BEELD 2025

(Close)

film, installation
33’00’’

After a mummy is discovered inside a Chinese Buddhist statue, it travels through hospitals, labs and museums. During the journey, the statue is taken as a mummy, a work of art, a commodity and a Buddha. A few years later, in Tampa, Florida, people gathered in front of a building, praying to an image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on its steamy window. How does an image become an icon?
Imagining Zhanggong’s journey through the Netherlands, the film presents reenacted scenarios of different people involved in the trip: excited doctors, meditating curator, hesitant collector, and a museum security guard frightened by the biological remains in an art museum. The fascination with the body in modern European history knows no end.
Beeld, as it both refers to “statue” and “image” in Dutch, discusses the iconography ("造像") behind the complicated identities and value of this migrating religious object -- how his image is molded, constructed and manifested, and how it was eventually read beyond its signifier.

watch short clip here

installation view, 2024
Offspring: Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
photo by Gert Jan van Rooij

Tampa
plastic film, vinyl sticker, 378.3 x 233.4 cm
Tampa presents an image possessing the liminal form of Mary and a sitting Buddha, usually installed on windows above eye level. A point of view of looking up becomes a metaphor that recalls religious gestures of believing, and spatial relationships between prayer and god, often mediated and fulfilled by the religious icon.

left: installation view, 2024
Offspring: Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
photo by Gert Jan van Rooij

right: installation view, 2025
Shapeshifters, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

(Return to Projects)