Masquerading in the name of world peace: An analysis of Sunil Sigdel’s painting “Peace Owners II”

Abstract

This article analyses Sunil Sigdel’s painting “Peace Owners II,” a portrayal of three major political leaders of our time; Donald J. Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, from the holistic level of structure, meaning, and discourse. To interpret the painting, it utilizes Erwin Panofsky’s “art interpretation theory,” which examines visual art in pre-iconographical, iconographical, and iconological description, in conversation with visual rhetorics. This article, keeping Buddhist philosophy at the center, shows that Sigdel’s painting is a medley of the eastern tradition of thangka-paubha art and the notion of global politics and foregrounds the contradictions between the real peace preached by Gautam Buddha and shallow peace advocated by the modern world leaders. The allegory of political leaders depicts a contradiction between Buddha’s notion on peace and that of the Buddha-like demigod of our time who are disguisedly selling the false idea of a peace process throughout the world. The painting also contends that the failure of both political ideologies—democratic essence and communist values—in global politics is the reason for the juxtaposition of Buddha’s concept of peace and profit-oriented intentionally operationalized peace by so-called peace owners.

Keywords

• Panofskian
• painting
• art interpretation theory
• Buddha
• peace owners