Art exhibition from Pakistan gets positive press reviews

NEW YORK: An exhibition of the splendors of the ancient Buddhist civilization of Gandhara from Pakistan, which opened at Asia Society on Wednesday, has received positive review in the press. "After what seemed like an endless run of geopolitical roadblocks, 'The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara' has finally come, six months late, from Pakistan to Asia Society. Is the show worth all the diplomatic headaches it caused with its images of bruiser bodhisattvas, polycultural goddesses and occasional flights into stratosphere splendor, it is," said The New York Times.

"That all but a handful of the 75 sculptures are from museums in Lahore and Karachi is in itself remarkable," art critic Holland Cotter wrote in the newspaper's art section. "Any effort to borrow ancient art from South Asia is fraught, even in the best of times. For an entire show of loans to make the trip, and in a period when Pakistan and the United States are barely on speaking terms, is miraculous.

In this regard, the Times paid tributes to Pakistan's UN Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon for his role in facilitating the release of the precious objects from the museums in Pakistan to New York. "Without (his) persistent effort ... the exhibition would almost certainly never have happened," the newspaper said. "So the show has a cliffhanger back story as an attraction, and some monumental work, like the fantastic relief called "Vision of a Buddha's Paradise". (Dated to the fourth century A.D., it's a kind of flash-mob version of heaven.) The serenely installed show of architectural reliefs, and works of gold and bronze, offers no hint of the immense bureaucratic and political challenges that almost prevented it from opening, wrote ARTINFO, the premier site for news about art and culture around the world.

The highlight of the exhibition, organized by Adriana Proser, a curator at Asia Society, is "Vision of a Buddha's Paradise". "The big Buddha seated at its center wears an off-the-shoulder robe ... while a couple dozen of mini-bodhisattvas around him mix and match international fashions, with no two outfits, or gestures, or poses, quite the same," the New York Times' art critic observed.

"Two figures gaze raptly up at the Buddha; another, chin propped on hand, looks day-dreamingly away; far below, two tiny observers feed lotuses to fish in a stream." ARTINFO quoted Asia Society Museum director Melissa Chiu as saying that the exhibition will provide not only an important counterpoint to the prevailing perceptions of Pakistan in the United States, but also an art-historically significant re-valuation of the ancient objects themselves.

"For so long, it was this outpost of Greco-Roman culture, and now we're actually trying to locate it very much within the region and within an idea of how cultures travel and how they became more a symbol of pluralism," said Chiu. For Chiu, the Asia Society's exhibition reflects a reappraisal that is currently underway in the entire discipline of art history. "Gandharan art has undergone a new appreciation now with scholarship being developed around the idea of a global culture rather than a national culture," she explained. In the last two or three years, according to Chiu, art historians have begun to argue that ours "is not the only period in which there was lots of culture interchange and travel, but actually in the ancient world there were these moments. And so Gandharan art comes out of one of those."

The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The carving eloquently embodies the European-Asian synthesis of Gandharan culture in the first to third centuries. It was there, in what is now the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, that Alexander the Great's incursion into India ultimately spawned an artistic expression. Gandhara produced the first sculptural representations of the Buddha, a thousand years after he died. "The sculpture is generally acknowledged to be the finest example of Gandharan art ever found."

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2011