Bunleua Sulilat

Biography

The park on the Lao bank of the Mekong, twenty-five kilometres southeast of Vientiane, was begun in 1958. Today it is known as Buddha Park, in Thai Wat Xiengkhuan.

Bunleua Sulilat was born on 7 June 1932 in Nong Khai province in northeastern Thailand, the seventh of eight children. Of the rest of his youth we mostly have a legend: as a young man he supposedly fell into a cave and met a hermit named Keoku, who became his spiritual teacher. The second park was later named after the hermit. After finishing this apprenticeship, Sulilat took up monumental sculpture (here, giant figures for open-air sites), although he himself said that he had had no artistic experience before building the park. I know of no documents for that period, and it is hard to draw a line between biography and tradition here. The material was concrete: reportedly the cheapest and most accessible, and on the Lao side of the Mekong there are many cement factories. Sulilat designed the figures himself, and they were then built of mostly unpainted concrete with steel reinforcement; the larger compositions are supported inside by a brick frame. Hundreds of unskilled enthusiasts worked without pay, and the concrete was donated to them. Buddha Park has more than two hundred statues, some of them about twenty metres high.

After the communist revolution of 1975 in Laos, Sulilat, concerned about the political situation, crossed the Mekong into Thailand. In 1978 he began a new park across the river from the old one, three kilometres east of Nong Khai. This is Sala Keoku, the “Hall of Keoku”. The place became something like the headquarters of a religious community: many local people were drawn by his vivid personality and by the blend of Buddhism and Hinduism that he preached. People began to address him as “Luang Pu”, although formally he was a layman. Other residents of the area thought him mad.

The sculptures draw on the long religious tradition of the region, but they stand out for their size, their highly personal and sometimes quirky imagination, and occasional signs of the modern world: among the figures are motor vehicles, firearms and Western clothing. People see in the parks features of naïve art and art brut, although the scale and the long, organised, communal construction are unusual for such work. A distant parallel is found in the projects of Lek Viriyaphant, for example the wooden Sanctuary of Truth, but that was built on a different financial scale and with professional craftsmen.

The didactic purpose is clearest in the karmic Wheel of Life, which stands in both parks. The version at Sala Keoku is the more elaborate: traditional and modern figures are arranged in a circle and show a person’s path from birth to death, which returns to its beginning. The composition ends with a young man stepping over the fence around the whole ensemble and becoming a statue of the Buddha on the other side.

In his last years Sulilat fell from one of his sculptures, his health declined, and he died in Nong Khai on 10 August 1996. His mummified body is placed on the third floor of the Sala Keoku pavilion.