New York’s High Line Will Host a Monumental Buddha Honoring Lost Cultural Heritage

For 18 months next Spring, a 27-foot-tall Buddha will rise on New York’s High Line, courtesy of Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Titled The Light That Shines Through the Universe, the artist’s High Line Plinth commission will quietly and movingly commemorate the loss of a treasured piece of cultural heritage.

In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan’s central valley. The 6th-century statues were reminders of the site’s pre-Islamic history as an exchange point along the Silk Road. Standing at 120 and 175 feet, the Buddhas became symbols of diversity, craftsmanship, and Eastern religion that the Taliban could not tolerate. They ignored international pressures to save the monuments and used ammunition and explosives to erase thousands of years of history.

“It was the first time, as a young adult, that I felt humanity couldn’t do anything to stop this from happening,” Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, remembered learning about the Buddhas’ destruction.

Nguyen’s reinterpretation of the larger Buddha, which will peer down 10th Avenue, diverges from the original work in meaningful ways. Alemani noted that the Bamiyan Buddhas were carved into cliffs, which meant they had no back side. Nguyen had to invent a posterior for his own freestanding sculpture. He will leave it less defined than the more detailed front of the piece, a space for the viewer’s own projection.

Additionally, the hands of the original carving have been lost to history and previous iconoclastic strikes. Nguyen will create his own from melted brass artillery shells and scrap metal from Afghanistan that one of his collaborators has collected. The hands will perform mudra poses that signify fearlessness and compassion. A gap will extend between these shiny forms and the rest of the stone sculpture.

“It’s a space of speculation or imagination,” Alemani told me over the phone. “It allows you to imagine what the hands used to look like,” but also what other possibilities might be out there.

Nguyen is fabricating the piece in Vietnam. It will consist of four massive sandstone parts, held together with a steel core, forming the tallest piece yet for a High Line Plinth commission. He will put it on a ship in January, to reach New York a couple months later. Alemani’s team will install it at night, in less than a week, craning it up from 10th Avenue piece by piece. Its title is a translation of the larger Buddha’s nickname “Salsal.”

“This sculpture is a towering, 27-foot call to remembrance, asserting that our collective memory and our shared humanity remain the most enduring antidote against those who seek to break and scatter the human spirit,” Alan van Capelle, executive director of Friends of the High Line, said in a statement. “What happened to the Buddhas of Bamiyan is not unique and is particularly resonant for many people across this country today who face a real fear of erasure and cultural persecution. A work of this magnitude requires a platform of equal magnitude, and I hope its debut on the Plinth offers people a powerful place to connect and find strength in this moment.”

Nguyen’s work often contends with the after-effects of war and destruction. His films and video installations, which have screened at the Sharjah Biennial, the Whitney Biennial, and the New Museum, often focus on the legacies of colonialism and the Vietnam War, in particular. Artillery shells are frequent materials throughout his sculpture practice, abstracted into beautiful and delicate new forms.

This fall, the artist mounted Temple, a monumental installation at National Gallery Singapore’s roof garden, for the 8th Singapore Biennial. The bright red, spider-like structure evokes the work of Alexander Calder (a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, who Nguyen has referenced in previous work) and becomes a site for healing: Soothing chimes, bells, and metal discs provide a therapeutic effect to visitors who sit on the pads beneath the work.

Nguyen’s High Line commission, besides serving as a monument to the wreckage, will raise questions about the possibilities of repair in the aftermath of extreme violence: against cultural relics and then, inevitably, against entire cultures themselves. Mediation and wellness programming will similarly accompany the sculpture’s run, with details yet to be released. 

The work, along with many of the High Line Plinth commissions, also speaks to ongoing conversations about the role of monuments in our country. Cultural factionalism can be responsible for both erecting giant testaments to particular belief systems, and to tearing them down. Nguyen offers an enormous reminder of the value of creative reinterpretations, the remaking of historical forms in a way that both honors cultural loss on an epic scale and leaves room for the contemporary imagination. Nguyen isn’t just bringing an object back to life, said Alemani, “but adding something that is a symbol of peace and hope and resilience.”