East meets west across the ditch

Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales offers some diverse exhibitions. GRAHAM REID wanders through the art.

Curious, isn't it, how the image of Christ became codified in Western culture. The Anglo-Saxon look about the eyes and narrow nose, hair somewhere past brown on the way to ratty blond, broad forehead and subtle hints of cheekbones. Even recent images conform to such a protocol of painterly conceits that anything outside the orthodoxy is controversial and often ridiculed. A black Jesus? A Jewish Jesus?

In its television programme Son of God, the BBC constructed a computer-generated face for Christ based on best available information. It quickly discovered such things can be lightning rods for debate. The BBC's Jesus looked nothing like Albrecht Durer's famous image and even less like blue-eyed blond Robert Powell who played Christ in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

My favourite likeness was a postcard picked up in a secondhand shop somewhere in the States. With misty eyes and high cheekbones he looks so manufactured in Hollywood we dubbed him Jesus 90210.

But representations of Buddha have historically been highly diverse, perhaps because of the early diaspora of the teachings through different Asian cultures.

A Buddha from Korea is quite different from a broad-lipped likeness rendered during the Angkor period in Cambodia. Buddha likenesses range from broad-faced Chinese paintings from the 17th century to alarmingly realistic renderings of the emaciated Shakyamuni in grey schist from Pakistan in the 3rd century.

And, in the exhibition Buddha at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, you can study these and numerous other diverse likenesses. The exhibition, which runs until February 24, took two years to curate and offers an exceptional insight in Buddhism, and representations of Buddha and the articles of the faith.

From Afghan stone statuary which betray Greco-Roman influences, through small, serene 14th-century gilt bronze figurines from western Tibet, to colourful cosmologies on folding manuscripts from 19th-century Burma, Buddha presents a broad cross-section of art and iconography and is supported by numerous other related activities.

The Gyuto Monks of Tibet will be in residence at the gallery in the Domain from Wednesdays to Sundays (starting January 16 and finishing February 3) and will construct a sand mandala, hold Tantric art workshops, give talks and conduct meditation evenings.

Buddhist practitioners will also provide talks, meditation and chants in the gallery's Wisdom Room from Wednesdays to Sundays, and Art After Hours will be a series of talks every Wednesday at 6.30 pm from January in which well-known Sydneysiders will discuss Buddhism's impact on Western culture.

Around the city there are also numerous other Buddhist-related activities but for lovers of art, the exhibition - with a fat $A33 catalogue and helpful display notes - is a must-see.

The gallery also offers other equally enticing exhibitions. Belle Ile: Monet, Russell and Matisse in Brittany, which runs until February 3, brings together works by the great Impressionists with that of Australian John Peter Russell who met and worked alongside Monet and Matisse at Belle Ile off the coast of Brittany.

Also running until January 27 is the first major Australian exhibition of ex-pat New Zealand artist Len Lye, which features an Australian premiere showing of his 1929 film Tusalava plus screenings of his Colour Cry, Free Radicals. All Souls Carnival and Particles in Space on January 23.

The Lye exhibition also includes lectures, Shirley Horrocks' 95 Flip and Two Twisters documentary about Lye as filmmaker and kinetic sculptor (January 16 and 20), and other Lye-related events.

The gallery also has its permanent exhibition which can engage even the most casually curious for an hour or so.