This torso of a standing Buddha statue from the 14th century in the northern Thai town Chiang Saen is different from what Westerners are used to looking at.
It’s a world away from realistic ancient Greek-inspired statues.
But Thai art becomes more enchanting as you keep exploring it. Instead of a muscled torso, the Buddha’s body is a smooth flow of graceful curves.
They flow from ground to crown.
And he seems pretty happy about it.
The muscled dudes in ancient Greek sculpture reflect a culture in which people focus on each of the statue’s components and its details. Most Westerners still usually look at sculpture and paintings in this way. And many sculptures enable you to examine them from all angles, including ones that are gentle on the eye. But in Thailand the senses gently flow rather than stop to analyze things.
But this flow takes you from one enchantment to another without a single form to limit you.
There are lots of graceful Buddha heads in Chiang Saen’s museum, and each one is unique.
Ditto for the bodies. This standing Buddha from 1577 once held a begging bowl. There are no straight lines. Everything gracefully curves, including the hands, body, and robe.
The precise details in Western sculptures enable the viewer to identify them with one event and place. The perspective in a lot of Thai art work gently meanders instead, and way of apprehending reality has deep roots.
So it’s in other art forms, including ceramics.
Many northern Thai towns that made ceramics from the 14th century on emphasized flowing forms and soft colors. These forms were often playful, like the birds in the above bowl.
Western ceramics often portrayed specific people and events.
The perspective in many Thai paintings also meanders. It doesn’t formalize things into an abstract three-dimensional grid, as Florentines began to do in the early 15th century.
Neighborhoods are also not reduced to linear grid patterns. Whether you’re on water–
–or strolling through–
–you feel as though you’re part of a flow of vibrant energies.
This feeling is reinforced as you continue to walk around. Lots of homes, wats, and businesses have little spirit houses. This crowded neighborhood is just outside one of Chiang Saen’s city gates. .
So the eye doesn’t stop at one place and analyze every detail in Thai towns, villages, sculpture, ceramics, or paintings. It gently flows, just like the rivers, religious processions, and art forms that Thais have lived with since their formative period. As it meanders it finds one enchantment after another. AI has yet to fully express this way of seeing reality.