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Boonma was apparently always a spiritual person; his early works usually had an environmental or social consciousness consistent with Buddhist "mindful living." I But the trials of his life turned him more deeply in that direction. In 1991, two years after the birth of their first child, Boonma's wife was found to have breast cancer. She survived until 1994. Boonma himself developed a brain tumor and then lung cancer, which killed him at the age of 47. Nearly all the work in the show was made in the fertile but painful last decade of his life.

The earliest, however, was Self-Portrait: A Man Who Admires Thai Art. (1982), a photograph of his own face that he decorated with the complex patterning of Thai dance masks, including the stereotypical "Siamese Smile" of a people known for their grace and graciousness. This work suggests his search for a personal subject matter and is more successful--that is, more readable--than a Buddha drawing of the same year motivated by his dismay at the pillaging of artifacts and the debasing of Buddha images through reproduction. One must be told of these implications. With Bowls, Candles and Matches (1990), he was clearly moving into the abstracted symbolism that became his mature expression. In the three drawings that bear this title, he melted candle wax onto paper, texturing and burning through the surfaces.

Among the pieces stylistically related to this work are Benediction (1991), in which candle wax and gold foil are melted onto photos of television screens in a collision of two worlds, meditation and entertainment. Boonma also made several works between '89 and '98 that he called "stupas" or "pagodas." These are glazed and framed panels containing tactile surfaces. They include such materials as soil, sand, rice flour, ash, white cement, charcoal or pigment, rubbed onto paper or canvas. The panels are stacked in graduated piles to suggest the architectural referent, both hung and leaning against the wall, raised off the floor on bricks. The panel arrangement of alternating rows of horizontal and vertical rectangles alludes to the bricklaying method used in pagodas, and the frame and glass of the panels themselves to skyscrapers (which Boonma, quoted in a wall label, calls "the modern pagodas of Newly Industrializing Countries").

His Charcoal Pagoda and Pots (1994) was the largest of this type, and the first work viewers saw at the Asia Society as they climbed the stairs to the second floor galleries. It rose 16 1/2 feet on the stairwell wall. It's a stack of framed charcoal drawings of alms bowls used by Buddhist monks to receive food offerings from the lay community every morning. The ellipses emerging from the darkness on the pages evoke mouths or eyes as well, especially because the images are stacked in pairs (which are increasingly smaller above the "base" of four large drawings). The work refers, a wall label explains, to the Buddhist ritual of placing vessels with cremated human remains inside the walls when stupas are constructed.

As evocative as these works are, Boonma goes further in his three-dimensional installations. These were introduced to viewers with House of Hope (1996-97), an installation surrounded by painted walls meant to evoke smoke-stained temple walls. Red-painted stairs---in a casual-looking assembly of sections reminiscent of children's step stools--lead to a rectangular platform almost concealed by hundreds of dangling ropes of prayer beads (recalling Felix Gonzalez-Torres's bead curtains). The entire installation is fragrant because the beads are made of herbal medicine balls. (2) Red, tan and gray-tinged, they hang in various lengths. Outside the installation room was a drawing for this project dated 1996, labeled with Boonma's explanation that for him the medicinal herbs symbolize hope, and the work is "about possibilities and acceptance." Boonma's words, used on many of the exhibition labels to point out and explain, seem never to constrain the viewer's response to the works.

You circumambulate House of Hope, wishing to enter; but with the three huge figure fragments called Melting Void (1999), you are, unexpectedly, encouraged to enter. Melting Void consists of seamed molds for large Buddha heads or busts, which are raised on pointed steel-pipe legs, surrounded with a bristling "aura" of metal rods and casting tools, and rubbed inside with herbs of red or yellow. Yon can duck under the rims and stand inside the heads, where tiny holes admit filigreed light, and the heads register as negative space expanded from your own positive head form, as if you could miraculously see the inner surfaces of your own features.

Two other installations are tall structures made of wooden boxes, with small central spaces that can be entered. Another installation, Lotus Sound (1992), allows a glimpse of an ideal you cannot reach. Behind a tall, curving, perforated wall made of alternately stacked black bell forms, which is set about 10 feet away from a corner of the gallery, you can see gold-foil lotus petals and pods strewn across the white wall in a wash of warm light. The barrier, precarious and fragile, imprisons symbols of purity and condemns us to the profane world. The piece is both plaintive and soothing, and it focuses meditatively on a sound heard only in the attentive viewer's mind.

The abstract qualities of Boonma's chosen forms are perhaps most moving in installations involving alms bowls. Drawing of the Mind Training and the Bowls of the Mind (1992) entices viewers to project their vision or their thoughts into simple bowl shapes represented in two and three dimensions. The label quotes Boonma calling the bowl form "organic and geometric and ambiguous" and adding, "I prefer to be inside the space which is separated from the outside world. I would like to place my mind inside the bowl."

Pages torn from a large drawing tablet hang on the wall in four rows of 14, each tacked with two pins at the top corners so it flutters and curls. The treatment of each page is individualistic in color or detail. They were made as part of a daily practice of "drawing meditation" conducted before daybreak, Poshyananda explains in the catalogue, as "a form of mind training for confronting death." (3) On the floor before the drawings are eight bowl-like objects on a shallow raw-wood plinth. All are round-bottomed, five are flat-topped and solid, two are cone-shaped and closed. Only one is a conventional volumetric form. They are white, gray, earth tans and black; four sit up straight and four lean. This piece, in total, involves both grid and idiosyncrasy, both illusion and construction. The forms are literally associated with real-world things, yet they are austerely ideal. They occupy some intermediate space, open to the imagination. They recall functional objects yet pull the mind toward reverie through their repetition, their modesty and their unending circular form. Poshyananda writes, "For him, the space inside these vessels was not confined, but opened to infinity," and he notes that Boonma thought the fragility of pottery made the bowls symbolic "containers of the self: like humans, they are easily broken." (4)

This piece was like a warm-up for a work of the same year with which Poshyananda closed the show. Alm (the label notes that the title plays on the similar sounds of alm and om) consists of 15 black pots with rounded bases, lined with varying amounts and configurations of gold leaf. Each has two, three or four grips around the rim; these are actually gobs of clay squeezed in a hand, in other words, solidifications of the void within a fist. The shape conveys a quality of tension and at the same time suggests the identifying mature of a palm print. The forms also vaguely recall skulls, (5) while the wide, open bowls, with their inner glow, convey an entirely different headlike volume.

The bowls are arranged in a triangle on a triangular wooden platform: at the end pointing toward the center of the room, one bowl has no grips and is fully lined with gold that wraps over the lip, as if it's full or as if it has reached nirvana. The darkness of the exteriors certainly seems grave, while the gold on the interior of a bowl meant to collect alms provokes questions of the nature of riches. Boonma presents the form itself as philosophical, in an exhibition that reaches across cultural boundaries to share meaning and to maintain hope.

"Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind," organized by the Asia Society, New York, and curated by Apinan Poshyananda, debuted at the Asia Society [Feb. 4-May 11, 2003] and travels to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco [Feb. 27-May 23, 2004], the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra [July 16-Sept. 5] and the National Gallery of Art, Bangkok [2004-2005]. It is accompanied by a 152-page catalogue.

(1.) "Buddhist teachings speak as reverently of nature as they do of the Buddha; in Buddhism, mindful living cultivates a fundamentally ecological awareness of the fragility and interdependence of human beings and nature," Apinan Poshyananda, "Montien Boonma: Paths of Suffering (dukkha)" in Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind, New York, Asia Society, 2003, p. 15.

(2.) While symbolic fragrance is not frequently a part of contemporary art, other artists working with aroma include Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, Wolfgang Laib and Ernesto Neto.

(3.) Poshyananda, p. 22.

(4.) Poshyananda, p. 20.

(5.) The exhibition included drawings depicting skeleton arms, hands or heads, while other works employed the pregnant symbolism of the question mark.