Does Greatness Make It Right? The Cost of Universal Museums

Yiwa Deng is a Graduate Liberal Studies student in the class of 2027. Yiwa is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

The first time I stood in Gallery 208 of the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, and saw the realistic Liao-dynasty ceramic luohan (an

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 enlightened being between a Buddha and a mortal), this thousand-year-old sculpture hit me hard. It broke three of my assumptions at once. My assumption about ceramics: it turns out ceramics aren't only for vessels; they can be a life-size sculpture. My assumption about religious figures: this was not a holy, merciful Buddha or god, but an ordinary man, his face full of age and even pain. And my assumption about "Eastern" art: it was not the loose, suggestive lines and empty space I had been taught to expect, but something strikingly lifelike.

This is what makes museums special. When you see a work of art with your own eyes, when you look at it from every angle, you feel something more direct and more real than any theory or textbook ever could. 

But wait.

I looked around. I was standing in the Metropolitan Museum. This piece that had just changed how I saw ancient Chinese sculpture was in America. And I was one of the very few Chinese people lucky enough to see it in person. 

We are used to treating the universal museum as a condensed version of the world's art, and we take that gathering for granted — generous, even. We walk from a Greek marble to an Egyptian coffin to a Chinese bronze, and it feels like abundance. We rarely ask how everything on the table got here. And we almost never think about this: for many of these pieces, the spot in front of us is the only place on Earth where you can see them — and the price of that abundance is their complete absence from the place they came from.

Take this luohan. It is one of a set of life-size glazed ceramic figures. Luohans usually come in groups of 16, and in this set, every face is different: different ages, expressions, wrinkles, and moods. About 10 survive today. Two are at the Met; the rest are scattered across London, Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Paris, with one fragment as far away as St. Petersburg. In China? Zero.

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More figures from the same set, now scattered among the Met (New York), the Penn Museum (Philadelphia), and the Nelson-Atkins (Kansas City).

Or take the Water-Moon Guanyin, a kind of sculpture with a beautiful name and a beautiful form, and my own favorite type of Buddhist figure. Chinese Buddhism and much of its imagery came from India, but the Water-Moon Guanyin is an exception. The sculpture is China's own invention, first created by the Tang-dynasty painter, Zhou Fang, and shaped by the world of Chinese scholar-art. She doesn't look like a usual Buddhist figure: often a female face on a male upper body, neither clearly male nor female, and not solemn at all. Instead, she leans back, one foot on a lotus, one knee up, and a hand resting loosely on it. Most are made of wood, and this form was especially popular from the Jin to the Song dynasties. Every museum I visited during my research had its own Water-Moon Guanyin; the one at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City is one of the finest left in the world. In China? Before the end of World War II, almost all of these portable wooden carvings had left the country, and the gap at home was only filled in 2005, when one was bought back from the United States.

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Wooden Water-Moon Guanyins from the Nelson-Atkins (Kansas City), the Met (New York), and the Penn Museum (Philadelphia).

What I want to talk about today is not property rights but human rights. Getting to enjoy other civilizations and their art in a museum is a kind of luck. But knowing your own culture, history, and artistic heritage is a right. I am very much for cultural exchange and for civilizations learning from one another — but only if the source culture also keeps enough of its own heritage to build and pass on an understanding of itself. Go back to the shock that the luohan gave me. It wasn't only about art. It was the fact that ancient China made sculpture this realistic at all. For as long as I can remember, the Chinese art history I was taught said that China — and all of East Asia — does not chase likeness, but feeling and suggestion: portraits, murals, sculptures, all of them built from non-realistic lines, not bound by the structure of the skull or by perspective.

Could one reason be that our own museums don't hold a single strikingly lifelike ceramic sculpture like this — no evidence to prove otherwise?

What is missing is not some piece worth a fortune at auction. What is missing is a chapter of art history.

It changed how I understood my own culture. That, I think, is one of the things art is for. Maybe someone will say this is a private, sensitive worry — a niche problem for art lovers. But it isn't.

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One day, I tried to use AI to generate a concept image of a grotto full of Buddhist statues (a cave temple carved into rock — one of the main forms ancient Chinese Buddhist sculpture took). In the cave it gave me, many of the Buddhas had no heads. This is not strange. Much of the online training data — the photos of these statues — already showed them without heads. Because in China, and across Asia, too many Buddha heads were cut off in the past and sent to the West as more portable "art." In many museums, we see Buddha heads from India and Asia, and they almost feel like they have become their own art form now, like a Roman bust.

At first, the absence only changed how I, as a person, pictured my own culture. But over time, it goes quieter and deeper, until it turns into a kind of "fact." A headless Buddha slowly becomes something that simply exists, a pattern, a norm. It's like painting a garden: you paint a few flowers in bloom and a few still in bud, because that looks more natural. A grotto with some heads and some missing their heads also looks more... natural? The damage stops being seen as damage. It settles into knowledge and is taught to the next generation. Until one day, a complete grotto — every figure with its head — would strike our children as strange. By then, what has been rewritten is not just one person's impression, but everyone's shared "common sense." 

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On the other side, once a Buddha head is put on display in a museum, it gets turned into art and made to seem legitimate. The wound of violence is smoothed over, explained away. There is even an industry now — Buddha heads moved into restaurants and massage parlors as exotic decoration. This is not the birth of a new art form. If anything, it shows which cultures get to be treated as serious art, and which ones can simply be taken apart. Because I have never seen the head of the Virgin Mary displayed on its own.

As an institution that gathers, displays, defines, and even rewrites art and civilization, the museum is powerful. It is, without question, great.

But does being great make it right?

If not, what can we do about it? That's what I want to explore in my next post.

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