The $14 million Buddha, Pt. 4
By DR. YOKO HSUEH SHIRAI
SPECIAL TO THE RAFU
Saturday, April 25, 2009

An x-ray image (right) of the Buddha statue does not give the written evidence needed
to properly identify its creator.

This is the final installment in this series by USC lecturer, Dr. Yoko Hsueh Shirai, covering the story of a recently auctioned Japanese Buddhasculpture at Christie’s New York (sold at over $14 million, hence the title) that set off a craze in Japan involving museum professionals, scholars, Buddhist temple administrators, icon sculptors, and the public at large. Last week’s installment can be read at www.rafu.com.
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As the Christie’s auction became imminent, the local municipal government of Ashikaga city, claiming the Vairocana as part of its own local history, circulated a petition nationwide on 22 February to ask the Agency for Cultural Affairs for aid towards “protecting” the/their image. The petition with 12,826 signatures was delivered to the Agency by the mayor of Ashikaga city on 5 March. On the same day, two special assemblies were convened in Tokyo but to no avail. The government’s handswere tied and the Vairocana was on its way to New York City.

Two weeks later, with a presale estimate of the Vairocana by Christie’s of a price between one and a half to two million dollars, the outcome was none too clear. Eventually Shinnyo-en paid over seven times the estimated price, another point of mystery. At a dinner party in the lovely Santa Monica home of Dr. Donald McCallum, my teacher at UCLA and professor of Japanese art, there was a prominent curator of Japanese art who knew someone that informed him that the other bidder of the Vairocana was “an American.” But the curator could not imagine an American collector of Japanese art who would pay this price, and then wondered if maybe Shinnyo-en itself had arranged to have the auction price driven higher by this “American.” I don’t know which is crazier: the reality that Shinnyo-en did in fact bid itself up to pay a more sensational price for the Japanese Buddha, or the idea that Shinnyo-en would even want to do such a thing.

Part of this response might have to do with what Shinnyo-en had been doing in New York just prior to the auction. Creating Buddhist icons as an act of religious devotion has long been a part of Japanese Buddhism, and the Shinnyo-en co-founder Ito Shinjo did just that. The sect organized an exhibition of Shinjo’s works, “The Vision and Art of Shinjo Ito,” and was touring internationally. Lily Koppel writing in the New York Times and published on 19 Feb. 2008 described the show which was to open on 21 Feb. at the Milk Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and close at the end of March. Capturing the public’s attention in a splashy way seems to have been a prerogative for the show’s organizers as the private opening reception featured high profile guests such as Donna Karan, Russell Simmons, and Victoria Secret model Miranda Kerr.

Aside from the exhibition, the sect was busy with another event in New York occurring just two days after the Christie’s auction. Angela Vimuttinan, an undergraduate at USC, discovered the Shinnyo-en Facebook site and during her class presentation, she flashed images of Mira Sorvino and Morgan Freeman from the “Red Carpet at Shinnyo-en Foundation Gala” to celebrate the launch of its “Six Billion Paths to Peace” campaign. This campaign launch involved a kind of installation piece in the center of Times Square that looked like a large tent with an artificial waterfall, and just outside the tent was a neatly manicured garden filled with flowers blooming in planters and park-like wooden benches. Angela interpreted this as “a venue that encouraged visitors to meditate upon what their individual paths to peace might be.” For those of you who aren’t aware of current statistics, there are an estimated eight billion people in the world today, so Shinnyo-en is asking all of us to meditate on our own paths to peace. Included in the campaign were two enormous electronic billboards in Times Square displaying close-upimages of smiling, ordinary people holding large sheets of paper that described their personal “paths to peace.” Subtlety and saving money clearly were not major concerns.

After the Shinnyo-en Vairocana returned to Japan, it was again loaned to the Tokyo National Museum and then displayed, as if nothing had changed. But there was a definite shift as an Unkei-inspired momen­tum really started to build: forgotten sculptures languishing inside temples large and small, from Zenkoji in Nagano prefecture to a small hall only two meters square in Kochi prefecture, were now being re-evaluated by scholars and attributed to Unkei’s workshop or to Kaikei, another contemporary sculptor who rivaled Unkei, or to Tankei, Unkei’s son and successor.

Anything having to do with the Kei-school lineage became one of the hottest things in Japan in 2008. There is the present Kei-school mas­ter sculptor located in Kyoto who has been inundated with orders for Bud­dha icon commissions from all over Japan. Then there is the exhibition of images sculpted by six genera­tions of Kei-school masters, starting with Kokei who is presumed to be Unkei’s father.

The show opened on 11 Nov. at the Prefectural Museum of Art of Yamaguchi prefecture, multiple hours south of the Tokyo and Kyoto/ Osaka metropolitan regions. Before closing on 21 Dec., the Yomiuri Shinbun – which happens to be one of the sponsors of the exhibition – reported that about ten thousand people visited the museum every twelve days, so subtracting one day a week the museum was closed, on average almost one thousand people paid the approximate ten dollar adult entrance fee each day. This is a phenomenal turnout for a show riding on the coattails of the coattails of…and so on, in an area that is far away from the usual places for blockbuster exhibitions such as Tokyo or Osaka. When will this madness end?
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Readers are welcome to contact Dr. Yoko Hsueh Shirai with com­ments and questions at yshirai@ usc.edu.