Nodding Buddha (2025)

Wood, plastic solar-powered Buddha, concrete blocks, bug buzzer

You slip through a side door and climb a dark stairwell. At the landing, Buddhas nod in uneven rhythm, their heads clicking like restless metronomes. Amid the dizzying waves you recognise a pattern—briefly—before it collapses again.

As you kneel before them, the bug zapper behind you cracks without warning, each burst loud as a whip as mosquitoes fling themselves into the violet light. Their deaths come irregularly, shattering whatever rhythm you thought you’d found.

150 solar-powered Buddhas nod on in a loose chorus, never quite aligned. Their repetitive gesture suggests devotion and serenity, yet the dissonance makes it comic, fragile, even absurd. I was drawn to these figurines through compulsion—an uncontrolled desire to collect, a hunger for novelty that became the work itself.

Buddha has always been a contradictory figure for me: a prince who abandoned privilege in pursuit of peace. An icon of discipline, yet also of privilege, where transcendence is only possible through renunciation. Is this serenity wisdom, or cowardice? Both readings exist at once.

In Nodding Buddha, solemnity dissolves into humour. The cute repetition turns an image of devotion into comic relief, a moment of levity inside the weight of doctrine. Yet, within the uneven nods and the sudden cracks of the bug zapper, I glimpse something else: the impossibility of lasting rhythm, of total peace. What we call “enlightenment” flickers, falters, and wobbles—just like the Buddhas themselves.