Dorothy Wong
Professor of Art and Director, East Asia Center, University of Virginia
Dorothy C. Wong is Professor of Art and Director of East Asia Center at the University of Virginia. Specializing in Buddhist art of medieval China, her research addresses topics of art in relation to religion and society, and of the relationship between religious texts/doctrine and visual representations. In addition to many articles, she has published Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004; Chinese edition 2011), Hōryūji Reconsidered (editor and contributing author, 2008), China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections (co-editor with Gustav Heldt, and contributing author, 2014), and Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645–770 (2018). Her edited volume, Miraculous Images in Asian Traditions, will be published as volume 50 of Ars Orientalis in late 2020.
The Making of Colossal Buddha Statues in Contemporary China
The making of colossal Buddha statues has been an important theme in Buddhist art along the Silk Road during the first millennium, relating to religious devotion and frequently in conjunction with notions of Buddhist kingship. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a new wave of making colossal Buddha statues in China, including Hong Kong. About a dozen colossal statues have been made, with some standing well over 100 meters tall and costing extravagant sums for the construction. Given the fact that Buddhist kingship is not a viable concept in the current Chinese communist regime, what accounts for the impetus in fashioning these Buddhist statues of immense size. The paper examines the transition of Buddha statues from cult images to cultural icons, the discourse of cultural heritage in the narrative of the nation’s history, and the building of infrastructures to support a tourist economy in the context of some degree of revival of Buddhism in contemporary China.