Two Artists on the Legacy of the Silk Road

When Shirazeh Houshiary visited China’s Mogao Caves in 2018, she had already been inspired by them through books. But nothing could prepare the Iranian-born artist for the astonishing experience of approaching them in person through the ‘hallucinatory, dreamlike’ Gobi and Taklamakan deserts – deep in the shadows of mountains that had been sculpted by millennia of swirling winds. She imagines the impact of the place on early travellers.

‘People who arrived there would have had to go through that landscape: it would be in their psyche,’ she tells me in her London studio, as we look at photographs of towering peaks, shimmering sand dunes and oases, all of which would have lain on the way to the caves. ‘Sometimes, when the wind would blow, it sounded as if there was a voice and they thought there was a spirit in the landscape,’ she says. ‘It’s that powerful – you really feel that there is something more out there than what we know. And those were the people who created those paintings.’

The 45,000 square metres of murals that cover the walls of the Mogao Caves, a system of almost 500 grottoes carved into the cliffs above the Dachuan River in Gansu Province, were painted between the 4th and 14th centuries. They depict a vivid array of religious, cultural and natural imagery – stories of the Buddha and religious figures deep in meditation, as well as workers, warriors, trade caravans, animals, mountains, rivers, temples – alongside more than 2,000 painted sculptures. Their astonishing diversity and scope reflect their location: the caves sit on what was the Silk Road – an ancient trade route that linked Asia with Europe for thousands of years, until the mid-15th century. According to UNESCO, they are ‘the largest, most richly endowed and longest-used treasure house of Buddhist art in the world’, a location of ‘unmatched historical value’.

It was as though the air was coming alive and the heavens were swirling, seething, with people, spirits, angels. 

Nilima Sheikh

The Mogao paintings have provided direct inspiration for one of the works Houshiary is showing in Studio at Frieze Masters this year. Time Curve (2023) is a wall-based sculpture of intersecting metal forms in turquoise and red that swirl around each other, recalling the dynamic lines that surround many of the figures in the Mogao murals. ‘One thing that fascinates me is the way that these paintings describe the field of energy around the body, rather than the body itself,’ she says, pointing to images in a book titled Dunhuang: A Pearl of the Silk Road, in which human forms deep in meditation are shrouded in dynamic ribbon-like lines.

For her, these images represent the dissolving of the artificial boundaries between objects and their surroundings, and between past, present and future, just as the endless loop of Time Curve represents the non-linear nature of time. ‘We know today that there’s no such thing as “solid” – we are all fields of energy and we are all connected – and we also know that time is an illusion,’ she says. ‘Just like the desert landscape, where everything is in the process of disintegrating – one moment the sand dune is there, the next it has vanished in front of your eyes – there is no solid reality.’ She adds that the artworks in the caves reveal that humans were playing with these ideas long before modern concepts of physics. ‘This understanding is not new – the paintings show that man has been thinking about this for centuries.’

Houshiary is not the only artist at Frieze Masters this year who has been inspired by the complex depictions at Dunhuang. ‘The vision of the caves and the mountains is mind-blowing – it was completely different to anything I had ever seen,’ Indian artist Nilima Sheikh tells me on a video call from her studio in Gujarat. Also showing in Studio, and known for her mystical, imaginary scenes that often address the female experience, Sheikh was similarly fascinated by the caves via reproductions of the paintings long before she finally encountered them in person in 2007. ‘As I saw them revealed to me,’ she says, ‘one after the other, cave after cave after cave, it was as though the air was coming alive and the heavens were swirling, seething, with people, spirits, angels. There was little differentiation between the earth and the air. Cave paintings are often very immersive, but this was another realm.’

These ‘realms’ are physical as well as spiritual. ‘Silk Roads’, an exhibition at the British Museum this autumn, explores the cultural confluence that the trade route represented and that is reflected on the walls of the Mogao Caves – an amalgamation of Chinese artistic styles, ancient Indian traditions and those from Persia and Central Asia. The accompanying catalogue explains that the artworks in the caves also reveal the ‘multicultural environment’ of the nearby city of Dunhuang. ‘Many pilgrims and monks visited Dunhuang,’ writes co-curator Luk Yu-ping. ‘Intrepid travelling monks became a popular subject in paintings – in one example the figure is depicted with a wide-brimmed hat, holding a fly whisk and walking stick, and carrying rolls of manuscripts in a backpack.’ The monk’s appearance, the curator says, suggests that he ‘represents a non-Chinese person coming from a distant land’.

This idea of the traveller’s wonder at finding themselves in this extraordinary environment, of it changing their perception, resonates deeply with Sheikh, reminding her of trekking in the Himalayan mountains. She spent a lot of her early years in Kashmir and the region has been a focus in her work for many years. ‘What has been painted in the caves is the world seen, not from one fixed vantage point, but from many different ones,’ she says. ‘From an aerial view and from the ground.’ These shifts of perspective, the sense of opening up multiple views of the land, are central to her ongoing body of work about that part of the world. ‘Because the places I would go trekking were not accessible to vehicles, you could only either walk or ride a pony or horse,’ she explains. ‘That experience of living and walking in the mountains revealed earth and space in very different ways to living on the plains – the land gets revealed to you gradually, scrolling and unravelling itself. In my work, I’m trying to share that feeling of walking on foot through the mountains, which gives you a different understanding of the land.’

Since Sheikh started exploring Kashmir in her work, she has strived to bear witness to its complex past and present, convinced that the region’s tumultuous history ‘is owing partly to our lack of understanding of the place and people there’. In her narrative approach there are echoes of the Mogao cave paintings, which depict secular parables and religious tales as well as stories about those who travelled along the Silk Road.

For the large-scale works she will show at Frieze Masters, Sheikh has homed in on a similarly peripatetic group of people: two nomadic pastoralist communities she encountered in the Kashmiri mountains. Every summer, she says, the people of the Gujjar and the Bakarwal tribes travel to the upper pastures in the western Himalayas with their herds of sheep and buffalo, and their pack animals – they used to be among the few people who lived at this elevation. ‘I have a deep admiration for the way they live, their concern and passion for their animals, how they avoid being exploitative of the land and how they have determinedly continued their lifestyle,’ she explains. ‘Even within Kashmir, these tribes are treated as “other”. The people of the lower regions do not identify with them or understand their lifestyle and, if you trace this history back to colonial times, they were often regarded as criminals.’

While her folkloric sensibility bears similarities to the caves, Sheik’s work has a distinct modern contextual and political specificity – it does not mirror traditional painting techniques; rather, she adapts those mediums to address the subjects that concerns her. Her latest work, for example, takes the case of Asifa, an eight-year-old Bakarwal girl who was abducted in 2018 by city dwellers while grazing the family’s horses, then drugged, raped and murdered – before her body was found a week later. ‘It was so terribly shocking to me,’ Sheikh says. ‘Over time, I realized there were other issues: of appropriation of property, of taking over areas [the tribes] used for grazing. It’s one of the curses of development, one of the ugliest sides of it.’ Sheikh created several small works about Asifa, before the larger project she is showing at Frieze Masters. The theme is reminiscent of her 1984 series ‘When Champa Grew Up’, 12 works about a woman murdered by her husband’s family over a dowry.

For both Houshiary and Sheikh, the Mogao Caves and Silk Road remain important influences. Sheikh is fascinated by the diversity of cultures that travelled and traded along the Silk Road, through which artistic styles, techniques and materials were combined in new modes of expression. ‘I’ve been interested in the visual and cultural artefacts of the Silk Road – the manuscript painting and wall paintings – for a very long time,’ she says. ‘It was wonderful to visit China, but the melding of Chinese, Turkish and Persian culture that happened in Central Asia has also been an important influence.’

In the desert, everything is in the process of disintegrating – there is no solid reality.

Shirazeh Houshiary

Over the decades, she has complemented her early interest in Indian miniature paintings with allusions to the art of Europe, the Islamic world, China and Japan. ‘For my earlier paintings, I developed many techniques by looking at Indian miniaturists, manuscript painters and pichwaipainters. But as the years have gone by, the influences on me have increased. I have learned to mix techniques and not limit myself.’ In the 1980s, she moved from painting in oil to tempera, noting that it was the medium used for many of the historical painting traditions she was engaging with – whether South Asian manuscript and folio painting, Japanese screen painting or pre-renaissance European paintings. As well as learning from centres of tempera paintings in north India and the north-eastern Himalayas, and from manuals and conversations about European and Japanese techniques, she taught herself new ways of mixing pigments. In doing so, she found commonality with, for example, Japanese painters who used soy extract as a binder. ‘I had begun to use casein tempera binder, which I sourced from a local chemical supply store, but when I asked which milk the casein was extracted from, I was told it was a soy milk extract – not so different from what was used in Japanese tempera painting.’

She adds, though, that this blending of cultures is reflected in a practical, rather than stylistic, sense. ‘I have bought pigments and brushes whenever I travel – from colour shops of the Western world, from Xi’an and Kashgar, from south-east Asia, and from the centres of traditional art in India – and I have been influenced by the arts of these regions. But it is technology I have sought, not technique. I do not aspire to paint like a traditional painter: I am inspired by the way they have painted to explore that technology in my terms.’

In Houshiary’s work, this commingling can be seen in her lifelong interest in the dissolving of boundaries between objects and challenging the dualistic perspective that forces a separation between body and consciousness – reflecting her interpretation of those fields of energy in the Mogao paintings. Again and again, she returns to the basic components of life – cells, seeds, pixels, words – and contemplates how they might be stitched back together.

One of her painting techniques involves adding pigment to a bucket of water and allowing it to settle as sediment at the bottom of a vessel, before pouring it on to the canvas. Another ongoing motif is the repetition of the words ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’, written in Arabic, which merge together into a pattern she describes as a ‘third state’ of being. Meanwhile, a sculpture, Just So (2021), is a pair of undulating towers made of repetitive aluminium bricks that come together to create light and shadow. ‘The bricks in the sculpture and the words in the paintings – they are both building blocks of civilization,’ she says.

Her stand at Frieze Masters is designed as a space that explores the notion of ‘outside and inside’ – peering through apertures, you see works with deep colours and images that represent the molten centre of the earth – inspired by her longstanding interest in the human ‘urge to know the secret of fire, even if the cost may be our own destruction’. From the outside you will see a glistening new work that evokes how you might feel looking down upon the earth from above. ‘But the earth is one: the atmosphere and the inside of the volcano are both part of one reality,’ she says. ‘There is no division, but we have split them.’

For Houshiary, this is the role of art – to repair what she sees as the artificial split in our collective psyches. ‘The responsibility of art is not only about making people aware of problems, but also to heal,’ she says. Thinking back to the Mogao Caves, she imagines how, centuries ago, these spaces could have served that function for those who entered them – like the nearby Dunhuang oasis, acting as a ‘cultural refuge’ for travellers on the Silk Road, offering that sense of awe that Sheikh also observed. ‘Imagine coming out of this very dangerous journey, through the uninhabitable desert – maybe people had been killed along the way,’ says Houshiary. ‘These caves were a kind of paradise, where you could be freed from the stresses of the journey and all the difficulties you had been through. When you entered these caves, it’s like you were released from the agony.’

Selected works by Shirazeh Houshiary are on view in Studio, exhibited by Lisson Gallery on Stand F12. Selected works by Nilima Sheikh are on view in Studio, exhibited by Chemould Prescott Road on Stand D08.

‘Silk Roads’ is on view at The British Museum until 23 February 2025

This article orginally appeared in Frieze Masters magazine 2024 with the title ‘A Kind of Paradise’.

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^{Main image: Nilima Sheikh, The beautiful village of Pachigam still exists 1 (detail), 2006. Mixed tempera on vasli paper, 104 × 41 cm. Courtesy: the artist}