University of Hawai'i at Manoa Center for Chinese Studies

Ming-Bao Yue, Director

Ni Zhang, Associate Director

Adriana Choi, Academic Support Specialist

Jian Shan, Casual Hire

 The early phases of Buddhist art in China are characterized by a process of appropriation and experimentation. The earliest artists hewed closely to models of Buddhist imagemaking imported from Gandhara and Mathura and from Central Asia. As Buddhism took root in China, artists began to explore the possibilities of visual expression of its ideas. Buddhist concepts like immateriality and impermanence, infinity and multiplicity, challenged the conventions of ordinary representation, and stimulated innovation in the visual arts. Buddhist monuments carved in stone in northern China during the late fifth and early sixth centuries seem to experiment with the permanence and materiality of stone itself. Various examples imagine stone as permeable or transparent, enabling the projection of images from one surface to another through the walls of a cave temple, allowing the devotee to look through a stone surface into an imagined, infinite space, or permitting Buddhas and bodhisattvas themselves to step through and manifest in the human world. This conversation between a scholar working on large-scale cave temples and another working on small-scale Buddhist votive sculptures will explore this phenomenon across a range of Buddhist monuments.