New sculpture evoking Bamiyan Buddhas rises above New York

A towering new Buddha will rise above New York City this week, as the High Line park unveils "The Light That Shines Through the Universe" by artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. 

The 27-foot sandstone sculpture opens to the public on Saturday (April 25) and will remain on view for 18 months as the public park's latest commission.

“It's made of sandstone that we sourced in Vietnam, but the hands are made out of brass that we sourced from Afghanistan, from old artillery shells,” Nguyen told Reuters on Friday (April 24).

The work is an homage to the massive 6th-century Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, which stood at 115 and 174 feet tall. Carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan valley, they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.  

By reimagining one of those lost monuments in contemporary New York, Nguyen brings themes of memory, loss and resilience into one of the city's most prominent public art spaces.

“So my work actually looks at memory and erasure and kind of the aftermath of war, displacement and colonialism,” Nguyen said. “Looking at the aftermath of that kind of destruction and thinking about what it would mean if we applied ideas of reincarnation to an object and how that would kind of help us reflect on the different erasures of recent history.”

The High Line is a public park built on a former elevated freight rail line on Manhattan's west side. Stretching 1.45 miles, it is one of New York's best-known outdoor spaces, where gardens, city views and contemporary art meet above the streets.

Nguyen's sculpture will stand on the High Line Plinth, a site dedicated to major public artworks, turning the elevated park into a platform for a work that links New York to a wider global history.

-Andrew Hofstetter, Christine Kiernan/Reuters