Sitting in a small, dimly lit space, musician Kojiro (Ko) Umezaki begins a song on the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute).
The instrument requires precise breath control and intense focus, and both are evident in Umezaki’s face as he plays. The piece, “Empty Bell,” traces back to Japanese mendicant monks of the Fuke school. And inspiring his notes are the divine creatures rendered within this space—an elaborately painted ancient cave temple replicated at the Getty Center.
Umezaki’s performance, and the cave temple, helped celebrate a 30-year collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the Dunhuang Academy to conserve and manage the Mogao Grottoes, a Buddhist cave temple site situated along the Silk Road near the city of Dunhuang in China. Since the GCI couldn’t bring the actual caves to the Center, it chose the next best option—install replicas of a few of the cave temples, complete with interiors exactingly painted by a group of skilled Chinese artists, on the Center’s arrival plaza.
Chinese artists at work on replica caves for Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road
For the exhibition, Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road, visitors explored the replicas and learned about the GCI’s efforts to protect the real site. Guests also saw rare objects from the Library Cave on display at the Getty Research Institute, and immersed themselves in a 3D experience that set them inside Cave 45, one of the original cave temples. If they were lucky, visitors came on a day when members of the Silk Road Ensemble, including Umezaki, brought the replica caves to life with music.
The Silk Road Ensemble, founded by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, is a group of diverse musicians who cocreate music from lands connected by the Silk Road network of Eurasian trade routes. For the GCI, it was a natural choice to invite the ensemble to explore the caves and play music inspired by them, and working with the University of California, Los Angeles, it brought several of the performers to the site as summer artists in residence.
The musicians chose instruments that reflected the many countries and regions through which the Silk Road meandered, prepared compositions both original and historical, and played for visitors as they explored the caves. Umezaki decided to perform in Cave 285, which contained paintings that combined Indian influences with pre-Buddhist ancient Chinese deities.
Watch Umezaki play the shakuhachi in Cave 285 in the video above.
“‘Empty Bell’ is specifically designed to focus on breathing and meditation, so it seemed to fit nicely in that context for me,” says Umezaki. “It spoke to the essence of what those caves might represent now, looking back on the history of Buddhism and how it translated into Japan during that period when Dunhuang was still particularly active.”
Other Silk Road musicians at the Center included Kayhan Kalhor, who played the kamancheh (long-necked Persian fiddle); Haruka Fujii and Wu Man, who performed a duet on percussion (gong) and pipa (Chinese lute), respectively; and double bassist Jeffrey Beecher, who played a composition he hoped would evoke for modern-day travelers the ancient pilgrims’ experience of the cave temples as places of introspection.
While their performances attracted large crowds on busy weekends, on weekdays the musicians played for smaller school groups from across Los Angeles. “Being able to share with students, especially younger ones, a history that goes back centuries and across geographical boundaries—that’s memorable and special,” says Umezaki.
