Like the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that it evokes, Zhang Huan’s “Three-Legged Buddha” is an artwork of mystery and complexity. It captures life, death, and rebirth. The enormous sculpture is strong and muscular, yet fragile; seemingly dominated yet defiant. Is the key figure within it collapsing, or is it arising?

These are the qualities and questions the sculpture embodies as it sits within the lush South Fields of Storm King Art Center. In July, the Mountainville, N.Y. art center, which brings together nature and sculpture in a magnificent pastoral setting of hills, fields, and woodlands in the Hudson Highlands, installed the sculpture. It stands about 28 feet tall and weighs 12 tons, and sits in a clearing amid a grove of maple trees. The sculpture is the gift of the Chinese artist and The Pace Gallery of New York.

The sculpture is definitely eye-capturing in the middle of the grove. It has three gigantic, thick legs, two of them balanced on thin stilts, in a contorted, back-bending image of the Buddha. The third leg and foot are resting atop the upper half of an eight-foot-high head, which has eyes closed. The top edge of the sculpture is rough like mountain peaks.

Three-Legged Buddha, Storm King Art Center

Zhang, born in 1965 in the Henan province of China, created this sculpture in 2007. Initially a performance artist known internationally through his edgy, provocative, and haunting works, Zhang has immersed himself during recent years in traditional art practice, specifically sculpting a series of monumental artworks depicting the fragmented extremities of Buddhist statues, according to The Pace Gallery, the artist’s dealer in New York and Beijing.

Of Destroyed Monasteries

“Three-Legged Buddha” is a moving and dramatic sight, all the more so when one understands the source of Zhang’s creation. Zhang set about to make these sculptures after a visit to Tibet in which he found fragments of religious sculptures that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution for sale in a Tibetan market. Deeply moved by the sight of these fragments, Zhang started to collect them as relics, with an intention to transform them in some way to art, according to Art Knowledge News.

The Tibetan people and their culture suffered immensely during the 1950s and 1960s at the hands of China’s government under Mao Tse-tung, especially when the Chinese authorities suppressed Tibet’s 1959 uprising and during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Chinese groups supporting the Cultural Revolution and some Tibetans who joined them pillaged and destroyed thousands of Tibet’s Buddhist temples and monasteries. Tibet contained more than 6,000 monasteries at the time of China’s invasion in 1950. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, fewer than a dozen were left.

Zhang sensed a mysterious power in the fragments that he found in the Tibetan market, knowing of the religious and historical meanings embedded in them, explains a Pace Gallery release on another of these Buddha works, “Three Heads Six Arms.” In recreating the fragments on a large scale, the artist believes he can help assuage the pain caused by the original destruction. In a series of these large sculptures based on the smaller fragments, Zhang has combined various body parts – legs, arms, hands, and heads – to personify Buddhist deities.

Being With…

Being present with Zhang’s sculpture engenders many sensations, some disturbing and some inspiring. It has undeniable strength and muscularity, especially in the legs, which are alive with spirit. And yet, the posture of the sculpture and especially the legs seem contorted, like a world twisted by harsh events.

Looking at the sculpture’s brokenness, reflecting the fragments that Zhang found and embodied in the upper half of the head that is under the weight of one of the legs, I consider how religion and spirituality become targets. The authorities, exemplifying the worst aspects of man’s nature, tried to silence and kill spirit in the form of Tibetan Buddhism, literally trying to break it apart in the monasteries and temples.

This, the sculpture says to me, is a world where man tries to crush another’s spirit. It is one where the soul threatens the order of worldly power and so the rulers must put it down, tear it apart. It’s trauma by brute force, one repeated in many cultures and different times around the globe.

Yet, there is something of non-collapse and calm in the face of the terrible force. The head refuses to yield and survives. The feet have life, the toes have life. Walking around the sculpture and knowing the events in Tibet, I feel the suffering of the Tibetans who practiced their faith in the temples and monasteries. I walk upon the solid ground and feel your silent suffering, feel the feet and the legs that marched and assaulted you for a time – and still do – and yet you survive.

If the sculpture has suffering, we must be with it to absorb its suffering and understand the force that seeks to crush spirit, prayer, music, art, and our very humanness. This, ultimately, is the healing power of “Three-Legged Buddha.”

View the slide show larger in Flickr.