Exhibit recreates ancient Yungang Grottoes
Print Edition
Thousands upon thousands of visitors descend on the world-renowned ancient Yungang Grottoes each year to marvel at its splendor.
The 1,500-year-old iconic site is one of China’s biggest cultural attractions and it never disappoints.
The ancient Chinese Buddhist temple grottoes, sited about 16 kilometers west of the city of Datong, in the valley of the Shili river at the base of the Wuzhoushan mountains, are a distinguished example of Chinese stone carvings from the 5th and 6th centuries.
The site witnesses 252 grottoes, with more than 51,000 Buddha statues and statuettes, fusing religious symbolic arts and cultures from southern and central Asia, and European with Chinese cultural traditions.
The only way to explore its mystery and enjoy its beauty is to visit the grottoes in person, although there is an intriguing exhibition worth viewing if you want to learn a bit about the ancient grottoes.
The show, “Ode to the Great Beauty: Memories and Dialogue with Yungang Grottoes,” is currently running at the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai. The exhibition features 120 Yungang cultural relics and a restored cave (Cave 12).
Thanks to 3D scanning and print technology, the Zhejiang University and the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute collaborated over almost three years to replicate the ancient grotto with a one-to-one scale model.
Cave 12 of Yungang Grottoes, is a corridor-pillar temple cave, known as the “Music Cave” for its magnificent sculptures of musical instruments. The restored cave is about 8.55 meters high, 12.2 meters wide and 4.5 meters deep.
In order to make the original on-site scene as real as possible, the team painstakingly recreated every detail inside the cave, including the imperfections under the erosion of time, such as the missing hands, fading colors and graffiti on the wall.
Laid out on a rectangular plan, the cave is divided into front and rear rooms. Various ethnic musical instruments, familiar or unfamiliar to modern eyes, are said to reflect the court bands of the Northern Wei Dynasty (AD 386-535).
The stone statuettes, potteries, gilded Buddha statues and relics excavated from the tombs, perfectly conjure up the history and life of the dynasty when Buddhism flourished as a state religion.
Buddhist culture not only created the magnificent grotto art that lives in harmony with the natural landscape, but also integrated Confucianism and Taoism, transcending the boundaries of religious arts. It leaves a profoundly far-reaching influence on Chinese aesthetic visions with a long-lasting imprint on the development of Chinese art.
In a bid to reflect a dialogue between the past and present, ancient and modern, 26 contemporary artworks created by 10 well-known Chinese artists are on display in another exhibition hall adjacent to the main hall.
The participating artists, like Guan Huaibin, Ni Youyu and Guo Gong, resort to traditional cultural contexts and Buddhist culture to create contemporary art inspired by the Yungang Grottoes.
A variety of art media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography, performance, painting and calligraphy, give a new visual perspective toward the ancient Buddhist site.
For example, Shao Yinong’s “Ligneous Heart No.1” features a daunting tree trunk that had been divided into six parts.
The artist polished, painted and varnished the trunk parts, layer-by-layer, and day-by-day, imbuing the trunk parts with “colorful growth rings.”
By repeatedly painting the trunk, the artist integrated an external observation of life and time with the internal growth of the mind, transforming the “the thought of growing up” into a simple and feasible practice.
Artist Ni Youyu’s “Heracles” is a hybrid of fragments from an ancient wood sculpture of a vajra and parts from a Heracles replica, the legendary Greek hero.
By deconstructing traditional images, the artist manages to evolve it into a new form of expression through a contemporary angle.
Feng Chuchen creates a multi-media installation titled “Seeing the Music” in a dark room, featuring 14 ancient musical performers based on original Yungang Grottoes’ images.
When visitors get close up, the silent ancient figures seem to wake up from their dream and begin to perform. Here, reality and future, legend and belief, material and conscious unwittingly collide through a “concert” of their own melodies.
Dates: Through March 28 (close on Mondays), 10am-6pm
Tickets: 98 yuan
Venue: Powerlong Art Museum
Address: 3055 Caobao Road
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
