Expanding New Bodies: The Use of Dry Lacquer in East Asian Buddhist Images

This paper considers the materiality of dry lacquer, known in Chinese as jiazhu 夾紵, in the context of Buddhist sculpture. Expensive, laborious, and unforgiving, the technique was used to create images of Buddhist deities across East Asia. The extant corpus reveals a preoccupation with rendering particularly human-like images; the accumulated layering of lacquer-soaked strips of cloth enabled the sculptors to achieve a heightened sense of bodily dimensionality, the lacquer finish resulting in a surface with nuanced curves and an elastic quality that one would associate with human flesh. Due to its fragile nature, several of those works in dry lacquer that survive are partly damaged, providing the present-day viewer with direct insight into the process of their creation.

Written records show that dry lacquer as an image medium was frequently associated with heightened spiritual response, was often the medium of choice for colossal images, and was most commonly employed for the creation of Buddha images. This paper highlights that extant visual examples further this understanding of dry lacquer use by speaking to its valued employment for images of dharani or spell-text bodhisattvas with multiple limbs, for which the ability of dry lacquer to bridge the gap between recognizable anthropomorphic materiality and divine form was of keen interest. Drawing on written and visual sources from Tang China and from Nara and Heian Japan, spanning from the Cleveland Museum of Art to Fujiidera in Osaka, this paper considers how the dry lacquer technique uniquely merged the worldly with the otherworldly.