Tai Shan Schierenberg One Man, Two Masters, 2023

During my early years living with my Chinese grandparents in Malaysia, I was exposed to Buddhism in a very ritualised way. We would regularly visit the local temples, especially the Perak cave temples where this Buddha sculpture sits that were very nearby, where we would offer incense, fruit, and prayers.  

Later, growing up in London, I was exposed to the daily ritual of the Lord's Prayer at the end of every school assembly and the Easter and Christmas holidays with their powerfully moving stories. This painting, with its title taken from the eighteenth-century Italian comedy 'The Servant of Two Masters', is a meditation on my feeble attempts to serve both belief systems in my daily life - nonattachment and awareness, or love and forgiveness- whilst being overwhelmed by the great artistic beauty in both traditions. -Tai Shan Schierenberg, 2026