Bodhi Tree Featured in Apple TV+'s Swan Song

The official trailer for Swan Song has 4.4 million views on YouTube. The YouTube thumbnail — the single frame Apple TV+ chose to represent the film — shows two lead actors in an intimate moment against a wall. On that wall, at 0:23 in the trailer, is Dr. Masumi Hayashi's Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India (2000).

Apple's marketing team chose that frame. Not a frame without the artwork. That one.

Swan Song premiered December 17, 2021. It's a science fiction drama about identity, love, and mortality — a man secretly cloned so his family won't have to grieve him. Directed by Benjamin Cleary (Academy Award winner, Stutterer, 2016). Starring Mahershala Ali (two-time Academy Award winner: Moonlight 2017, Green Book 2019), Naomie Harris, Glenn Close, and Awkwafina. The film received a Golden Globe nomination and BAFTA nomination for Best Actor.

Cleary's choice of Bodhi Tree is precise. The film deals with what persists across a life — memory, love, identity. The Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya is the site where a man sat in meditation until he understood the nature of suffering and its cessation. The tree in the photograph has been alive, in unbroken biological continuity, for 2,500 years.

Cleary knew what he was putting on that wall.

The Provenance Thread

Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India is a hand-constructed photo collage — a unique work. Hayashi made several unique constructions from the same photographic source material; each has its own composition and is a distinct physical object. These are not prints, not editions. Each is an original.

One of those constructions passed from Hayashi through Los Angeles dealer Stephen White to Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck — Hollywood screenwriters best known for American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Katz and Huyck built an exceptional collection of Japanese photography. In 2018, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art acquired the Katz and Huyck Collection — over 400 photographs, including three Hayashi works, as a partial gift of the collectors and through acquisitions funds.

The construction that appeared on the Swan Song set is a separate unique work from the Foundation's inventory — related by subject and source material to the Smithsonian piece, but a different object with a different composition.