David Ma
Name: Chinese American Bodhisattva
Medium: Fired Ceramic, Glaze, Decals, Oxides, Jeans, Ceramic Stars, Fortune Cookie Wrapper
Year: 2026
Dimension: 50 x 26 x 22 inches (H x W x D)
I recreated a Bodhisattva, a figure of compassion central to Mahayana Buddhist veneration, and distorted my own face onto it.
The work began with an encounter in Old Town, San Diego. In a store designed as a recreation of a nineteenth-century Chinese supply shop, I saw a Bodhisattva statue sitting on a barrel near the exit, waving goodbye. It was being sold as a decorative prop, stripped of spiritual significance, reduced to an oriental object for consumption. I was unsettled, not only by how the statue gave authenticity to the kitsch new-age spiritualism trinkets that surrounded it, but by the familiar feeling of confusion I carry whenever I walk through spaces decorated with random Asian artifacts.
That moment reignited a meditation on the extraction and recontextualization of Asian objects in the West. Walking through museums, I see severed Buddha heads, looted temple fragments, imperial wares, objects that function as aesthetic masterpieces and as material evidence of colonial looting. Their presence raises questions about ownership, authority, and the ethics of display.
Sometimes, wandering these exhibitions, I feel like a tourist in a dream, separated from these objects, uncertain of my connection to them. By putting my face on this Bodhisattva, I’m deconstructing my double consciousness. Both of our identities have transformed due to space, displacement, and commodification. In this form, I’m occupying the present, dressed in jeans, an “I ❤️ NY” shirt, and a Jesus tattoo on its back, layering American identity onto Buddhist form. This is not an act of deifying myself, but a lighthouse to subjectivity in a sea of fragments. I’m interested in asking, Where do the marginalized exist within the architectures of their colonizers, when we start to disrupt the role that’s expected of us?
The Bodhisattva, traditionally a being who postpones enlightenment to aid others, here becomes a vehicle for a different kind of compassion, one of self acceptance that is rediscovered through cultural hybridization.