Bodhisattva Guanyin
late 500s–early 600s
- Medium
- sandstone with polychromy
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- Overall: 138.8 x 38.2 x 27.4 cm (54 5/8 x 15 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- China, late Northern Qi (550–577) or early Sui dynasty (581–618)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The artistic excellence of this bodhisattva is further reinforced by comparable outstanding Chinese Buddhist sculptures excavated at Qingzhou in Shandong Province in 1996—one of the most sensational and significant archaeological finds of the 1900s. Like related types among the Qingzhou finds, this statute has a gently smiling face and meticulous detailing of splendid jewelry. A noticeable difference, however, is the unique yingluo 瓔珞 (mukt hara) worn by the bodhisattva for personal adornment. The somewhat bizarre but imaginative combination of a string of jewels with grotesque animal masks, flying apsara, jade pendants, dragons, and metal ornaments was probably a regional decorative style of Shanxi Province.
