site. [More]

Approaching the divine at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco

APOLLO MAGAZINE

The Buddhist deity Guhyasamaja (c. 1400–1500), China. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

SAN FRANCISO, CA---‘We want to make you look at art differently,’ says Qamar Adamjee, a curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. As she points out, visitors to the museum – which holds what is arguably the finest collection of Asian art outside Asia – do not always looks as closely at objects as they might: ‘Visitors think all Buddha images look the same,’ she says. ‘Seen one seen them all!’ Such an attitude prompted Adamjee and her fellow curators, Jeffrey Durham and Karin G. Oen, to devise ‘Divine Bodies: Sacred Imagery in Asian Art’ (until 29 July), an exhibition about the representation and meaning of divinity.  [More]

Carving the Buddha—the same way—for 1,400 years

TRYCICLE
By Lakshmi Gandhi

Bushi sculpt a figure in the documentary "Carving the Divine."

To view a statue carved by the Būshi—a community of Japanese sculptors who create intricate wooden replicas of Buddhas and bodhisattvas—is to view a style of sculpture that has been virtually unchanged for nearly 1,400 years. In Yujiro Seki’s new documentary "Carving the Divine," viewers get an inside look at how the Būshi have passed on their meticulous carving techniques from generation to generation. The film introduces us to Master Koun Seki, who has devoted his life to his craft while also running a school for apprentices and other emerging artists. Watching Master Seki interact with his pupils, viewers quickly learn that the craft requires immense dedication. Tricycle spoke with Yujiro Seki about this ancient art form and its preservation. [More]

2018 Spring fundraising campaign for Religion News Service

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

Since 1934, Religion News Service has shed light on the most meaningful issues of the day. As the only nonprofit news agency devoted to unbiased, nonsectarian coverage of religion, spirituality, ethics and culture, our reporting aims to educate, inform and cultivate understanding among people of different faiths and traditions around the world. Through donations large and small, your support ensures that our award-winning team of journalists can keep bringing you objective reporting and insightful commentary for months and years to come. We have faith in you, our subscribers and readers. By supporting our June 2018 fundraising campaign with a gift today, you can show your faith in us. [DONATE]