Page 60 - Christie's, materpieces of Buddhist Art December 2, 2015 HK
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The King of Hell (Enma, in Japanese), with bulging eyes, King Enma is usually flanked by two stanchions (sometimes
furrowed brow, and mouth wide open in a rage, presides over only one) topped by human heads that see and record all
a fearsome judgment scene. Originally enthroned on a raised human activity, omniscient witnesses reporting to the king.
altar in a dimly lit temple interior, grimacing straight at us— On festival days, such didactic displays enticed well-heeled
perhaps we are all potential sinners—the King of Hell appears pilgrims and frightened children.
as a stern and imposing Chinese bureaucrat with the Chinese
character for “king” (wang in Chinese or ō in Japanese) on Most familiar to travellers in Japan today is the set of nearly
the tab of his cap. His robe was once likely painted a fiery life size Ten Kings and demonic attendants carved in 1251 in
red. Chinese influence is apparent in the cut of the robe, with the baroque style of Chinese Song sculpture and installed
its scalloped-edged yoke covering the shoulders. His face is in the Ennoji Temple, Kamakura. The figure offered here is
quite realistic and mobile in expression, resembling faces on smaller and probably older.
some of the early products of the Unkei school in Nara. He
rests one hand on his left knee, and with the other holds his The collectors John G. Powers (1916-1999) and his wife,
scepter, symbol of power and authority. Enma is often flanked Kimiko, began acquiring Japanese art in 1960, stimulated
by two clerks, also in Chinese garb, who hold a record of the by their interest in contemporary American Pop Art. John
good and bad deeds of the person on trial. Since medieval Powers, who began his career as general counsel for Prentice
times, Japanese perceived the “Other World” of Enma and his Hall Publishing in New York, retired as its president in the
office as Chinese, or “foreign.” late 1950s. During his time in the publishing world, he and
his wife developed a passion for Pop Art and formed a major
It is likely that this ominous figure was at the centre of an collection. The Powers Art Center, a memorial to the life of
altar group forming the tribunal of the Ten Kings of Hell. In John Powers, opened in 2014 in Carbondale, Colorado, where
Buddhist belief, humans must cross into a kind of purgatory the couple made their home from the 1970s.
after death and appear in the underworld before one or more
kings of hell (the Chinese codified a cult of the Ten Kings By 1970, when their Japanese masterworks, including
of Hell) to determine into which one of the Six Realms of Buddhist sculpture, were first exhibited at the Fogg Art
Existence they will be reborn: various hells, hungry ghosts, Museum, Harvard University, the Powers had formed one of
beasts, bellicose demons, humans, or heavenly beings. The the most outstanding private collections outside Japan. They
complex iconography of hell imported from China centuries had travelled to Japan together and formed friendships with
earlier was familiar to all Japanese, and was popularised in the major Tokyo art dealers. The couple made their collection
paintings imported from southern China in the thirteenth available to the faculty and students at Harvard, resulting in
century. The excruciating torments of the eight levels of hell a 1988 exhibition of one hundred examples of Edo-period art,
and the many satellite hells, including cold hells, had been including much material purchased after 1971. In 1999, just
catalogued in grisly detail in The Essentials of Salvation months before the death of John Powers, John Rosenfield
(Ōjōyōshū), a seminal tenth-century salvationist treatise by published Extraordinary Persons: Works by Eccentric,
the Tendai priest Genshin (AD 942–1017). Genshin advocated Nonconformist Japanese Artists of the Early Modern Era
salvation through invoking the name of Amida Buddha (1580–1868) in the Collection of Kimiko and John Powers. This
and belief in rebirth in Amida’s Western Paradise, the Pure definitive, three-volume catalogue of painting and calligraphy
Land. Hell is provisional and is always paired with heaven. from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was a labor
of love that took almost three decades to complete.
Julia Meech
Consultant
58 Masterpieces of Buddhist Art 大俱足 — 經典亞洲佛教藝術
