Attendant to Guanyin

16th - 17th century

Chinese

This youthful attendant of Guanyin is fondly known as the “Golden Boy” because he was originally covered with gold leaf. At a later time, he was lacquered and embellished with raised decoration resembling embroidery.

In East Asia and the Himalayas, priests often deposited sacred materials like relic grains, rosaries, incense, textile patches, and sutra texts inside the bodies of Buddhist sculptures and then sealed them up during consecration ceremonies. This boy has a compartment at the back of his torso containing a small bronze mirror, sheets of paper with Tibetan characters, and textiles dyed in various colors, some representing body organs.

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Wood, polychrome, gilt

Overall: 29 1/2 × 16 × 11 in. (74.9 × 40.6 × 27.9 cm)

Figure: 25 1/2 × 13 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (64.8 × 34.3 × 24.1 cm)

Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection

48.53

Provenance: possibly Ludington Collection; Jan A. Kleijkamp; Richard Fuller, Seattle, Washington, February 1948; by gift to Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, 1948

Photo: iocolor, LLP

Now on view at the Asian Art Museum

Resources

Exhibition HistoryPortland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, Gift to a City: Masterworks from the Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection in the Seattle Art Museum, Nov. 3 - 28, 1965. Cat. no. 45.

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Chinese Art: A Seattle Perspective, Dec. 22, 2007 - July 26, 2009.

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Boundless: Stories of Asian Art, Feb. 8, 2020 - ongoing.

Published ReferencesHandbook, Seattle Art Museum: Selected Works from the Permanent Collections. Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 1951; p. 71 (b&w)

Gift to a City, exh. cat. Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1965; cat. no. 45.

Foong, Ping, Xiaojin Wu, and Darielle Mason. "An Asian Art Museum Transformed." Orientations vol. 51, no. 3 (May/June 2020): pp. 54-55, reproduced fig. 12 (installation view).

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