Zhang Huan’s performance art piece Dream of Dragon, performed at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in 1999, involved the artist laying on tree branches, naked, and covered in dog food. A pack of nine dogs were then allowed to lick the food off his body. (One dog purportedly bit him.) Five years later, his installation piece, Dharma Circle, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany. Dharma Circle featured a Buddha statue half-buried in sand under a small spotlight, facing itself in a mirror. This was the first time that a Buddhist image manifested itself in Zhang’s work, and it represented a turning point in his personal life when he formally took on a Buddhist practice.

Since Dharma Circle, Buddhist imagery has found its way into a number of his works. Some, like the giant copper sculpture Three-Legged Buddha installed at London’s Royal Academy of the Arts, foreshadow Three Heads, Six Arms, installed this summer in San Francisco’s Civic Center. Other works are equally theatrical, pointing to Zhang’s skills as both a studio artist and a performance artist. Berlin Buddha, for example, features a large Buddha statue, but this one is made from compacted incense ash which, over the course of the exhibition, slowly disintegrated, a mediation on impermanence.

Zhang makes clear in recent interviews that he does not see himself as making “Buddhist” art, per se. Rather, he is taking the Buddha as object or subject in his work as a way of “expressing humanity and the meaning of life through the form of Buddhist figures.” And this humanity, indeed the artist’s own humanity, is evident in Three Heads, Six Arms as well.

The sculpture itself is nearly eight meters tall and weighs approximately sixteen tons. You can see it from a block away, a huge, spider-like copper form attracting art lovers and tourists alike. It rests on the ground supported by a few fingers and a forearm. Three of its arms stretch up into the sky holding what look like misshapen flowers, as if in offering. One of its six arms is missing, cut off just below the shoulder. From the front, the serene and slightly-smiling face of what could be a bodhisattva looks down at you.

Zhang’s inspiration for the sculpture came from the remnants and fragments of Buddhist statues, survivors of China’s Cultural Revolution, that he’s found in his native Henan province and his travels to Tibet. And while that front-facing face looks like a bodhisattva, he’s suggested in interviews that it was equally inspired by Chinese Taoist deities. And then there are those two rear-facing faces, one a likeness of the artist himself. No matter how Buddhist or not-Buddhist this sculpture is, the artist’s face is literally in it, a reflection of himself, of his own humanity.

What’s more, Three Heads, Six Arms rests in San Francisco’s Civic Center, between a child’s playground and a parking lot, in the shadow of City Hall. More than being a sculpture, more than being a (possibly) Buddhist sculpture, it is also a public work of art.

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In 1981, Richard Serra was commissioned to provide a sculpture in the open space outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in downtown Manhattan. His sculpture, Tilted Arc, was almost immediately hated by the general public. Some complained that the thirty-six-meter long piece of steel, slightly curved, attracted too much graffiti and that the cost on the city to clean it up was too much a burden. Others simply complained that the sculpture was inconvenient; one couldn’t walk the straight shot from the office to the subway but had to actually go around it. After being an impediment to foot traffic and provoking a lawsuit, the sculpture was unceremoniously removed 1989.

This is one of the enduring problems with public art — it’s public. By its very nature it must walk a delicate balance between appeasing the ever-changing tastes of the contemporary art scene and the often less adventurous tastes of the public at large. While art critics generally consider Richard Serra to be one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century, the general public just wants to get from the subway to the office.

But what happens when a piece of public art has explicit or implicit religious undertones? This question didn’t seem to be on the mind of San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom when he, along with the San Francisco Arts Commission, chose Zhang Huan’s monumental sculpture to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the sister-city relationship between Shanghai and the City by the Bay. According to the Chronicle, when asked if we was worried that the sculpture would be seen as a religious symbol, Mayor Newsom replied, “Now I am.”

For a brief moment after Three Heads, Six Arms’ instillation, it seemed that Mayor Newsom would have cause to worry, that there would be controversy. Someone scrawled “Jesus is the one” across its back. And with various festivals and events in the Civic Center over the summer, the city had to erect fencing around the sculpture to keep people from climbing it or defacing it.

But when I visited Three Heads, Six Arms on a typically chilly San Francisco summer morning, controversy was nowhere to be seen. Double-decker tour buses stopped along the street pouring out tourists to take group photos in front of that smiling visage. Hipsters wandered under its arms and felt the cool copper before laughing and saying something appropriately ironic to their friends. Children climbed the arms, and a group of college-aged girls sat in a row along the forearm for a group photo — despite the small sign warning people not to climb the sculpture, that video surveillance is in effect.

There wasn’t any fencing keeping the public away. There was no graffiti. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church weren’t milling about with signs reading “Jesus Hates Buddha.” More than anything, an atmosphere of curiosity and play surrounded the sculpture. Three Heads, Six Arms could have been a jungle gym for all the public cared.

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Religion in the public sphere almost always makes headlines, especially in a country with a federally protected separation of church and state. A small cross in the Mojave Dessert, for example, was passionately defended by its supporters as a veteran’s memorial, and the Supreme Court seemingly did back-flips to declare the patch of land underneath it to be private, not public. (The cross has since been stolen, sending the case into legal limbo.) Over the last few decades, a number of states have attempted to display copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses as the “foundation” of American law. In general, states have lost these lawsuits, but another case seems to be headed to the Supreme Court this fall.

Passions have been even more inflamed by a proposed Muslim community center to replace a shuttered Burlington Coat factory in Manhattan. While the Cordoba House isn’t public art, it is clear that the public has a thing or two to say on the subject, throwing American’s basest fears and prejudices against the Islamic faith into sharp relief.

In an article for Material Religion, Professor of American religions Thomas Tweed asks, “Why are Buddhists So Nice?” It’s a good question. In his article, he asks a series of questions comparing the American media representations of Buddhists and Muslims. Muslims, he argues, are painted in almost universally negative ways, engaging in activities that are down-right antithetical to normative American values. Buddhists, on the other hand, seem to have much better public relations representation. If you listen to the media long enough, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that Buddhists aren’t anything but nice, through and through.

Is it this sense of Buddhists’ inherent niceness that makes Buddhist public art a location for play? Apart from one Jesus-inspired act of vandalism, there seems to have been little public outcry against Three Heads, Six Arms. (And despite the perception of the Bay Area as a hub of leftist politics, having been to enough demonstrations and public rallies, I can assure you that the Westboro Baptist Church crowd makes plenty of noise here, too.) Mayor Newsom wanted a piece of art that would be audacious, that would generate controversy. He may have gotten the former, but Three Heads, Six Arms has been rather quiet on the controversy front.

But perhaps we can look at this from another angle. If this is indeed Buddhist public art, then isn’t there something inherently spiritual (perhaps even sacred?) in a Buddhist image? From this point of view, is using the Buddha as a jungle gym the most respectful thing one could do? Buddhism is often cast as a religion (or philosophy depending on whom you ask) of peaceful passivity. It is hard to imagine the general in charge of ground forces overseas asking people not to disrespectfully climb on a sculpture in San Francisco lest they enrage Buddhists half a world away. Perhaps the flip side of Buddhist niceness is that while no one is threatening to burn Buddhist holy books, no one takes Buddhist images seriously either.

This is the power of art. On the face of it, the artistic process can be revelatory for the artist. And once we come into contact with the end result, we as viewers can be caught up in this revelatory process ourselves. Zhang’s face is one of the three heads, and we are invited to see our own face as well. But once art crosses that ill-defined threshold to become public art, something else happens. Pushed outside the comfortable confines of the art-critic world or the museum, public art engages a new level of meaning. It interacts with a larger discourse, asks new questions of us. We confront our own humanity not only as individuals but members of the broader, interconnected, public. We are forced to come into contact with our collective understandings — and misunderstandings — of art, of religion, of ourselves.

For more images of Zhang Huan’s Three Heads, Six Arms, visit the photo gallery here.