Memories of Paradise

Tracing the histories of a cosmopolitan sculpture.

By George Murphy

Illustration by Emily Wells Bennett

When Dr. Jin Xu was hired as an associate professor in the Department of Art History last year, he discovered that his position came with the unexpected perk of access to Columbia’s art properties collection. As a historian of Chinese art, he was particularly interested in the Sackler collection (yes, those Sacklers), which includes a wide variety of Chinese stone sculptures that have received little scholarly attention. Of the sculptures, he found one especially fascinating—a Northern Qi work from the Xiangtangshan Caves in Hebei province, known to scholars as the “Monster Panel.” 

Xu requested that the sculpture be moved to his office so that he could study it more closely. As he examined it, he realized that previous scholars had erred in their analysis of the sculpture’s origin. Scholars previously posited that the “Monster Panel” and six other similar panels had been carved out of the walls of Xiangtangshan at some point in the early 20th century. However, as Xu notes in Orientations magazine, it was clear that the sculptures had originally been freestanding due to their weathering and some other small clues. This discovery may not have been particularly extraordinary by itself, but its implications were. Drawing on photographs and measurements of the Xiangtangshan Caves that he had taken before arriving at Columbia, Xu was able to demonstrate that the panels were a perfect fit for the dimensions of one of the burial chambers at Xiangtangshan, thought by scholars to potentially be the final resting place of the first Northern Qi emperor, Gao Yang. If so, this would mean that Columbia is in possession of something extraordinarily rare: art from an ancient Chinese imperial tomb.

My first impression of the “Monster Panel” was of its fearsome energy. The panel depicts a figure with the body of a Hellenistic strongman and the head of a yakshi, the primal nature spirits which abound in Buddhist art. Carved in high relief, the monster is imposing, with bulging muscles, sharp fangs, and a general aura of barely constrained fury. Interestingly, despite potentially being an example of art produced in an imperial workshop, the Monster Panel is not necessarily a reflection of visual motifs exclusively indigenous to China. The creature’s muscular body is an import from the Sogdians, an Iranian people influenced by Greco-Roman aesthetics; its scowling yakshi face, meanwhile, originates in Indian Buddhist art. Clues like this, Xu told me, demonstrate that the Northern Qi conception of the afterlife was not  “specifically a Chinese paradise.” Instead, it is a cosmopolitan object, a crystallization of cultural collisions between East and West.

We don’t really know what the “Monster Panel”’s last millennium looked like—maybe it drifted through the collections of different Chinese families for generations, or maybe it lay in some field or attic for centuries, completely forgotten. At some point, it left China, and after migrating through the Western art market, it ended up at Columbia, where it was removed from the public eye. In other words, a once entombed object has been buried once more, only this time in the vaults of the University’s art collection. In this sense, the fate of the “Monster Panel” isn’t unique. Columbia’s Art Properties collection is massive, containing objects ranging from ancient Greco-Roman pottery to Persian decorative objects to rare early daguerreotypes, most of which private collectors donated more than fifty years ago. However, few people even know that the collection exists. This stands in contrast to the collections of other universities, such as Yale and Princeton, which are permanently displayed in campus museums and receive a great deal of scholarly and press attention. 

It’s not fair to say that Columbia’s collection is completely locked away. Students and faculty can request access to objects from it whenever they like, and parts of it are displayed around campus and in the Wallach Gallery on occasion. However, I can’t help but wish that there was a more permanent place on campus to appreciate and learn from the Art Properties collection. Art history majors are not  the only students who can benefit from exposure to art—imagine Lit Hum taught in front of the collection’s Greek vases or materials science classes that use objects from the collection as case studies. Xu’s discovery of the sculpture’s origins reveals the possibilities that arise when art is removed from the archives.  Access to artworks like the “Monster Panel” is an enormous privilege, but how much does that matter if nobody knows that privilege exists?