Museum artefacts are seldom in the shape they were before entering museum premises: they are treated with preservative substances to arrest their material decay, restored, and displayed under specific temperature and light conditions. In the past, they were even fragmented at the moment of their collection and reassembled, as in the case of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin.
Asian religious statues, especially those collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, experienced several transformations. From being guests of honour on shrines, once they were collected for museum galleries or storage rooms, they were beheaded, mutilated, fragmented, hollowed. They were no longer sacred icons but complied with the criteria of the art market, aesthetic tastes, erudite knowledge, and societal norms of the audience, other than their worshippers. As shown by art historians, mutilating religious statues could increase the art market’s profits derived from the multiplication of fragments to sell and responded to an antiquarian taste towards ruins and archaeological remains.
These mutilations are seldom problematized in the museum narratives provided in galleries and catalogue entries, and in certain cases, they become appealing aesthetic features. For instance, Buddha heads are such potent symbols of Buddhist art that their reproductions as pleasing and mystical furniture decorations can be found everywhere, from coffee shops to yoga training rooms, without realising that their presence in museums signals past violent lootings or destructions.
Head of Buddha, mid 6th century, Shandong or Hebei provinces, MET Asian collection, not on view, OA photo downloaded from the MET website.
“Traces of Guanyin” prompts the audience to pay closer attention to the signs of decay on statues in museums and to acknowledge them as historical traces of troubled pasts.
Rather than being the dissemination of provenance research, this curatorial project reflects on the potential of material traces in accounting for historical and archival silences within museum collections. In the exhibition’s approach, traces serve as doors to events, experiences, and feelings that are not readily apparent in the historical archives.
We notice them only when we perceive a perceptual interference with our present experience: a reverie, an atmosphere, or a fantasy that suddenly disrupts what we are doing, transporting us into a suspended temporal dimension in which past and present mingle together. Similarly, material traces of past interventions on religious artefacts stir in us hypotheses about what could have happened, as well as emotions such as uncanniness and grief. “Traces of Guanyin” mobilises these fantasies that emerge from our interaction with past traces and fill the voids of museum narratives.
If fantasies and counternarratives resulting from our interaction with traces cannot completely unravel the historical vicissitudes that occurred, they can allow us to imagine possible scenarios that have happened and future trajectories for these museum artefacts. Traces are therefore both material signs and narrative trajectories that researchers, curators, and audiences follow to make sense of museum collections.
The hollowed Buddha from the Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography. Photo by Valentina Gamberi, Copyright by the Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography, Parma, Inventory number cna0680.
The hollowed Guanyin collected by the Protestant pastor and Sinologist Heinrich Hackmann and now stored at the Religionskundliche Sammlung, Philipps-University Marburg. Photo by Heike Luu, Copyright by the Religionskundliche Sammlung, Inventory number Nt 058
This curatorial project focuses on two Chinese folk religious statues that present hollows in their backs: a Buddha collected by Xaverian missionaries for their Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography in Parma, and a Guanyin, donated by the Protestant pastor and Sinologist Heinrich Hackmann (1864-1935) to the Religionskundliche Sammlung of Philipps-University Marburg. In Chinese folk religion—a syncretism of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism practised by the Han and Hakka ethnicities in China, Taiwan, and other areas in Southeast and East Asia—god statues must be spiritually reinforced by inserting sacred substances into a cavity on their backs. Unsealing the latter is therefore a sign of deconsecration. “Traces of Guanyin” narrates the journey undertaken by the anthropologist Valentina Gamberi to understand how and by whom the two statues were unsealed. In her archival and ethnographic experience, Valentina could not provide clear answers: the statues could have been unsealed either by their previous owners or the collectors. Her ethnographic research on deconsecration rituals in Taiwan revealed that the practice of removing the sacred substances from is still observed among Taiwanese collectors today.
By connecting past and present deconsecration practices in Europe and Asia, “Traces of Guanyin” presents a multilayered and multivocal narrative. Unsealing the statues’ hollows is ambiguous: it could reflect local knowledge for spiritually protecting collectors and previous owners from bad luck, but it could also be part of a process of religious conversion and, therefore, iconoclasm. Hollows thus reflect both the local agency and the violence of collectors. By exploring contemporary deconsecration rituals in Taiwan and their inherently controversial and taboo nature, the exhibition highlights the importance of negotiating local, conflicting views on the treatment of sacred artefacts. It also acknowledges that collecting these objects is inherently problematic. At the same time, “Traces of Guanyin” shows that ethnographic accounts alone cannot fully explain discarded matter. Instead, the exhibition traces multiple journeys, voices, and perspectives reverberating through hollowed god statues. It decenters the ethnographer by bringing in other voices and experiences from fieldwork—Valentina’s friend, Chang Yuhua, and the contemporary artist Peng Hung-Chih—and reveals her awkwardness in researching sensitive topics.
You are welcome to explore the virtual exhibition. You can proceed from Valentina’s exhibit first and then switch to Yuhua or Hung-Chih’s contributions, or look at Yuhua or Hung-Chih first and then come back to Valentina’s exhibit.
References
Grasskamp, Anna and Annette Löseke (2015). “Asia in Your Window Frame: Museum Displays, Window Curators and Dutch-Asian Material Culture,” World Art 5(2): 223–248.