Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan.

• Author: Lee, Sonya
• Position: Book review

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan. By KATHERINE R. TSIANG, with contributions by Richard Born, Jinhua Chen, Albert E. Dien, Lec Maj, Nancy S. Steinhardt, Daisy Yiyou Wang, J. Keith Wilson, and Wu Hung. Chicago: SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2010. [Distributed by the University of Chicago Press.] Pp. 269, illus. $45.

Echoes of the Past was published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2010 and later at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. (I would like to thank Andrew Harrington of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for providing me with the gallery labels from the Xiangtangshan exhibit.) The exhibit was the culmination of a multi-year collaborative project devoted to the reconstruction and recontextualization of Xiangtangshan cave temples, a project based at the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. As Wu Hung, the project's senior adviser, states in the preface, the project "represents a new type of academic program that integrates research, teaching, technological development, domestic and international collaboration, scholarly exchange, and public education into a focused whole" (p. 13). Accordingly, the eleven Buddhist cave temples associated with Xiangtanshan--divided among three separate locations near Fengfeng in southern Hebei province, China--are examined within the initial period of creation under the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77), as well as in the twentieth century, when the caves first became known to the outside world through site reports, academic studies, and the art market in the West. In response to the removal of sculptures from the site by looters in the early decades of the century and the subsequent dispersal of these pieces in museum and private art collections around the world, researchers of the Xiangtangshan project have sought to reunite the sites with the fragments abroad through the use of digital 3-D reconstruction models. Their efforts yielded a multimedia video installation which formed the centerpiece of the exhibition; the imaging technologies utilized therein are explained and documented in the accompanying catalogue and at two related websites respectively set up by the University of Chicago (xts.uchicago.edu) and the Smithsonian (asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/XTSgallery.asp#l).

The Xiantangshan project exemplifies a...