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"Buddhist Art"
ASIAN ART IN BRUSSELS will be held from June 5th to 9th 2013 in the heart of Brussels. It will coincide with two other important cultural events – Brussels Ancient Art Fair (BAAF) and Brussels Non-European Art Fair (BRUNEAF) – making Brussels a key destination for art enthusiasts in June.
The finest of Asian art
together with interesting lectures.
Please take a closer look at the exhibitors´ list. There are many renowned galleries and dealers from all over the world, who will show exciting exhibits this year:
Michael Woerner, Oriental arts
Wei Asian Arts, Oriental Art and Antiques
John Siudmak Asian Art, Indian and Himalayan art
Renaud Montméat Art d’Asie, Arts of India, China, the Himalayas and Southeast Asia
Mingei Arts Gallery, Japanese antique & contemporary arts
Galerie Lamy, Oriental arts
Kyoto Gallery – Tony Cammaert Antiquair, Japanese art
Kitsune Japanese Art, Japanese art & antiques
Jacques How-Choong, Oriental Art
Nayef Homsi, Ancient Art of Asia
Antiquair K. Grusenmeyer n.v., Exquisite sculpture & objects
Carlos Cruañas, Art of India, Himalaya and South East Asia
Gisèle Croës, Arts d’Extrême-Orient s.a.
Asian Arts Company – Carlo Cristi, Arte Orientale Tessili
Buddhist Art, Khmer, Himalayan and South East Asian Art
Astamangala, Ancient Art from Tibet, Nepal and India
Moreover, on June 6th and 7th there will be some additional lectures held by François Picard, Max Rutherston, Irka Hajdas, David Pritzker and Pratapaditya Pal.
Please visit the official website of the fair and also save the date:
Asian Art in Brussels 2013
Pictures courtesy of Asian Art in Brussels.
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Thomas J. Pritzker is Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. But he and his wife Margot are als passionate collectors of Fine Buddhist art.
Build up an important collection of Himalayan art
(if you belong to the richest people in the USA).
Spending money for charitable organizations like Mr. Pritzker is an exemplary habit in the USA, which should definitely be followed by more people in Europe. But building up a world-renown collection of Asian art is also a great thing to do.
The Pritzkers travelled the Himalayas in the 1970ies. They started buying ancient sculptural art from Kushan, Tibet and Nepal during the journey already. Later, the collectors specialized in early Tibetan Thangkas.
Thomas Pritzker once sayed, that for each piece they are interested in, they will first live with it for a while and let it unfold its charisma. After that they will finaly decide whether to purchase it or not.
One of the most famous exhibits of the Pritzker Collection is a sculpture of the so called “Three Silver Brothers” (height: 71cm).
This is a brass cast work of three Bodhisattvas from Western Tibet dated ca. 1220. This exceptional Bodhisattva triad has been produced around the same time as a life-size Bodhisattva triad at Khojarnath monastery. It is much to be hoped, that Mr. Pritzker will put his collection on display again, hopefully also to be seen in Europe.
Pictures courtesy of Amy Heller.
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Patan or Lalitpur is one of the three great cities of the Kathmandu Valley. It is called “Yala” by its inhabitants, the Newars. This ethnic minority has specialized in modelling and casting of antique Buddhist bronzes in the Himalayan region since many centuries.
Newaran bronze sculptures belong to the finest in the world
Established in 1997, the Patan Museum opens its showrooms to public visitors in the historic center of Patan city. Lalitpur is translated with “the city of fine arts” and it is the place, where the heart of Nepal´s cultural heritage is still beating today.
The exhibition comprises a large variety of religious art objects and antique relics. There are more than 200 exhibits constantly on display, which represent different periods and stylistic developments of early Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a focus on metal technology.
Anyone who knows about the importance of Buddhist bronze manufactors from Lalitpur on the development of Buddhism in the Himalaya region, should take an opportunity to visit Patan museum. It is a place, where an important cultural heritage is preserved “on site” in Asia, not in a great Museum in Europe or in the USA.
Actually, there are many museums in Western countries, which could easily donate sculptures or relics to the museum belonging to Patan or Kathmandu region.
Go to: Patan / Lalitpur Museum – Nepal
Pictures courtesy of Patan Museum.
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The “face of majesty” or “face of glory” is seen everywhere all around Asia. The “monster mask” might be used as an ornament on antique Chinese bronzes dating back even to the pre-Buddhist dynasties Shang and Zhou. In Chinese art history, it is called taotie-decor or -mask, but it has got an equivalent in the Kirtimukha (Skr.), which derives from ancient Indian history.
Jalandhara demom devoured his own body until only the head remained
Throughout the whole of China, as well as in India and South East Asia, the smiling taotie-mask can be found as guardian of doorways. Also in the Himalayas the monster mask is extensively shown on temple walls, hanging banners, archways and as door handles and knockers.
According to a Hindu legend from the Skandha Purana, Kirtimukha derives from a demon called Jalandhara, who once has been created from the blaze of Shiva´s third eye. The demon devoured his own body until only the head remained.
Shiva named him Kirtimukha and bid him to remain for all eternity as a guardian to the threshold of his door.
Images courtesy of wikimedia commons.
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Vinay Kumar Rao observed women in early Indian Buddhist sculptural art in various dimensions. He does not agree with a general perception, that women did not receive the same rights as men in early Buddhism. Buddhism by contrast never restricted the educational opportunities of women and accepted them as being capable to achieve similar goals as men.
Indications about gender roles and relations in early Buddhism
The study takes a close look at Buddhist sculptural art and also textual inscriptions from the second and third century B.C. in India. The book “Women in Buddhist art” gives us indications about gender roles and relations in early Buddhist societies. It is a great research work, recommendable not only for anyone interested in BUddhist art, but also friends of cultural studies.
Vinay Kumar Rao´s study looks at women in the perspective of divinity an natur, as well as women performing religious activities, then focusses on women expressing her feminine desires, heading forewards to women in daily life, and finally examining dresses and ornamants.
The author added an extensive appendix about women in early Buddhist inscriptions and also a very informative glossary, in which many important words and names in Buddhist art are described.
Please follow this link for more information: Agamkala Prakashan
Images courtesy of Agamkala Prakashan
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Because of the production process of the so-called lost wax casting technique (cire-perdue), each Buddhist bronze sculpture is unique.
Every Buddhist bronze sculpture is a one of a kind antique piece of history
The liveliness and spirited expression of antique Buddhist sculptures from the Himalaya region cannot be imitated by modern sculptors. There is a fire burning in the facial expressions, in the proportions and in the softness of lines and bodies, which is unachieved today.
Maybe one of the reasons for this is a special sense of passion the old sculptors put in their works.
Their ability to produce such beautiful pieces of art, Buddhist sculptures and figures, is now lost forever, since the masters of manufacturing had passed away.
What they´ve left behind, is now preserved in private and public collections: antique Buddhist bronzes from the Himalayas.
Images courtesy of: Gallery Peter Hardt
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In Tibetan buddhist art, the skull is a widely used iconographic symbol. It may appear on sculptures and paintings in form of garlands or necklaces of skulls, five-skull crowns or single skulls.
Necklaces of skulls, skull-crowns and a skull-lamp
A necklace of skulls is often worn by female buddhist deities. It usually shows grinning skulls painted in white. Such a necklace (munda mala) usually represents the female principle of emptiness. The skull´s four canine teeth are generally discribed as symbols of the biting through of the four maras (obstructives).
The five-skull crown in Tibetan buddhist art generally represents the undifferentiated union of the five buddhas (Tathāgatas). Often, each skull is surmounted by a jewel or a vajra. These five jewel finals are usually coloured to correspond to the five buddhas.
Single skulls appear in various forms and functions in Tibetan iconography. For example a skull-lamp, which burnes human fat, with its tongue burning as a wick, would be described as a purification symbol. The body (skull) is purified by the flames, as are speech (tongue) and mind (fat). This example derives from ancient Hindu cremation rituals.
Images courtesy of:
The British Museum
Musée Guimet
Field Museum of Natural History
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Martin Walker-Watson lived as a Buddhist practitioner in an isolated Buddhist community on a remote mountain-top in the Himalayas in the 1970ies. He then worked in the Jewellery trade for more than fifteen years.
Gilding Arts Studio in Kathmandu, Nepal
He set up a studio for repoussé-works and gilding of Buddhist bronze works in Kathmandu in 1998. Today, he is a recognized spezialist for gilt bronze works in Buddhist and Asian arts.
Buddhist meditation sites on three continents have required expertise in gilding from Mr. Walker-Watson, when large scale pagodas with gilt bronze roofs and ornaments have been erected.
For more information about Buddhist art and gilt bronze works, please read his latest publication:
2013 Catalogue “Sacred Colours – Buddhist Art for the 21st Century”
Go to: Gilded Buddha Sacred Colours
Images courtesy of Martin Walker-Watson
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The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA, doesn´t have the size and publicity like the large museums in New York, London or Paris. But it has got an innovative approach regarding the use of online media in relation to its collection. Like many international art museums, Walters also put its collection data base online and presents the exhibits with pictures and short descriptions.
What are online databases of art museums good for?
On museum´s homepages, you often can search their collections, but there is no possibility to decide about relevance. The general visitor will not be pleased, if searching through thousands of objects and not knowing, which one is interesting, important or relevant for him.
There is a need for relevance definition services for online databases. Museums provide online tours, online curating or specific contextual frameworks to help navigate through their online collections.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is forerunning in this field. Even if it doesn´t provide large online stories, audio and video tours, like other museums, it stands out, because it publishes all antique objects under the so called the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License. This means, that images of art objects are allowed to circulate.
Walters Art Museum offers different “ways to browse” their collection, as they call it. You can navigate through objects according to their categories, dates, mediums and so forth, but also filter with “museum locations” or “community”. The latter shows some arrangements from registered users of their website, not unlike lists of favorite exhibits.
All this isn´t really the big solution yet, but these are examples of trying to find new ways of relevance definitions for online art databases.
Of course, there are still further ideas needed, which help to make large collections of antique and modern arts accessible on museum´s internet sites.
Go to: The Walters Art Museum
Images courtesy of The Walters Art Museum.
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Jain Buddha India 18th century
India 18th century, bronze
H: 13 cm / W: 8 cm / D: 4 cm
Peaceful Buddha sitting on a rectangular base with a beautiful calm and ingenuous facial expression. The Jina is protected by a nine-hooded cobra goddess. Please compare: John Guy: “Indian Temple Sculpture“; collection of South-Asian sculptures at Victoria & Albert Museum; V&A Publishing.
Build up your own collection of authentic antique buddhist sculptures. This sculpture is offered on asianartblog.com exclusively courtesy of Gallery Peter Hardt
Please inquire with the following link or directly write to us on:
contact@asianartblog.com
inquire about this object
Located in the Indus Valley in Ladakh region of India, the Matho Monastery has been one of the most important Sakya Tibetan Buddhist centers at the foothills of the Himalayas since its establishment in 1410. During the centuries of its existence, many Buddhist art relics have been stored. The monastery´s collection consists of a great variety of important Buddhist relics, particularly Thangkas, Buddhist bronze statues and objects from monastic everyday life.
Restoration and preservation
Most of the monastery´s Buddhist art objects have been locked up in boxes for the last 30 years for protection, since Ladakh was opened to tourrisme. Therefore, the Matho Museum Project has been initiated to display this precious collection in a secure way. It is run by the the Himalayan Arts Preservation Association, the Good Karma Foundation and the Cultural and Welfare Soiety of Matho Monastery.
The project team includes internationally renowned art historians, restorers, architects and the monks from Matho monastery themselves, led by Lopön Tsering Dorje, the lama in charge of the religious Buddhist practice inside the monastery.
The Matho Museum Project will not only restore the artefacts and build a museum on the 15th century base of the monastery. It will create a sustainable economic base for the region by training a local restoration team in international restoration standards.
Some of the most prominent advisors of the project are:
Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and French interpreter for H.H. the Dalai Lama.
Marion Boyer, curator of the Musée Elise Rieuf.
Götz Hagmüller, architect and urban conservationist.
Michael Henss, leading Tibetan and East Asian art historian.
Zara Fleming, lecturer and Buddhist art expert for Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian art.
For more information, donations or volunteering opportunities, please visit the project´s website and directly contact with:
The Matho Museum Project
Images courtesy of Matho Museum Project.
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On behalf of our long-term customers, collectors and clients, we are looking for specific items from various fields of ancient buddhist art.
Antique buddhist art & sculpture
Buddhist iconography is extensive and manifoldly. In order to round out their collections, our customers are explicitly interested in antique buddhist sculputres, bronze figures, altar-relics & related objects, stupas and paintings.
Please inform us about your objects: make us an offer any time!
We are happy to give you a free valuation or to directly offer you a purchasing price. And of course, we are accepting further search requests from you, too.
Write us an email to:contact@asianartblog.com
We are looking forward to hear from you.
Images courtesy of Gallery Peter Hardt.
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Ancient and antique art from Korea is a barely noted international area of collection. International studies of cultural history of the Korean peninsula has increased just in recent decades.
Korean antiques stand out not only because of a particularly strong sense of refinement and elegance in ancient Korea. They are also relatively unknown, since they are often attributed to the neighboring countries China and Japan. There are only a few internationally renowned and well-established art historians and experts specialized exclusively in Korean art.
Korean Seladon ceramics, with their distinctive inlay decor designs (sanggam), as well as Buddhist art, writings and paintings from Korea, are still underrated areas of collection today. At art fairs and auctions, ancient art from the land of Gangnam-Style are not even shown sometimes, probably because of the heavy gravity of China, which leads art market participants in some cases.
Anyone interested in ancient Asian art objects, which still have got great potentials to grow and develop, should look for treasures from Korea. Two countries on the peninsula still being confronted with tremendous political challenges are highly interesting for the international art market and future developments.
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Images courtesy of wikimedia commons.
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An essential part of Buddhist practice is the idea of not attaching oneself to possessions and material goods. When entering into a monastery, a Buddhist monk leaves behind all posessions and properties, because he did not want to be hindered in his practice by attachment to material goods.
Why do people buy ancient Buddhist figures for many thousands of euros then? Are the collectors of such sculptures not Buddhists? Or are they Buddhists all the more?
In Buddhism, sculptures of Buddhas and deities are to be understood as the body of the Buddha. A large votive sculpture of a Buddha in a temple, for example, which has got opened and lively eyes, represents the Buddha himself. The sculpture is the Buddha.
Buddhist sculptures are the “Buddha” in
Buddha, Dharma and Sangha
When I visited an exhibition of bronze sculptures of Tibetan lamas, I observed a group of exiled Tibetan monks living in Germany. In front of the sculptures, they performed complete prostrations and recited mantras. The sculptures were not pieces of bronze on a pedestal in their eyes, rather the Buddhist teachers themselves were present through the presence of the sculptures.
For a practicing Buddhist, there is basically no difference between a figure that was recreated and a classical sculpture – at least until the sculpture is alive and has a spirit. The age of the altar sculpture shows no difference to the Buddhist practitioner, because he strives to direct his attention to the moment, the here and now.
Nevertheless, Buddhism looks back on a very long and rich history. Ancient Buddhist sculptures relate to this history, according to their origin, their stylistic and iconographic features and the fact that they exist at all today.
A collector of antique Buddhist sculptures not only collects “the Buddha” himself, but he also collects and preserves a piece of Buddhist history. This is something, that shows empathy and understanding of the fragility of this peaceful and gentle religion.
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