Andrew Nguyen installs giant High Line Buddha
- Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s giant Buddha is now up on Manhattan’s High Line Plinth, turning Frieze week into a public-art event far beyond the fairs. - The work, “The Light That Shines Through the Universe,” stands about 27 feet tall and reimagines Afghanistan’s destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas. - It matters because the piece turns a busy New York walkway into a memorial about cultural loss, repair, and public memory.
A giant Buddha now stands over 10th Avenue on Manhattan’s High Line. But this is not a generic spiritual monument, and it is not really a Frieze-week stunt either. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s new sculpture is about destruction, memory, and what public art can do when it lands in the middle of a city’s daily traffic. The news is simple — the work is now on view on the High Line Plinth — but the reason people are stopping for it runs much deeper. ### Who made it? The artist is Tuan Andrew Nguyen, the Vietnamese American sculptor and filmmaker whose work keeps circling war, displacement, and the afterlives of empire. The High Line selected him for its fifth Plinth commission, which is the park’s program for very large-scale sculpture at the spur over 10th Avenue and 30th Street. (artsy.net) ### What is actually on the High Line? The piece is called *The Light That Shines Through the Universe*. It is roughly 27 to 30 feet tall, made in sandstone with reflective metal elements, and installed where the High Line’s previous giant crowd-pleaser — Iván Argote’s oversized pigeon *Dinosaur* — had been sitting. It is expected to remain there through fall 2027, so this is not a quick pop-up. (fhl-website.s3.amazonaws.com) ### Why a Buddha? Nguyen is reimagining the Bamiyan Buddhas — the monumental sixth-century figures in central Afghanistan that the Taliban destroyed in 2001. That history is the key to the whole work. The sculpture is less a replica than an echo, basically a way of asking what survives after an act of cultural erasure. (artsy.net) ### What makes this version different? The most loaded detail is the hands. The original Bamiyan monuments had lost their hands long before their final destruction, and Nguyen turns that absence into the emotional center of the piece. For this High Line version, the hands are cast from brass artillery shells and arranged in Buddhist mudras tied to compassion and fearlessness — so the work literally converts material from war into a gesture of calm. (theartnewspaper.com) ### Why put this in New York? Because the High Line is not a museum where viewers arrive prepared. It is a walkway. People pass through on lunch breaks, on dates, on tourist loops. So the sculpture has to interrupt ordinary movement. That is part of the point — a memorial to destroyed heritage appears in one of the city’s most photographed leisure spaces, and suddenly a casual stroll collides with the history of war and loss. (thehighline.org) This is my inference from the site and the artist’s framing, but it is exactly how the Plinth program tends to work. ### Why is Frieze week part of the story? Because art week usually concentrates attention inside booths, VIP previews, and fairs. This installation pushes some of that attention back into shared public space. You do not need a ticket, a badge, or even much prior knowledge to encounter it. During a week when New York fills with art visitors, the High Line gets a work that can compete with the fairs on scale while doing something very different emotionally. (fhl-website.s3.amazonaws.com) ### So what’s the bottom line? The easiest read is “giant Buddha arrives in Manhattan.” But the stronger read is that Nguyen has planted a monument to cultural destruction in one of New York’s busiest art and tourist corridors — and made it impossible to treat public sculpture as mere decoration. (artsy.net)
