A 27-foot-tall standing Buddha, hewed in sandstone as a symbol of peace and resilience by the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, has been selected for the next High Line Plinth commission, to preside over 10th Avenue at 30th Street on the elevated park in spring 2026. Titled “The Light That Shines Through the Universe,” Nguyen’s statue resurrects the larger of two Bamiyan Buddhas — towering figures carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan in the sixth century and demolished in March 2001 by the Taliban in a brazen, internationally broadcast spectacle of iconoclasm and cultural violence.
Like many worldwide, Nguyen (pronounced nuh-WIN) had not been aware of the Bamiyan Buddhas until seeing a televised news clip of their destruction in 2001, leaving colossal empty niches in the mountainside (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site).
“I think that collective moment will become part of the conversations as people come and revisit the image of the Bamiyan Buddha now in New York,” the 49-year-old multidisciplinary artist, recognized in October with a MacArthur “genius grant,” said in a Zoom interview.
Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1976 and came at age 3 with his family as refugees to the United States, where he grew up and earned his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Since moving back to Ho Chi Minh City in 2004, Nguyen has become known for his work in moving image and sculpture that poetically explores ideas of war and trauma, memory and repair. He currently has work in the Singapore Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo, and his film “We Were Lost in Our Country” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through March 9, 2026.
Nguyen’s proposal was one of 56 submitted by 49 artists and collectives from 31 countries for the fifth and sixth High Line Plinth commissions. A shortlist of 12 artists were invited to create sculptural models, which were exhibited on the High Line in 2024 with public feedback solicited. “It’s not a vote, but we look at those comments and keep them in mind,” Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art, said in a phone interview.
“In the face of extremism and cultural erasure,” said Alan van Capelle, executive director of Friends of the High Line and part of the selection committee, the themes of healing and renewal in Nguyen’s Buddha “speak brilliantly to the moment we’re living in.” The piece is to be installed in late April and will remain on view for 18 months. (The committee’s other selection will be announced in 2027.)
The High Line Plinth commission was conceived “to rethink monumentality and who has the right to be commemorated in public spaces above a pedestal,” Alemani said. It has become one of the most visible platforms for public art worldwide. Nguyen underscored that “any artist doing public work aspires to it.”
In 2019, the inaugural commission of “Brick House” — a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman — by Simone Leigh significantly raised her profile. (Leigh went on to represent the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale.) The other recipients of the commission are Sam Durant, Pamela Rosenkranz and Iván Argote.
“We like to work with artists who can take on this opportunity to push their career to another level and realize a project they were never able to do before,” Alemani said. “Tuan’s not an emerging artist — he has shown in biennials around the world — but this allowed him to work at a new scale and with materials that he has never worked with, like stone. For Simone, it was bronze.”
It’s also the first time Nguyen has created a monumental figurative piece. “It’s really daunting to produce a replica of something that doesn’t exist,” Nguyen said. There are no known records of what the Bamiyan Buddhas looked like originally; over the centuries they had lost their arms and parts of the faces in previous military attacks.
Using photographs of the disfigured Buddha nicknamed “Salsal” by local people (meaning “the light that shines through the universe”), Nguyen modeled the sculpture on the computer and is collaborating with a team of stone carvers in Vietnam to render the statue by hand from four huge blocks of sandstone that will be stacked on an internal supporting armature.
While Nguyen has gone to great efforts to copy the stone figure as it looked before its demolition in 2001, he has imagined new hands positioned in mudras — or symbolic gestures — connoting fearlessness and compassion and cast in gleaming brass from melted-down artillery shells.
“It’s about taking materials that are destructive and transforming them,” Nguyen said. He has previously used such unexploded ordnance — still-lethal remnants of the war in Vietnam and scavenged from its landscape — to fashion metal discs and chimes suspended from his abstract sculptures evocative of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and stabiles.
For his Buddha, Nguyen worked remotely with a network of people on the ground in Bamiyan to extract brass ballistic shells from the war-torn landscape and recast them into bowls in order to move the material covertly across the border into Pakistan, where it was then shipped to Vietnam. There, it was liquefied once again and transformed into the shape of welcoming hands.
On the High Line, Nguyen will install these shiny prosthetics on poles a short distance in front of the ancient-looking Buddha as a kind of speculative new future.
The statue is a reminder “that even in the midst of chaos and violence, we can remain compassionate and fearless,” he said. “I imagine against the skyline these super polished brass hands, as they sparkle in the sun, will be something very spectacular.”
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