Murals at Shangri La

This thoughtful, measured study of Shangri La presents the museum as a place of beauty and as a site of exile.

Its bold, colorful composition featuring recognizable artworks from the collection — the gem-inset enameled gold peacock boat from the Mughal Suite being the most central — references the artistry that characterizes Shangri La.

But note the jarring shapes of architectural rubble and striated fragments of disintegrating ornamentation, referencing the artist’s experience of loss during the civil war in her native Beirut and the construction at, and of, Shangri La.

These elements are framed by oversized vegetation drawn from the pietra dura elements of the Mughal Suite, exaggerated for artistic effect but intentionally obscures the presentation of Shangri La as being easily accessible or understood - both publicly and emotionally.

The strong graphic underpinnings are suggestive of Kufic script, but are blueprints of the site, outlining the artist’s daily walk to and from Shangri La as she worked on the mural.

A striated phoenix/simurgh emerging from the right-hand side of the composition symbolizes renewal.

The work is overlain with a reflective blue paint—known, rather poetically, as “interference”—which interacts with the waterways in front of the panel, injecting an intriguing visual note, and subtly references Shangri La’s shimmering collections of lusterware ceramics on view in the Mihrab Hallway.

Artist Eko Nugroho reminds us that beyond the walls, barriers, and boundaries created by nation states, there is the sky that we share and oxygen that we all need created by the nature that surrounds us.

The rainbow is an important metaphor for diversity: the appearance of a rainbow should remind us that this necessary diversity should not only be tolerated, but valued.

If nature creates beauty through these multitude of colors, then humanity is also meant to appreciate and care for diversity.