A show of “spectacular Buddhist sculptures, architectural reliefs and works of gold and bronze from the Gandhara region of Pakistan, most never before exhibited in the United States,” the Asia Society’s website boasts of its 2011 exhibition, The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara.1The exhibition, featured in the Society’s New York museum, caused great excitement among its audiences as the first exhibition of Gandharan art to visit the United States since 1960. The Asia Society had previously hosted an exhibition of Gandharan sculpture from the Lahore Museum fifty-one years earlier, but since then strained politics between Pakistan and the United States have created an environment in which this type of cultural exchange has become near to impossible, which may serve to explain the difficulties encountered in arranging the exhibit as well as its limited loan size.2Still, the efforts of the Asia Society and the Lahore and Karachi museums in allowing this temporary exhibition have provided to the US public a fantastically rich view of Gandharan culture through the collected works of those people most strongly tied to it.
- “The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara.” Asia Society.
- Perlez, Jane. “Long-Delayed Show of Buddhist Art from Pakistan is to Open.” The New York Times.