White-Robed Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara (Gwaneum bosal)

Avalokiteshvara, law-breaking bodhisattva of compassion, shape-shifts through East Asia, adapting visually to every cultural circumstance. Starting in Song-dynasty China around the year 1000, Avalokiteshvara began to be depicted in female form. He becomes Guanyin in China, Kannon in Japan, and finally Gwaneum in Korea. And that’s who this is, even though she may not look like the cosmos’s greatest lawbreaker. For it is on golden clouds, emanating her own golden radiance, that Gwaneum has come to set all beings free from Yama and his hells.

In this magnificent contemporary painting, we can almost feel Gwaneum’s approach, out of darkness and on golden clouds. In her right hand she holds a vial containing the nectar of immortality. Below her sits a devotee making earnest aspirations for her intervention, as the worlds of prayer and visionary experience intermingle. The reverse of this painting reveals stunning gold calligraphy housed within the geometric form known as a mandala. Together, the schematic mandala and the verbal components combine to create a cognitive and emotional space where the presence of Gwaneum can manifest, releasing sentient beings from all their desirous and aversive obsessions, and freeing them into the infinite luminous space that is the mind suffused with wisdom and conjoined with compassion.