Navigation

Since their inception more than two millennia ago, Buddhism and Buddhist art have undergone cross-cultural pollination across inter-Asian, intra-Asian borders. While these international connections in Buddhist art have been productive in generating a transnational methodology in art history, little attention is given to the modern transformation of Buddhist art. This panel seeks to explore the intersection between Buddhist art (Buddhist world views, pluralism, cross-cultural histories, iconography, compositional logic, genres, and popular distribution platforms) and the epistemology of modern art and modernity (the division between the sacred and the secular, the avant-garde, categorization and canonization, curation and art education, and the expanded audience in new institutions) that emerged and crystalized amid the twentieth-century histories of nation-building, imperialist expansions, and postcolonial independence. Expanding the inherently transcultural history of Buddhist art into the twentieth century is how India and Japan from the continent’s two corners began to reconnect through the shared Buddhist heritage during the rise of Pan-Asianism. Around that time, the epistemology of Asian art was rearticulated in America based on the study and exhibition of ink rubbings from the 6th-century cave temple in Central China. At once a religious belief and an aesthetic system, Buddhist legacy continued to reverberate across multiple regime changes and devastating wars, as seen in the Buddhist visual productions of colonial Korea and post-partition India that erupted vibrantly in times of transformation. Together, the panel poses crucial questions about heterotemporality of indigenous modernity and alternative imaginations for contemporaneity currently unaccounted in the methods of global art history.