32 Years of Loretta H.Yang's Buddhist Sculptures in Liuli

Life is suffering.

Suffering that comes with birth, ageing, sickness, death, wanting what we can not have, facing what we can not bear and separation from loved ones.

Could all life's apprehensions, unrest and confusion be a channel for wisdom that will carry us through hardship?

 

Allow light to enter.

In this light,

experience clarity and

deliberate life's troubles.

 

Liuli statues, one after the other,

benevolent visualizations, time and time again,

no matter how dark the world,

light exists,

lending the power to move forward.

ARTIST   Loretta Hui-shan Yang

The act of sculpting Buddha is more than an exercise in art.

It is an act of meditation that creates distance from unrest and closeness to the self.

This type of introspection offers peace to my soul. —Loretta H. Yang

From the Fragility of Liuli to

Transparent Like Liuli Inside and Out

Loretta H. Yang – acclaimed actor,

124 films,

124 lifetimes,

125 life cycles.

At the height of her career in 1987

she left the film industry to pursue liuli art.

Why?

Unrest, for one.

 

Poet Bai Juyi penned: Like scattered clouds, the fragility of liuli.

The world of movies is glamorous and illusory.

As a female actor, the temporality and unrest it evokes,

the unrest of birth, death, sickness and ageing,

the unrest of encountering what we can not bear,

the unrest of desire and even love,

is omnipresent.

 

Is there a physical material

that can convey the many levels of unrest while tempering it?

The Second Vow from the Sutra of the Medicine Buddha states:

May the body be as liuli, transparent inside and out.

Using liuli to create Buddhist sculptures,

Loretta H. Yang has been able to discover the light within unrest.

 

From acting to liuli,

across thirty-two years,

Yang has harnessed the powerful clarity of liuli

to create Buddhist sculptures.

Inspired by the vision that

“the body [is] as liuli, transparent inside and out”,

she has gained a profound understanding

of life through Buddhist sculpture.

From the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris

to the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum in Kaohsiung,

her work has been seen by people in every corner of the world.

Yang's sculptures are a practice in

boundless compassion and wisdom;

they also convey a universal message of love and compassion.