In March 2001, the world watched in horror as the Taliban detonated explosives at the base of the Bamiyan Buddhas in central Afghanistan. These colossal statues, which had stood as silent sentinels of the Silk Road for 1,500 years, were reduced to rubble in a matter of days—a violent act of iconoclasm intended to raise global awareness of their hypocrisy as they raced to save the irreplaceable Buddhas while allowing the people of Afghanistan to suffer in the armed conflict.
Twenty-five years later, amidst the steel and glass of New York City skyscrapers, far from its desert home, one of these lost giants is set to return. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Light That Shines Through the Universe debuts on the High Line in spring 2026. It is meant to be a spiritual echo of the original statues, a monument constructed to confront the violence of the past with a proposal to ensure that similar circumstances are not repeated in the future. This is why the work is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.
Standing 27 feet tall and carved from yellow sandstone, Nguyen’s sculpture commands the High Line’s Plinth with a presence that is both majestic and mournful. However, the work’s true power lies not in its gargantuan stone body but in its intricate metallic hands. In an act of material alchemy, Nguyen has cast the Buddha’s hands from melted-down brass artillery shells sourced from various global conflicts, armed conflicts much like the war that was waged in Afghanistan when the original Buddhas were destroyed.
The hands of Nguyen’s Buddha are held in two specific mudras (Buddhist hand gestures): the Abhaya mudra held at its raised right hand—representing fearlessness and protection—and the Varada mudra held on its lowered left hand to offer compassion and charity. Nguyen physically reshaped the Buddha to show a welcoming gesture to allow the sculpture to be a physical manifestation of the biblical prophecy to "beat swords into plowshares." He reminds audiences that just as the Buddha has actively decided to show the mudra, lasting peace is not a passive state but an active process that must be done through small everyday acts, acts that can begin as small as meaningful hand gestures.
Nguyen himself is a Vietnamese-American artist whose practice has been deeply interrogative of the traumas of history and displacement. His family arrived in the United States as refugees of war, making this work personal. It addresses the noise of global conflict—the relentless cycle of destruction that threatens cultural heritage sites and, more importantly, human lives. The destruction of the original Bamiyan Buddhas was a stark example of how war targets people and their memory and identity.
Here, The Light That Shines Through the Universe becomes a defiant counter-narrative that proves that while physical cultural heritage can be destroyed, the ideals they represent cannot be so easily extinguished. By fusing the memory of the Bamiyan Buddhas with the remnants of modern global conflict, he has created a space where history’s ghosts are met not with silence, but with a cautious embrace. The work compels us to witness the transformation of terror into tenderness, proving that even in a world fractured by conflict, humanity’s capacity for remembrance and future compassion stands as tall as any New York City building.
Plan your visit to see The Light That Shines Through the Universe at the High Line in spring 2026, or learn more about the High Line Art program here.