Eight Men Ferrying a Statue of the Buddha (from Mogao Cave 323, Dunhuang, Gansu province)
The Fogg Museum's Gallery Description:
This mural section was part of a series of vignettes recounting the recovery of a sculpture of Shakyamuni Buddha believed to have been sponsored by a daughter of the great Indian monarch Ashoka (304–232 BCE) from a river near Yangzhou in the early fourth century. Inscriptions in rectangular cartouches (a fragment of one is visible directly below the skiff) briefly describe each scene of the narrative, which has also been passed down in canonical histories of Chinese Buddhism. The flaming jewels on the tall canopy that covers the Buddha sculpture, together with the fluttering banners that adornthe boat and are held by the assembly of monks nearby, signal the importance of the recovered sculpture and imbue the scene with a sense of celebration.
Credit Line Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, First Fogg Expedition to China (1923-1924) Accession Year 1924 Object Number 1924.41
Constance Chen, "Empire of Artifacts: U.S. Epistemological Colonialism in 1920s China" (emphasis mine):
For the Fogg Art Museum and Warner, there was an urgency to get to China and to collect artifacts because Europeans had already conducted much archeological work throughout the Asian country, including at Dunhuang.… American institutions thus felt compelled to join the race for objects as soon as possible to enhance their own academic standing. They were vying for intellectual and cultural control of China in an attempt to position themselves within the hierarchy of global knowledge production; they interceded in the invention of Orientalist discourses in a deployment of selective internationalism to increase U.S. influence abroad without governmental or military interference.… Regardless of the method, obtaining artifacts that could be studied and displayed at the Fogg was essential in elevating the Americans in the competition against the Europeans.
…Warner’s work in China paralleled American efforts to solidify the U.S. footing within the international community on multiple fronts. Harvard University’s objective of gaining institutional renown by owning Asian antiquities to be used as pedagogical tools in the new Fogg facility was intertwined with U.S. political and economic ambitions in the Pacific world and beyond. The attainment of artifacts and the production of knowledge abroad were hence folded into and served as one cultural component of the growing informal empire that the United States was building, taking place alongside other expansionist projects in the economic and religious realms. Warner’s actions and viewpoints thus both replicated and extended the United States’ empire-building machinations. Harvard’s ventures in China exemplified the deployment of selective internationalism and corresponded with the American attempt to intervene in Asia without resorting to military force or political occupation. This was, however, not any less influential on the colonial subjects or the colonizers themselves: the removal and reframing of Chinese objects impacted the production of epistemic structures on art and race in the United States and simultaneously served to reshape notions of nationalism and cultural patrimony within China. The ideological functions imposed on Chinese antiquities by Warner and his contemporaries were consequently in dynamic interaction with U.S. colonialist forays into the global arena in the early twentieth century and illuminated the discursive entanglements between culture, modernity, and knowledge production.
