This parinirvana sculpture, surrounded by boddhisatva paintings, photographed by James and Lucy Lo inside Mogao Cave 158, dating from the Tang Dynasty, circa 781-848.
This parinirvana sculpture, surrounded by boddhisatva paintings, photographed by James and Lucy Lo inside Mogao Cave 158, dating from the Tang Dynasty, circa 781-848. All images courtesy of Seattle Art Museum

Imagine a geode in which every one of the crystalline facets inside is a different painting or sculpture.

Now imagine a cliffside full of those, with a doorway on each one that you can walk through to enter and look at the art.

What you're picturing are the caves at Dunhuang, which men began carving out of cliffsides outside the Chinese desert oasis town in the 4th century.

For a thousand years, hundreds of cliffs were dug out and filled with art—across the walls, along the ceilings, in passageways between caves—that represented the incredible cultural, ethnic, and religious exchange that took place in the silk road hub of Dunhuang. Buddhists, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, and Chinese Christians were here. Later came the anti-Bolsheviks, who fled Russia during the revolution and camped out, burning art heedlessly by using some caves as kitchens.

James and Lucy Lo took this photograph in 1943-44, of a view of the northern Mogao Caves.
James and Lucy Lo took this photograph in 1943-'44, of a view of the northern Mogao Caves.

After the Silk Road declined, the caves sat mostly dark for almost six centuries. When they were "rediscovered" by European explorers in the early 20th century, Chinese artists immediately took an interest. Bombarded on all sides by Western influence, Chinese artists wanted a place where they could go to gain inspiration for new Chinese art that was based in ancient traditions separate from the West. The caves were perfect. Paradoxically, these caves that were such a pure representation of the Chinese past at that time were also the original melting pot, said curator Foong Ping. Today they're a major multiethnic scholarly site and a popular domestic tourist destination.

Foong organized the small, smoldering, elegant exhibition Journey to Dunhuang: Buddhist Art of the Silk Road Caves at the Asian Art Museum through June 12.

It tells the story of this fascinating place through an odyssey undertaken by a married couple, James and Lucy Lo.

The two Chinese photojournalists rode out to the caves in 1943 on only a horse-and-donkey-drawn cart, then stayed for eight months without electricity or running water, developing their negatives every night using water they collected from a stream.

"This place elicited love, yet it required sacrifice," Foong told me.

Journey to Dunhuang is not as big a spectacle as Cave Temples at Dunhuang, the exhibition that's also happening now (and which had input from former Seattle AAM director Mimi Gates) at the Getty in LA, where caves are actually reproduced at scale.

But the Seattle show is a gem elegantly presented, and it includes materials that have only very rarely been exhibited before, and never here. To select photographs, Foong combed through all 2,500 of the images the Los produced, which are held at Princeton, where Foong received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Chinese Art and Archaeology.

She chose photographs that are themselves works of art, not just documentations of the place. Almost all of them are not permitted to be reproduced here. But you can fall right into them and feel yourself in the past, in a dusty, dry place, gazing at a thousand Buddhas or marveling just at the ear of a prone giant. Some of the views no longer exist or are inaccessible for their own protection.

Some of the photographs are nearly pitch black. To photograph them, the Los erected an elaborate system of mirrors to draw in the sunlight, and white cloths.

This is the exam of a student from sometime between 618 and 907, later repurposed for the upper part of a funeral shoe.
This is the exam of a student from sometime between 618 and 907, later repurposed for the upper part of a funeral shoe. Princeton East Asian Library Dunhuang and Turfan Collection, manuscript # PEALD 11d R. © The East Asian Library, Princeton University

The Los also collected ancient manuscripts from this time and place. Their collection of 80 is the largest in the U.S. (most are in the British Museum), Foong said. She chose six, which are very fragile, and have only been lent once before ever.

Leaning over the glass case where the manuscripts gleam, Foong is gleeful as she explains that one is a test for a student of Confucianism, and it is marked with a "Pass," though some answers are marked "No!"

Another is mindbogglingly complex, with early Uighur script running in one direction, and Chinese characters running in another.

"Somebody who is Uighur is trying to learn the definitions of Chinese characters!" Foong explained. (She added that during the run of this exhibition, AAM hosted a Uighur rock star, and he was a huge hit, but he could not read the script. Too ancient.)

Foong also brought out tempera-on-plaster fragments from AAM's own collection, acquired long ago by the museum's founder, but never exhibited before. She believes they probably are from the caves at another Silk Road site where the art caves may have appeared even earlier, Kizil.

A detail of a Boddhisattva holding peaches, painted from the Los memory and notes between 1958 and 1963.
A detail of a Boddhisattva holding peaches, painted from the Los' memory and notes between 1958 and 1963.

The third and final part of the exhibition jumps with color: paintings made from the Los' notes and memory, reproducing what they saw inside those caves in color, rather than the black-and-white of photography.

Two long scrolls and a handful of panel paintings were intended to bring across what the Los saw faithfully, without correction.

In the case on the left, look for the part of the scroll where the art is burned out, replaced by a charcoal cloud. That's the place where the White Russians kept their stove.