Zhang Huan’s Sydney Buddha a towering but mute sculpture

ZHANG Huan’s Sydney Buddha is a poetic idea but it seems as though the scale and costly production process consumed the artist’s attention.

Zhang Huan’s Sydney Buddha is at Carriageworks, Sydney, until March 22.

A FEW weeks ago in the course of discussing the rehanging of the Asian collection at the Art Gallery of NSW, I happened to mention the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Bamiyan Buddha sculptures in 2001. It was, as I observed, not only an act of cultural vandalism but the expression of rage and nihilism in the face of an ethos of peace and non­violence. A few days before that column appeared in print, the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked and its staff massacred by two thugs, the offspring of Algerian immigrants to France. That outrage has helped a few more Western intellectuals overcome their instinct to relativise and discount the menace of religious extremism and may even convince mainstream Islam that it must do more to condemn extremist elements and cannot hide behind lukewarm assurances that they are not representative of the religion as a whole.

It is particularly when it is compared to a religion such as Buddhism that one can see Islam has certain weaknesses that make it vulnerable to extremism; so for that matter do Christianity and their common parent Judaism, but different histories have led these religions to evolve and develop towards greater sophistication and tolerance. In particular the enormous upheavals of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the subsequent industrial revolution have long made simplistic views of religion untenable for any intelligent person.

The dissemination of knowledge and ideas through printing was instrumental in all these scientific and cultural movements, and freedom of the press is fundamental to any conception of a free and democratic society. But printing was banned in the Islamic world for many centuries; the first Arabic printed books were produced in Renaissance Italy. As for democracy, Islamists believe the idea to be impious since we already have divine law to rule us.

Especially in comparison with Buddhism, though, one can see another deep and almost intractable problem. Even beyond the more flagrant examples of the oppression of women, Islam is a profoundly masculinist system of belief. It seems to valorise Mars without Venus, to lack the balance of male and female, Yang and Yin, that is so central to Indian and Chinese systems of belief. Iran is a special case in this regard: the Iranians are Indo-Europeans, unrelated to the Arabs, their culture is much older and more refined, and the Persian language makes no distinction of gender.

The trouble with an unbalanced masculinist model is that it is rigid and brittle: when faced with frustration, failure and impotence, this type lashes out in rage, like the kind of men who beat their wives. As we have seen with the so-called Islamic State, drifters and losers of every stamp can find in religious zealotry an alibi to express their murderous resentment, to kill and rape and destroy. The challenge for mainstream Islam is to remove any resort to such an alibi, but this may require deeper thinking about its own underlying assumptions: perhaps nothing less than an Islamic reformation.

On the scale of world religions, Buddhism is at the opposite pole. It was not spread by the sword and it has no cult of holy war. It does not condone the killing of anyone who makes light of its divinities, prophets and scriptures. It does not offer any moral justification for anyone to express rage, turn to violence and take out their sense of failure and irrelevance on others.

Although Buddhism eventually developed into an elaborate system of belief, it was scarcely, in its origins, a religion in the usual sense of the word. Buddha is not a god, and indeed there are many Buddhas, of whom the historical Shakyamuni was the one who first brought the message of liberation to the world. His teachings were not only alien to violence but intended to remove its root causes from the world.

Buddhism emerged from Hinduism as Christianity arose from Judaism, as a reform movement aiming to answer certain conundrums of the parent faith: in the case of Christianity, to break out of the endless legalism of the Jewish tradition; in the case of Buddhism, to escape from the cycle of reincarnations in the eternal quest for freedom from suffering.

Buddha taught that all life was suffering, but that suffering was caused by desire. If we can only cease from desire, suffering will cease too, and with it the cycle of lives. From this perspective, the whole vortex of anger, humiliation, hatred and violence that engulfs the murderous religious fanatic is a narcissistic illusion that first destroys the mind, then serves to multiply suffering in the world all around. The idea that after death such unhappy men could dwell in a heaven fawned on by virgins is existentially implausible: they died already in hell.

Images of Buddha, on the other hand, since they were first produced in Gandhara in the most remarkable of all cultural fusions of East and West, have always sought to act as paradigms of the stillness of the mind that is at peace, free of desire and fear, anxiety, longing or regret. They are not images to be worshipped but models to be emulated.

Travellers may have seen colossal statues of Buddha such as the one at Kamakura in Japan, and there is a giant Chinese Buddha in Sydney as part of the Sydney Festival, which finished last month. Or, more precisely, there are two that sit facing each other in the great hall at Carriageworks, their form as well as their subject inviting us to meditate on aspects of Bud­dhist philosophy, for one is made of 20 tonnes of compacted incense ash gathered in temples and the other is the mould in which it was formed.

Their author is a Chinese artist, Zhang Huan, who initially made his name in Beijing with gruelling works of performance art. He lived and worked in New York from 1998 to 2005, when he returned to live in Shanghai, and has more recently turned to large-scale sculptural works inspired by religious iconography and particularly by his Buddhist beliefs. Today he is well known internationally, with a huge studio and an enormous team of assistants, producing works for exhibitions and the art market.

This is perhaps why Sydney Buddha — the third version of this work, after an initial showing in Taiwan in 2010 and a second in Florence in 2013 — is a little disappointing in its tangible and affective quality. The idea is an interesting and poetic one, but the realisation is rather obtuse, as though the compulsory scale and obviously costly production process have effectively consumed all the artist’s attention. It’s the trouble with this kind of neo-official art, which is designed to compel the attention of the inattentive and to force a response from the chronically unresponsive.

Thus we admire the colossal aluminium mould with its sections held together with stainless steel nuts and bolts, its head lying on the ground apart from the main section of the body, but none of this is really aesthetically significant. It is all part of the superficial mechanics that are meant to impress us with the level of effort and investment that have gone into the work’s production.

The head of the sculpture, in contrast, although skilfully executed, is perhaps inevitably rather crude. The features and the expression, the all-important elements that should radiate serenity and invite communion in contemplation, are lacking in refinement and interiority. One stands before this work listening for it to speak, but it remains mute.

It is a striking example of the gap between idea and execution that arises when the passage from one to the other is mediated by the quasi-industrial production process of much transnational contemporary art. And it is, incidentally, at the opposite extreme from the intimacy and immediacy of traditional Chinese ink painting, in which idea, gesture and image are almost simultaneous and equivalent, and where in consequence the painted image is filled with the presence of the mind.

This is not to say that the work is devoid of interest. On the contrary, the idea behind it is a compelling one, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the artist’s original conception. The incense is the literal residue of the devotion of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women who have come to pray, to ask favours of their deities or simply to commune with the sacred images in the temples.

The people have left, the prayers have dissipated into silence, the perfume of the incense sticks has dispersed, but the ash remains. The idea that these vestiges still carry some trace of their original intention is an appealing one, although not perhaps one particularly in the spirit of Buddhism. More to the point perhaps is the reflection that all forms in this world are ephemeral, that individuals and their desires and fears are ultimately illusions.

The manifest form of Buddha, his corporeal existence in this world, is only temporary and passing. The historical Buddha was not immortal, and in a sense is interchangeable with the myriad Buddhas of the past and the future who represent the perennial availability of enlightenment. Anyone who achieves freedom from desire and fear, indeed, is potentially a Buddha, for that is all the word signifies. That is why, for example, Japanese Zen Buddhist painters are fond of the paradoxical subject of a laughing monk tearing up the Sutras, the sacred Bud­dhist texts; for none of these things has any intrinsic value compared with the single reality of enlightenment.

So all forms in the world of time and space pass away, and the idea of a Buddha of ash dissolving almost before our eyes is a singularly apposite one. There is in fact a camera on the gallery above that is filming the gradual dissolution and no doubt we will later be able to watch a time-lapse video of the process. But even stone Buddhas will gradually wear away: the Bamiyan Buddhas, in the normal course of time and after some millennia, would have slowly crumbled to dust. But the Taliban, trapped in the blindness of hatred and anger, could not understand this.

Such are the thoughts that the installation at Carriageworks can suggest. It is just a pity that the work itself does not embody such ideas in a more aesthetically intuitive manner; but such an intimate quality of experiential immediacy is hardly compatible with a disconnected and mechanical production process.

Zhang Huan: Sydney Buddha

Carriageworks, Sydney, until March 15.