27 APRIL 2002, Page 41

Remarkable sculptural presence

Martin Gayford applauds the Royal Academy's latest exhibition he Royal Academy has redeemed itself. Its main exhibition at the moment, Paris: Capital of the Arts, is one of the worst in concept and execution that I have seen in a major institution in recent years. It has the effect of making the subject seem less interesting than one had previously thought, and the contents — some of which are wonderful — not so beautiful as they actually are. Although I was quite rude about the exhibition when I first reviewed it, in retrospect I wish I had been ruder (critics have their regrets, and usually of that variety).

But the new show in the upstairs Sackler Galleries — Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries (until 14 July) — also marks the return of the Royal Academy to exhibition-mounting form, It introduces a subject — Chinese sculpture of the 6th century AD — that many of us know little about. And it makes a convincing case that the subject itself is of enormous interest and that the objects on show are overwhelmingly beautiful.

The exhibits have been selected, as you may have heard, from a cache of ancient statuary discovered by builders under a school playing-field in a north-eastern province of China in 1996. Archaeological discoveries are commonplace in China, but this one was different in two ways. Firstly, because the site was not immediately ransacked by robbers, as is frequently the case in China and elsewhere (the objects subsequently turn up, without provenance, on the international art market). Also, this was extraordinary in its richness — hundreds of Buddhist statues of the 6th century AD.

It is not clear why they were buried in this way. Intermittently Buddhism was suppressed by the imperial government in a manner that recalls the abrupt changes of ideological line in more recent years. But the best guess appears to be that these sculptures were buried as an act of piety by wandering monks in the 12th century because at that point they had become old, broken and out of use (Chinese Buddhists believed that a spiritual presence inhabited the sculpture after certain rituals had been performed).

The paradox is that these works, which seemed hopelessly worn by time in the era of the Crusades, having been protected by all those centuries underground now look sensationally fresh and new. Many are fragmentary: and limbless, but the cutting is amazingly crisp and — an unexpected touch, this — many retain a large proportion of their original paint.

Like mediaeval and ancient Greek sculptures, these were originally painted — an idea that, after several centuries of looking at chaste white neo-classical works, the modern Western sensibility finds hard to accommodate. These sculptures suggest that the earth and vegetable colours of ancient paint produced a far mellower effect than the sometimes strident reconstructions one sees in books. I imagine the appearance of the polychrome sculpture on the Parthenon and in mediaeval cathedrals would have been similar, although the actual colours of religious art in the Far East can be a little surprising. The flesh of the Buddha, because of his spiritual eminence, was held to be golden — as it clearly remains on several figures on view here — and his hair sky-blue, which has not survived so well. Another exotic touch is the tea-cosy-like protrusion, or usnisa, from the top of the Buddha's head, denoting unearthly wisdom.

Those are in any case the comparisons that come to mind for the quality of these statues. Whether or not it is because of those rituals performed long ago, they have remarkable presence — especially the slightly later ones combining serenity with princelike demeanour from the period of the Northern Qi. (China at that time was ruled by a patchwork of powers, whose names resemble letters left over at Scrabble.) The works on show also have what you might call remarkable sculptural presence. A sign of this is that photographs, even good ones, give only a dim idea of the full force of the best things in the exhibition. Of course, even good painting defies photography to some extent — but that's even truer of sculpture, because its special excellence lies in three dimensions, which is exactly what a flat photographic image can't capture.

In this case there is a combination of calm stillness and monumentality that is compelling and, to me, a little surprising — because I had associated Chinese art mainly with landscape painting and ceramics. There are, I know, celebrated cave temples with many Buddhist carvings from this period in China, but I have never seen them. These sculptures at the RA, as I say, bring to mind Greek work of the 5th century Bc, and the European Romanesque.

And, strangely enough, they are connected. These sculptures represent a translation into Chinese sensibility of Indian Buddhist sculpture of the Gandhara period. And that in turn was strongly affected by the art of the Greek states left behind in presentday Pakistan and Afghanistan by Alexander the Great. So these sculptures from northeast China, carved at the time of Arthurian Britain, are, like the saints of Chartres, remotely descended from ancient Greece. But the dynamism of Greek. and Indian, sculpture has been replaced by a strength that seems to be projected by inner peace.

I don't know what spiritual consolation these amazing works offered to 6th-century Chinese, but they certainly do wonders for the Sackler Galleries. For a long time I have felt vaguely unhappy about these rooms, designed by Sir Norman Foster. For some reason, perhaps because they are too bland, the galleries often don't seem to do much for the paintings that are hung in them (an example was the Chardin exhibition a few years ago, which lacked the punch of its earlier incarnations in Paris and Dusseldorf).

The answer seems to be to fill them with sculpture (different spaces tend to be good for different kinds of art). Neither the installation nor the lighting was complete when I saw the show, but the Sackler Galleries seemed to be coming to life in a way I have never seen before.