Many said the Buddha artwork, “Floating Echo,” seemed to intensify the sense of peace they regularly found at the Socrates Sculpture Park, a four-and-a-half-acre patch of trees and grass on an industrial stretch of Long Island City, Queens. “The Buddha, he’s just chilling, you know, just chilling out there, thinking,” said Brandon Polanco, 25, a filmmaker who was stretching on the grass after a run. He had taken a photo of the Buddha sculpture in which it shone like a crystal against the skyline.

“In the background, you see the whole entire city, and he’s just quietly sitting on the water,” Mr. Polanco said. “It puts some perspective on things.”

As a public park run by a nonprofit corporation, the Socrates Sculpture Park regularly hosts playful, provocative outdoor art displays that change with the seasons. “Floating Echo,” by Chang-Jin Lee, a Korean-born visual artist who lives in New York City, is part of an exhibition by emerging artists. The show’s debut was on Sept. 9, and it will remain, if it survives the weather, until March.

Religion is often, like economics or culture, a subject of the public art at the park, said John Hatfield, the park’s executive director. A short walk from the Buddha, for example, was a statue of the Virgin Mary made of birdseed; it changes each day with the pecks of twittering sparrows. “Religion is a part of our lives, and therefore it’s a part of what artists are sometimes interested in exploring, philosophically, politically, spiritually,” Mr. Hatfield said.

“Floating Echo” works on several levels, he said. It invites reflection on Buddhist ideas of tranquillity and detachment, as it comes alive on the waves, while remaining in balance. Yet on another level, it is a kitsch object. “After all, it is an inflated, plastic balloon,” he said. The Buddha as kitsch is everywhere, he added — in bodegas, in garden ornaments. “Why is that O.K.?” he said. Is there something about Buddhist philosophy, he wondered, that makes that “perfectly fine”?