TY - JOUR

T1 - Cloned Buddhas

T2 - Mapping out the DNA of Buddhist heritage preservation

AU - Kolata, Paulina

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - This article considers how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality and memory in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara — a 1400-year-old “Shaka Triad” sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha — was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology spatio-temporally transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist materiality in-between past-present-future devotional and heritage worlds. In doing so, the hi-tech religious heritage care interventions distance heritage objects from the religious contexts and demand different regimes of valuation in reproduction that allow to reimagine the value of the past while obscuring the affective value of decay. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation.

AB - This article considers how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality and memory in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara — a 1400-year-old “Shaka Triad” sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha — was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology spatio-temporally transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist materiality in-between past-present-future devotional and heritage worlds. In doing so, the hi-tech religious heritage care interventions distance heritage objects from the religious contexts and demand different regimes of valuation in reproduction that allow to reimagine the value of the past while obscuring the affective value of decay. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Buddhist heritage

KW - heritage 'cloning'

KW - Super Clone Cultural Properties

KW - heritage reproduction

KW - heritage preservation

KW - the Shaka Triad

KW - heritage scientification

KW - religion and heritage

KW - Japanese Buddhism

KW - heritage in Japan

KW - Buddhist materiality

KW - Japan

M3 - Journal article

JO - Cultural Studies

JF - Cultural Studies

SN - 0950-2386

ER -