BEELD
film, installation
35’11’’
In 1996, the Chinese Buddhist statue Zhanggong was acquired by a Dutch collector. A mummy of a monk, that had died 1000 years ago was discovered inside. After this finding, the statue began its journey of being examined in a hospital, exhibited in museums, and stored at the collector’s repository, further complicating its role as a Buddha, a mummy, work of art, and commodity. A few years later, in Tampa, Florida, people gathered in front of a finance building, to pray to a mysterious image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on the steamy window of the building. 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 collection of skeletons in the museum's basement. 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. Through a variety of filmed and found footage, the film interweaves Zhanggong’s image with the constant conflicts and fascinations with the body in modern European history.
Please email me for screener.
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. Over the period I have been thinking of how the studios of De Ateliers resemble the hall of a chapel with its 7-meter height ceilings and shape of windows. 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.