The Wailing Arhats: Buddhism, photography and resistance in modern China

The interactions between the twentieth-century Buddhist religious world and a new urban audience generated novel modes of image production and image viewing that were rooted in Buddhist visual culture. In particular, through the medium of photography, Buddhists explored the well-established East Asian practices of formal portraits and of funerary portrait paintings. Photo-portraits, I suggest, are not unlike earlier portraits. Despite their associations with modernity, the products of camera technology can in fact be seen to intensify the underlying Buddhist assumptions about the magic and talismanic nature of certain objects.