Making merit, making art
Subtitle: a Thai temple in Wimbledon
By: Sandra Cate.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Honolulu
Language: eng
Number of pages: 218
Subjects: Wat Buddhapadipa (London, England); Mural painting and decoration, Thai -- England -- London -- 20th century; Mural painting and decoration, Buddhist -- England -- London
Description: "Sandra Cate's pioneering ethnography of art-making at Wat Buddhapadipa, a Thai Buddhist temple in Wimbledon, England, explores contemporary art at the crossroads of identity, authority, and value. Between 1984 and 1992, twenty-six young Thai artists painted a series of temple murals that continue to attract worshippers and tourists from around the world.

Their work, both celebrated and controversial, depicts stories from the Buddha's lives in otherworldly landscapes punctuated with sly references to this-worldly politics and popular culture. Schooled in international art trends, the artists reverse an Orientalist narrative of the Asian Other, telling their own stories to diverse audiences and subsuming Western spaces into a Buddhist worldview."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-207) and index.
Table of contents: title: Finding a place; title: Long-distance merit making; title: Thai art and the authority of the past; title: From Buddhist stories to modern art; title: "Going outside" and the experience of modernity; title: Art, identity, and performance; title: Tourists and templegoers, religion, and art.