Strangers in Cyclicity
- Management
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
Three times in twenty-four years, my mother’s Buddha statues have been pummeled into debris under the cover of night. The first time it happened, someone knocked Buddha’s head clean from his shoulders, which we found lying in the grass a few feet from the front porch and defiantly glued back on. A few days later, the vandal returned to finish the job, smashing the hollow statue to pieces that could not be reconstituted Humpty-Dumpty style. That was in the early 2000s. And again, about six years ago, my mother installed another Buddha in her yard (she is living somewhere else now) under an oak tree. This statue suffered the same fate as its predecessor, as if, somehow, two mass-produced reproductions of a religious figure were trapped in the same karmic cycle, locked in a repetitive sentence carried out by anonymous perpetrators.
Religious iconography is especially susceptible to destruction in the long and fascinating history of art under attack. Michelangelo’s Pietà; Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross; Dürer’s Lamentation of Christ. While the lawn figures were not art, they resembled sculptures of deities one can find in museums and temples, properly housed and in historical context. The fate of these figures came to mind while reading Danni Shen’s essay attached to Ye Zhu’s solo exhibition, CONTINUATIONS, which states that “several of the original CONTINUATIONS reliefs were destroyed over the years” and have been remade for this exhibition. The essay does not specify how these works were destroyed, or by whom. While they are whole, each of the arhat pieces (by the way, an arhat is a disciple who transcends Samsara based on the Buddha’s teachings) on display at Hawthorne Gallery this month appear to have undergone some degree damage and repair before arriving at peace. Heads are misplaced, torsos hollowed out. Hands duplicate and splinter from the wrists to float beside the arhat’s body, palms welcoming the viewer into prayer.
But the eight reliefs that managed to escape destruction over the years shape a narrative that links the nature of the soul to our modern circumstances for living. Within these reliefs, one can spot sunken bolts and screws, old phones, oyster shells, wires, pins, and more objects that seem to be receding into the muck of mundanity as the arhat emerges into the light. It is as if the familiar apparatuses for vanity and identity construction have formed a cosmos of our own manifestation. Together they create a mosaic of our daily, recurring chaos that mirrors the recurring chaos of reincarnation. The real challenge, then, is to separate our eternal souls from the past and present we keep in our mementos.
The reliefs encircle a gleaming black pool at the center of the room, upon which float pads of material containing more mixed and displaced pieces from the arhat’s journey to nirvana, each titled using suggestive religious syntax, like "Make Do with What the Lord Giveth" and "A Narrow Passage Worth Taking". As you walk around the room to study each figure, your back is to the great void in the center, ringed by an unbreachable bank of brushed charcoal. It is easy to imagine this pool as a primordial source of modern debris. At every point in the room, you can turn toward the pool and see the arhats on the opposite walls in deep meditation around the polished void, as if to acknowledge that consciousness, or reality, can be slipped into as easily as one enters a river.
As the pool disperses, the enlightened walk free, leaving footprints at the softest edges of the ring. Or maybe it’s the other way around: a lost soul wandering, moving with each circumambulation deeper into the maelstrom, drawn down into the cool black depths of an unbreakable karmic cycle.
While standing around the pool, a low tone filled the room, a harmony that dispersed like that of a struck bell. It submerged the figures in simple music, a clear call for contemplation as one. For a short period of time, Hawthorne Contemporary transformed into an urban temple, and unified the audience in the narrative carried through by the CONTINUATIONS on display. For a moment we were linked in the swirling loop of that low, sonorous timbre, fated to end the viewing eventually, to look at our phones and forget, to step out into the light and repeat our many cosmic errors.
Ye Zhu, Continuations
Hawthorne Gallery
Until April 25, 2026
