Unraveling the Mystery of the Art God
November 08, 2024 at 07:30PMDorje Chang captured the minds, hearts, and dollars of devoted followers, sharing his teachings through divinely-inspired art. Is he the third coming of the Buddha? An art professor? A miracle-worker? A strongman? Even still alive? None of the above? I’m still not sure—few are!—but that in no way lessens the pleasure of exploring the ever-branching rabbit hole excavated by Bien-Kahn’s decade of painstaking research into the enigmatic figure.
That’s what makes Dorje Chang’s art such a compelling wrinkle. The exhibited work is a central tenet of the messianic claim; conveniently, it’s also a visible miracle to behold. To have a follower recount a feat of superhuman strength, or even an apparition, is hard for a layperson to fathom but has the advantage of having happened in the past and out of the view of nonbelievers. But hanging art on a wall and inviting the public in for free is a high-wire act. What if, to them, the art looks unremarkable?
For months in early 2020, I sent emails to more than two dozen professors of art and professors of Buddhism at universities across the country, as well as to California-based Buddhist leaders. To my surprise, nearly every professor and Buddhist leader responded that they’d never heard of Yi Yungao, Wan Ko Yee, or Dorje Chang. The professors who did recognize the name declined to comment; one deferred because “what I have to say about the individual in question might not be kind,” while another passed, explaining, “Nobody I know wants to talk about this guy in public. I suspect that most reputable figures in this tradition would not want to appear in an article where he is the main figure. Who wants to be linked, even by proximity, to that?”
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Barry Fleming worked in the Auburn art department back in 2000, when Dorje Chang and Wang had supposedly been professors there. He remembers reading about a gift of original art at the time. “And that’s about all. I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t that odd?’” he says. “ ‘And we don’t know anything about it in the Department of Art?’” He says Wang and Dorje Chang never taught in the Department of Art and Art History.
Fleming’s friend Dan Neil worked for Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art and remembers taking Dorje Chang’s gifted art to the museum’s vaults. “It never hung,” he says of the painting. “It was never exhibited.”
A few years later, Fleming says, the museum director called and asked him to grab the art from the vault. When he got there, Fleming couldn’t believe what he found: a book of spin art (“like someone smoked some bad Alabama homegrown and spun for a couple hours,” Fleming says), a sculpture (“a maybe three-foot-long piece of fake jade made out of some kind of plastic,” as Neil remembers it), and a large hologram of a polar bear in an ice cave displayed within a faux-gold frame. “It was like a baseball card from the old days where you could turn it and it would kind of change on you,” Fleming says. “It was this printed plastic thing of some sort of technology that’s pretty low-tech and not in focus and really bad.” There was a $10,000 price tag still on it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/08/unraveling-the-mystery-of-the-art-god/
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