“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” So said a Zen master in an iconoclastic koan—a paradoxical statement to provoke a disciple into understanding, in this case to warn against a doctrinal conception of Buddhism. From its roots in ninth-century Japan to its existence as a modern global phenomenon, Zen, or rather our understanding of it, has dramatically transformed. “Killing the Buddha”: Reconstructing Zen investigates the dynamic shifts in Zen and Zen-adjacent art from the seventeenth century to the post–World War II period. Focusing primarily on the Kemper Art Museum’s twentieth-century collection, this installation addresses three themes: meditation, movement, and reinterpretation. These categories respectively engage the role of meditation in the historical practice of Zen through seventeenth-century ink scrolls, the global spread of Zen concepts and its Western artistic interpretations, and the mutability of the role of Zen in American and Japanese avant-garde artistic movements, including Gutai and Abstract Expressionism. Weaving together the works of Zen monks and nuns—such as Sengai Gibon and Ōtagaki Rengetsu—with Zen-inspired works by Franz Kline, Yoshihara Jiro, Yoko Ono, and others—this exhibition illuminates the outsize yet understated role of Zen in the canon of modern art.