In spring 2026, pedestrians and commuters in Manhattan will encounter an unexpected presence rising above 10th Avenue: a 27-foot-tall standing Buddha, carved from sandstone, overlooking the city from the High Line’s Plinth at 30th Street.
Titled The Light That Shines Through the Universe, the monumental sculpture is the latest public artwork by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, recently selected for the fifth High Line Plinth commission — one of the most visible and influential public art platforms in the world.
The artist behind the work is Tuan Andrew Nguyen, a 49-year-old multidisciplinary artist born in Vietnam in 1976. He arrived in the United States as a refugee at the age of three, later earning his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Since relocating to Ho Chi Minh City in 2004, Nguyen has built an international practice spanning film, sculpture, and installation, often addressing themes of war, trauma, memory, and repair.
In October, Nguyen was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant,” recognizing his sustained contributions to contemporary art.
Nguyen’s sculpture reimagines one of the two Bamiyan Buddhas, monumental sixth-century figures carved into cliffs in central Afghanistan and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in a widely broadcast act of cultural erasure.
Rather than creating a literal replica, Nguyen describes the work as an “echo” — a resurrection through memory. The Buddha is rendered in light brown sandstone, modeled digitally from archival photographs, and hand-carved in Vietnam from four massive stone blocks assembled on an internal armature.
While the stone figure closely follows historical imagery, the sculpture introduces a deliberate intervention: new hands, cast separately in brass and positioned in Buddhist mudras symbolizing fearlessness and compassion.
Nguyen traces his connection to the Bamiyan Buddhas to a collective moment of shock in 2001, when images of their destruction circulated worldwide. At the time, he was unaware of their historical significance, but the violence of their erasure left a lasting impression.
“I think that collective moment will become part of the conversations as people come and revisit the image of the Bamiyan Buddha now in New York,” Nguyen said to The New York Times.
For the artist, the project confronts extremism and cultural loss while proposing memory, transformation, and care as forms of resistance. According to High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, the Plinth was conceived to rethink monumentality — questioning who and what deserves to be commemorated in public space.
Nguyen’s proposal was selected from 56 submissions by artists and collectives across 31 countries, following a public exhibition of shortlisted models in 2024.
The sculpture is being produced through a transnational process spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Vietnam, and the United States.
Nguyen collaborated with networks in Bamiyan to recover brass artillery shells from the war-torn landscape. These materials were discreetly transported to Pakistan, then shipped to Vietnam, where they were melted down and recast into gleaming prosthetic hands. Once installed on the High Line, the polished brass hands will stand slightly in front of the ancient-looking stone Buddha, suggesting a speculative future rather than a fixed past.
“It’s about taking materials that are destructive and transforming them,” Nguyen said, continuing a long-standing aspect of his practice that repurposes remnants of war into poetic forms.
For the High Line’s selection committee, Nguyen’s work resonated with the current global moment. Alan van Capelle, executive director of Friends of the High Line, described the sculpture’s themes of healing and renewal as speaking “brilliantly to the moment we’re living in.”
Set against New York’s skyline, The Light That Shines Through the Universe will not only reintroduce a lost monument to public consciousness, but also invite reflection on how memory survives, and transforms, in the face of violence and erasure.
About the display
Date: Late April 2026 – Fall 2027 (18 months)
Location: The Spur, High Line Park, 10th Avenue & 30th Street, New York City