Interview with David Templeman, co-curator of the exhibition: Buddha: Radiant Awakening

by Kathleen Gregory

For three months ending on the 24th February 2002, the Art Gallery of NSW and VisAsia (the Australian Institute of Asian Culture and Visual Arts) presented an extraordinary exhibition of Buddhist art and iconography from around the world. David Templeman, honorary Research Associate at the History Department of Monash University, was a co-curator of the exhibition. Ordinary Mind spoke with David to find out more about how this exhibition came about.

David Templeman: Previously, the Art Gallery of NSW had conducted several exhibitions that incorporated a large amount of Buddhist material. Sir Edmund Capon, the Director of the Art Gallery of NSW and a Chinese specialist, had been highly impressed by these and wanted Buddhist art to become something that the gallery developed. He handed this over to the Director of Asian Art, Jackie Menzies, as a very loose suggestion that there should be an exhibition. To put an exhibition of this type and quality together, you really need to have five years of running time, however he only gave her about fifteen months. That was the genesis of it. It was Sir Edmund's desire and Jackie's willingness and love of Buddhist art that really started it.

OM: How did you even start to bring such an exhibition together?

DT: A committee was set up, consisting of Jackie Menzies, Dr Adrian Snodgrass (Associate, University of Sydney) and myself. It was our job to come up with the shape of the exhibition and the selection of the pieces. Jackie was particularly interested in how forms of the Buddha had radiated through time and space. So, we shaped this as an idea first. This resulted, firstly, in looking at the Buddha as a narrative life-story and secondly, in looking at the fact that texts such as the Avatamsaka Sutra present the Buddha as permeating all atoms of the universe. We also wanted to consider how the Buddha is represented over time, as a being situated in the past, present and future. We then had to consider how these aspects are reflected in art and the various mediums of that art.

Once we had developed that narrow but very provocative purview, we made our wish list. That took the better part of six months - going through every catalogue and book that we could, noting the pieces that we considered to be the best representatives of the Buddha of the time. We then contacted all the galleries. Some of the pieces were not available, some were too delicate to travel and some were already committed in the next year or so to other exhibitions. Interestingly, not all of the highest quality ones were committed, so we had access to some pieces that were absolutely stunning. The next step was that the pieces had to be viewed in situ in the galleries. If they were as good looking in the flesh as they were in the photograph and the gallery was willing to lend them, we sought to arrange the committing of the pieces, the signing of documents and so on. Then, all the pieces were arranged to arrive in the same week - that was amazing!

OM: I believe that some of the pieces had never travelled and some had never been exhibited before. Can you say something about those?

DT: A late starter for us was a statue of Buddha Shakyamuni (no. 26 in the catalogue), a very large 2nd century Kushan Period, Indian sandstone piece. It was identified by Dr Pratapaditya Pal - our senior adviser - to be an image of the Buddha, despite there being none of the identifying marks that you would expect. This piece has never been seen; it is in a private collection. We got a little glossy snapshot of it from Dr Pal, who had seen it in situ in a New York flat. It was just a smudgy little photo and we could not really see it well, so we took it on chance. When it arrived, everyone fell over backwards, because it is such an unbelievable statue.

The other piece worth mentioning - it is one of the greatest pieces of the exhibition in my opinion - is the painting of the Paradise of Maitreya from Dunhaung, China (no. 80 in the catalogue). It is a Tang Dynasty (9th -10th centuries) image, painted on silk. This is from the British Museum and has never left there. It was taken from Central Asia by Sir Errol Stein, at the turn of the 20th century, deposited in the British Museum and has been there ever since. Other museums in the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of New York, have tried to get this piece, but no-one has been able to access it.

Some of the other pieces that we are extraordinarily lucky to have are the ones that came out of Central Asia from the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Particularly, the tangka of Shakyamuni Buddha in Vajrasana (no. 59 in the catalogue); and the two scrolls Greeting a righteous man on the way to the Pure Land of Amitabha (nos. 89 and 90 in the catalogue). These three pieces, as far as I know, have only been displayed a few times before.

OM: Why do you think you were so successful in procuring these pieces?

DT: The reason we did so well is because galleries and collectors are becoming increasingly unwilling to lend to exhibitions that are not specific and focussed. There is too much of what I would call the scatter-gun effect - where you say, 'We will have an exhibition of Buddhist art and we will have a bit of everything.' The fact that we had the narrative life of the Buddha and his diffusion through time and space as the focus, I think impressed people and they saw it as an opportunity to ally themselves with an exhibition that was controlled, tight and very focussed.

OM: What difference do you think having such a focus has had for people coming to the exhibition, for example, for those who do not know anything about Buddhism?

DT: The catalogue has been written in such a way that it did not preach - we did not want to be advocates of Buddhism. It is an art gallery, a State Government undertaking. Essentially, what the ordinary person would have got out of the exhibition was the magnificence of the art of Buddhism. We wrote the catalogue very carefully, it is a very good overview of Buddhist cosmology, of the five Buddha principles, of the Buddha's life. I have been to the exhibition eight times. Each time there have been school groups, lay people, artists sketching various pieces, people prostrating, Buddhists going around with prayer-hands, at every single piece. The catalogue was in many people's hands; they were looking at each piece in conjunction to reading the catalogue. So, many approached it as an educative undertaking. Although it is hard to be educated and be stunned by the beauty and magnificence of the pieces at the same time!

OM: If one looks at the catalogue and the exhibition, while it is not about promoting Buddhism, at the same time it is not just about the art itself either. It seems like there is something you are trying to do to bridge those two aspects?

DT: Yes, there are constraints as I mentioned. Being in an art gallery, you cannot really have an exhibition that promotes a religion or a point of view. Jackie Menzies realised, through previous experience, that to have a successful exhibition you have to have curators who are enthusiasts or insiders. Although she herself is not inclined to any religion, she does lean towards Buddhism because of its aesthetic values. Adrian Snodgrass is a practising Buddhist and I am an enthusiast. With that combination and with other contributors, when we wrote the catalogue we ended up with something that was enthusiastic and written from the inside. There is a knowledge and a passion in the catalogue that rubs off on the reader. The inscriptions next to the pieces were extracted from the catalogue, so the same sense was there in the exhibition itself. Although we never set out to convert people or excite people about Buddhism.

One of the most interesting pieces was right in the foyer, before you even enter the gallery. The gallery has a huge foyer, with ten niches in the walls. In all of these niches were ten bronze casts from an original 17th century Quinlong period Buddha, from China (no. 125 in the catalogue). Each one had an arial behind it with a speaker in its base. They spoke to each other across the foyer, taking in turns: om, mani, padme, hum. You could call this installation art, or it could be said to be proselytising, but essentially it was aesthetically satisfying. Karma Phuntsok's amazing piece was used to finish the exhibition (no. 129 in the catalogue). It shows a handsome young Mao Tse Tung with a Buddha on the middle of his face, representing Buddha-mind. That is deliberately provocative and really challenges the observer to 'Think about it!' The piece entitled 'Our Gods,' by Liu Xiao Xian (no. 131 in the catalogue) is two pictures, one of Jesus and one of the Buddha, each made up of tiny images of each other. We also tried to make a point with that. Whether you are Christian or Buddhist, you may not be the same thing, but there are elements that flow over. The modern component of the exhibition attracted a lot of interest and was scattered throughout the gallery. The visitor would be surprised, seeing that Buddhist art occurs right through Australian art, through sculpture art, through Aboriginal art and so on. That it is contemporary and reflects the 'real world.'

OM: Can you say something about the publicity and the other events that accompanied the exhibition?

DT: When people leave the exhibition, going down to Pitt Street and around Hyde Park, there are banners of several of the pieces at every streetlight. There must be about 1000 banners which are about nine feet high and four feet wide. Every fifth or sixth one reads, 'Buddha Radiant at the Art Gallery.' The program of activities was amazing. There was a symposium, a visual arts syllabus, activities for students, painting activities for children, meditation, lamas teaching in the exhibition space itself and film festivals. The Wisdom Room was a large space within the exhibition itself, which comfortably held 300 people. They had over 900 people crammed in there, at different events for various teachings. Videos were running all of the time. One that sticks in my mind was a hand-held video where people had gone through Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai Temples in Sydney and filmed people doing things. These were lovely shots of real Buddhism.

OM: How successful has the exhibition been?

DT: Our greatest fear, of course, was that people would not come. There were images from all of the traditions. Would that attract people who would usually attend just for specific interests, or would it attract a more general audience, or neither? I am told informally that the numbers that passed through the exhibition by the end of the third week, was in fact the amount that we had expected for the whole three months.

OM: The exhibition isn't travelling?

DT: No, it could not travel. Some of the pieces are unable to travel. Two Japanese scrolls (no. 84 in the catalogue) could not be exposed to light for the duration of the exhibition. They were only in the exhibition for three to four weeks. These were replaced with one of the nicest holdings of the Art Gallery of NSW, which had been kept in abeyance (no. 83 in the catalogue). Other pieces were committed elsewhere. No gallery in Australia is really able to handle this exhibition - consider the National Gallery of Victoria, for example. The exciting thing this exhibition has done for me is confirm that the Art Gallery of NSW is pre-eminent in Asian Art, even though its holdings may be inferior, for example, to the National Gallery of Victoria. A multi-million dollar commitment has been made by the Gallery to extend its Asian Art area. This exhibition confirmed that this is the right decision: Asian art is popular.