A Howick gallery is showing the first exhibition by an art student who followed a single Buddhist deity across four cultures.
Where Compassion Rests, by Yoyo Zheng, opened at Uxbridge Arts and Culture on 16 July and runs until 26 September.
The work began on a trip to Yunnan Province in southern China, on the Ancient Tea Horse Road, a trade route formed in the late 6th century that carried religions and cultures as well as goods.
Zheng visited temples there dedicated to Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion in Chinese Buddhism, who is usually shown with a willow branch and water.
In Shangri-La City, where Tibetan Buddhism runs through daily life, she found the same figure had become Chenrezig, a masculine form with four arms.
Each arm stands for one of the four divine abodes: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity.
Researching further, Zheng found that in Mahayana Buddhism the two become Avalokitesvara, often shown with a thousand arms, a thousand eyes and eleven heads.
Rather than settle on one version, Zheng has blended Indian, Chinese, Tibetan and Nepalese depictions into her own interpretation.
“The many forms of the Bodhisattva reflect the many forms of humanity,” the gallery says in its exhibition text.
It says the deity’s recurrence across cultures points to “a strong undercurrent of interrelatedness and shared beliefs that connects us all”.
Zheng is a first-year architecture student at AUT’s School of Future Environments.
She works in ink, gouache and rice paper, which the gallery says is a way of connecting with her Chinese heritage and wider East Asian artistic traditions.
The exhibition is hanging in The Wall, a space on the Uxbridge concourse given over to work by local secondary and tertiary art students.
The Wall runs up to four exhibitions a year and is intended to let emerging artists work through the process of mounting a show without the pressure of a full gallery.
Uxbridge is at 35 Uxbridge Road, Howick, and its galleries are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm.
Entry is free.
