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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.2 (2025): 383–385; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.02.13
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History)
Alain Arrault. A History of Cultic Images in China: The Domestic Statuary of Hunan. Translated by Lina Verchery. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2020. 260 pp.
Angela F. HOWARD
Emerita, Rutgers University
In this innovative study of Hunan’s popular religion, Alain Arrault focuses on the ‘household cult’ of domestic, small sized (20 cm or 9 inches high), wooden statuettes originally painted, which are still made and venerated in the southern province of Hunan, China. Placed on a small altar of a home, the statuettes are exclusively used for the family’s private devotion; they are, therefore, not found in temples or ancestral halls. The oldest statuette, kept in the Hunan Museum Collection, Changsha, is dated 1609 by the inscription carved on its back, suggesting that this cult was already present in the late Ming. Most statuettes date from 1780 to 1980. The author has catalogued some 3,143 statuettes, the majority Buddhist, a smaller number Daoist, and a few being nonreligious or secular in character.
The tridimensional, devotional statuettes belong to three different collections:
- the Patrice Fava Collection, started in the 1990s, consists of 911 statuettes acquired in the Beijing antique market, representing Buddhist, Daoist, and Hunan’s local gods;
- the Yan Xinyuan 顏新元 Collection, the largest with 1,362 statuettes, was assembled in Hunan in the 1970s;
- the Hunan Museum Collection with 870 statuettes derives from the Changsha Custom’s seizure in 1984 of ten containers of statuettes intended for sale in the Hong Kong antique market.
Rather than adopt an art historical approach and examine questions of style and aesthetics, Arrault is concerned with examining the relationship between written testimonies and archeological remains. A peculiar characteristic of this type of religious art consists in the ‘Consecration Certificate’, which was originally inserted in the statuettes’ hollowed core. In this way both the interior and exterior, in different ways, played a specific role: the statuette was the object of devotion, while the document supplied its identity, whether Buddhist, Daoist, or even popular: like the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the God of the South Peak, and the God of the Kitchen with his consort, respectively. Some certificates also contain lively stories, the protagonists being both women and men. The Consecration Certificate, moreover, indicates the statuette’s site of production, whether in Central or in North-Eastern Hunan; lastly, it attests that the production still continues to this day.
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