"At sixty-two meters, the Leshan Buddha in southern Sichuan is the world's tallest premodern statue. Since its carving out of a riverside cliff in the eight century, it has remained a site of pilgrimage for monks and lay travelers and is now a World Heritage Site. But this Buddha is not alone: Sichuan is the home of other monumental sculpture and cave temples dating back many centuries. These examples of art embedded in nature have altered landscapes and have influenced the values and worldview of users through multiple ...
Read More
"At sixty-two meters, the Leshan Buddha in southern Sichuan is the world's tallest premodern statue. Since its carving out of a riverside cliff in the eight century, it has remained a site of pilgrimage for monks and lay travelers and is now a World Heritage Site. But this Buddha is not alone: Sichuan is the home of other monumental sculpture and cave temples dating back many centuries. These examples of art embedded in nature have altered landscapes and have influenced the values and worldview of users through multiple rounds of revival, restoration, and visitation. Cave temples, with their attendant statuary, are a unique architectural form that is created as part of a mountain or rock formation for religious purposes. As hybrid spaces that are at once natural and artificial, they embody the interaction of art and environment. This far-ranging study of cave temples in Sichuan explores the interconnectedness of cultural monuments to social context and the ecosphere by asking how the natural setting shapes the design of cave temples and how these sites, once established, influenced conceptions of nature. Sichuan offers plentiful examples for the investigation of art history from an ecological perspective, as the cave-building tradition in Southwest China has been intricately tied to how local inhabitants made use of their natural resources. These examples show how and why cave temples were first integrated into Sichuan's ecosystem and have remained rooted in it. Temples in the Cliffside brings art history into closer dialogue with current discourse on environmental issues and contributes to a new understanding of the ecological impact of artistic works"--
Read Less
