Asia Week New York 2024 will be held in March and many Asian antiquities will be on display for sale. After the high-profile raid by the Manhattan D.A.’s Office on sellers of Asian antiquities in 2016, a European law professor and specialist in antiquities theft referred to the sale of Asian art in Manhattan as “usually a depressing festival of pillage”. Since then, the attitude toward looted art has markedly changed and we frequently read about sacred art going back home from prominent museums. But the decades of looting have left much sacred art damaged or lost and the illegal antiquities trade may go further underground now.
In 2022 India found an Indian American antiquities dealer, Subhash Kapoor, guilty of the looting and trafficking of ancient Asian sacred art. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. His organization had allegedly pillaged sacred art from India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia and Pakistan to sell to wealthy collectors through a New York City art gallery. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office confiscated over 2,000 items from Kapoor and claimed they had nabbed one of the kingpins of the world-wide illegal Asian art trade; some experts are not so sure he was the worst.
In the last couple of years the trend of looted, sacred Asian art being repatriated continued. As high-profile examples, Yale University Art Gallery had more than a dozen works linked to Kapoor seized by Homeland Security in 2022. In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned fourteen sacred works to Cambodia and two to Thailand that had been linked to Douglas Latchford, a British citizen charged with numerous crimes in the US related to ancient art smuggling. Recently, the nations of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand demanded that the Denver Art Museum return artifacts linked to Latchford.
So the tide has turned and the norms have changed. Individuals and museums now realize it is not acceptable to purchase sacred work stolen from poor Asian countries. They now know if they do, there is a good chance they will be busted and publicly condemned. But I also believe that the damage has been done and it probably cannot be undone. I also believe that Western museums are still chock-full of looted art.
As far as damage is concerned, please take a look at the sculpture of a Buddha from a museum in Pakistan which I recently saw at an exhibit in Shenzhen, China (highlighting ancient art from an area along the ancient Spice Route). The piece is not illegal and is not being illegally displayed – its country of origin happens to be an area now within modern Pakistan. What I want to do is point out certain things about this statue to show that the looters and traffickers have done serious and irreparable damage to Asian sacred art.
This Buddha is an example of what is called Gandharan art. As you might recall, Alexander the Great lead a war of conquest all the way into what is modern Pakistan. This opened relations between South Asia and the Hellenistic world. Gandhara is a region where ancient Greek art greatly influenced the development of South Asian art. Much Gandharan art looks like a hybrid between Greek and South Asian art.
The Greek influence is quite noticeable in this Buddha. He is posed as someone from an ancient Greek sculpture would be posed and his garment seems Greek. Although it is difficult to see from the photo, the eyes of this Buddha are even looking upward. This was a feature of some Greek/Roman art, where heroes or those who were suffering sought divine intervention by gazing upward. Since the enlightened Buddha would not be looking up for any god’s help, a Gandharan sculptor borrowed this from the Greeks, for whatever aesthetic reason.
But most importantly, you can see that there is a major crack around this Buddha’s neck and the hands are missing. The head was most likely hammered off of this Buddha to be sold to a collector or museum. It is always much easier to hammer off a head and sell it to a collector than to try to steal an entire, quite heavy, body. Interestingly, however, it seems that the head was rejoined at a later time, perhaps after the head was confiscated by authorities who also knew where to locate the body.
What about the hands? Collectors of looted Asian art like buying hands as well. The hands on these types of sacred statues are often displayed with symbolic finger arrangements. If I am a collector and I cannot afford to buy a head, maybe, at least, I can swoop up some hands with delicately chiseled fingers holding some symbolic meaning. I believe there is a good chance the hands of this unique work were looted and are in someone’s home or a museum.
So when you go to a museum to look at the ancient Asian art, you will see heads of sacred beings (which were hammered off of bodies which were probably located in temples). People worshipped and prayed before these statues. These statues had deep emotional and social meaning to communities. Now wealthy connoisseurs “own” them and have them lying around their houses, apartments or villas where they are conversation pieces or objects to confer greater prestige upon themselves.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, there is a magnificently beautiful head of Guan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy. As you can read from their website, this head was “severed from a monumental figure”. Now, I am not accusing the Art Institute of anything. I am just saying that when someone hammered this head off so that it could be sold, the work was destroyed. I could cry looking at this remarkable head of one of the most humane creations of the human mind, a goddess people worship to this day. There are different poses that different Guan Yins have, and the body poses are often integral to the overall impact and meaning of the statue. This was completely lost when the head was chopped off.
For a collector to get an illegal emaciated Buddha head is like Sydney Greenstreet’s character of Kasper Gutman finally getting the Maltese Falcon. An emaciated Buddha head is the stuff that dreams are made of. It is simply beyond me to even imagine the sense of pride and superiority an “owner” of an emaciated Buddha head must feel. So this leads to the question of why some folks want to buy illegal works of sacred art. Again, virtually any ancient Asian art that we see in a museum was probably in a temple somewhere. It was there to assist communities in prayer and worship. Whether it was first removed legally from the temple is a big, often overlooked question.
Usually three basic reasons are given for why folks would illegally purchase this art: the prestige and “thrill” of owning something rare and of immense cultural and spiritual value; the investment opportunities of owning something that can be sold for a higher value at a later date; and, there are even some folks who have a sense of “custodianship” and who feel that such priceless objects would be better preserved with them than in villages, museums or in other collections.
I think there is a deeper reason, which I do not quite understand, and which the connoisseurs themselves probably do not grasp. There has been a propensity for Western art lovers to secularize art meant to serve sacred or magical functions. Picasso and others did this to African art in the early 20th century.
Art had a sacred and magical value in African societies, but Western artists preferred to imbue the objects with “meaning”. It is the “meaning” of these objects which gives them their value to Western collectors. A Guan Yin to an art thief is a different Guan Yin to a poor farmer in a village who needs rain, a good crop and a smooth pregnancy for his wife. The art thief finds profound meaning in the objects he steals.
So what about the museums? Some are cleaner than others. When I was in Hanoi last year, I saw two beautiful statues of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guan Yin) in the fine arts museum which almost brought me to tears. These were brought to the museum so that looters could not get them and because the temples had been abandoned. This is fine. Kudos to the Vietnamese Fine Arts Museum.
But what about all the heads that have been separated from bodies and the little altar pieces one often finds in museums which were probably stolen and then sold to collectors before making their way to museums through donations or sales? Can we count on all of the sacred art which has been partially destroyed and sold to be repatriated? Or do the museums only give back what they have to, when they get caught? In the mean time, the process of looting that was so acceptable for so long has destroyed an overabundance of art found to be sacred by so many.
Photos of the Gandharan Buddha were taken by the author at the Shenzhen Museum’s “The Silk Road” exhibit.
Photo of the head of Guan Yin from the Art Institute of Chicago is public domain and courtesy of the Art Institute.
Photo of the headless “fasting” Buddha is public domain, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For reference:
https://theantiquitiescoalition.org/sale-of-indian-heritage/
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
