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Long-Distance Merit-Making: Art at a Thai Buddhist Temple in Wimbledon |
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| Author |
Cate, Sandra Louise
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| Source |
Dissertation Abstracts International
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| Volume | v.60 n.3 Section A |
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| Date | 1998 |
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| Publisher | ProQuest LLC |
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| Publisher Url |
https://www.proquest.com/
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| Location | Ann Arbor, MI, US [安娜堡, 密西根州, 美國] |
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| Content type | 期刊論文=Journal Article |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Degree | doctor |
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| Institution | University of California, Berkeley |
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| Advisor | Phillips, Herbert P. |
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| Publication year | 1998 |
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| Note | 400p |
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| Keyword | England; Transnationalism; National Identity |
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| Abstract | This ethnography of a Thai Buddhist temple in England explores the sociocultural production of art at the intersection of identity, authority, and value. At Wat Buddhapadipa in Wimbledon, England, in a classical-style ubosot (meeting hall) sponsored by Thai Elites and the royal Thai government, contemporary Thai artists have painted prestigious, yet controversial temple murals. Finished in 1992, the murals depict Buddhist narratives, other-worldly landscapes punctuated with sly references to global politics and popular culture. The artists have rendered their personal visions of “Thainess” (khwaampenthai) and Buddhist doctrine for diverse audiences.
Observers judge their work as too radical to be painted in Thailand, yet seminal in the “neo-traditional” art movement, revealing conflicting epistemologies of temple painting (murals-as-stories, murals-as-art) and competition for cultural authority. Representing an expanding Thai middle class, the artists position themselves within a social field shaped by Buddhist merit and “Thai tradition,” as they seek status in a world extending beyond national borders. A mural detail poses this visually, as a Thai Airways plane replaces the symbolic boat that carries Dhamma practitioners to Nirvana. This work analyzes the sponsorship of the temple in an expanding economy of merit, trajectories of the artists' lives from Thai villages to London, exported hierarchies of authority, modes of artistic production, and the discursive practices (international and local) which interpret art, define the status of the past, and give value to the present. Based on ethnographic observation, interviews, and formal visual analysis, it fuses the work of the anthropologist and the art historian, viewing Wat Buddhapadipa as both aesthetic creation and as religious construction.
These artists reverse an Orientalist narrative of the Asian Other, arriving in London to tell their own stories, and painting a Buddhist world that subsumes Western spaces. Schooled in international art trends, they manipulate categories of the “traditional,” “modern,” “neo-traditional,” “postmodern,” “Asian,” “Western,” “sacred,” and “secular,” collapsing oppositions constructed by scholars. Such categories become active verbs, indices of creative process and strategy. This study tracks globalized ideologies, categories, and institutional practices of “modern art,” as they are received, reworked, and re-interpreted locally, and projected back into an international arena. |
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| ISBN | 9780599223363; 0599223367 |
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| Hits | 186 |
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| Created date | 1999.10.26
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| Modified date | 2022.03.31 |
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