Cleveland Museum of Art

Bodhisattva Guanyin

Date

late 500s–early 600s

Medium

sandstone with polychromy

Culture

China, late Northern Qi (550–577) or early Sui dynasty (581–618)

Department

Chinese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

The artistic excellence of this bodhisattva is further reinforced by comparable outstanding Chinese Buddhist sculptures excavated at Qingzhou in Shandong Province in 1996—one of the most sensational and significant archaeological finds of the 20th century. Like related types among the Qingzhou finds, this statute has a gently smiling face and meticulous detailing of splendid jewelry. A noticeable difference, however, is the unique yingluo ( mukt hara ) worn by the bodhisattva for personal adornment. The somewhat bizarre but imaginative combination of a string of jewels with grotesque animal masks, flying apsara , jade pendants, dragons, and metal ornaments was probably a regional decorative style of Shanxi Province. The carved and painted back suggest that the bodhisattva was originally displayed where it could be viewed in the round.

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