Inside Out Exhibition May 20-22, Lhasa
Inside Out / phyi nang log (Tib) / FaSheng FaSheng (Chinese)
May 20 -22, 2007
Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild Gallery
Lhasa, Tibet
please also see installation and art work images in the Inside Out gallery at
http://picasaweb.google.com/leigh.sangster
By Leigh M. Sangster
A special exhibition was recently held at the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild (GCAG) Gallery, in the Barkhor neighborhood of Lhasa, to celebrate some outstanding new works by local artists[1]. Members of the Guild invited me to curate a show in Lhasa, and I had also been hoping for an opportunity to show works commissioned for a Beijing exhibition to Lhasa audiences before they left the city. After working closely with several members, we proposed to the GCAG Board a three day exhibition, which would include an opening reception and an artists’ talk, various publicity in the city, and professional touches such as a Works’ List and bi-lingual labels which are not always easily incorporated into the Gallery’s ever-shifting works on view. The result was a diverse exhibition of works (chosen by myself in conjunction with the members) of oil and acrylic paintings, photography, multi-media, and computer generated digital prints, which together touched on a range of themes, from the representation of Tibetan culture to questions of defining “contemporary” in Lhasa art today.
The show was titled Inside Out/FaShengFaSheng for several reasons, the connotations of just one language’s phrase being impossible to render in a tri-lingual translation. Inside Out first tells us that all of the GCAG members share a commitment to using their artworks to communicate - a conceptual idea or an emotional state or a memory – to their viewers. I wanted to acknowledge that what audiences are seeing is an inner reality made visible, a movement from inside an artist out onto canvas or other medium. As contemporary Tibetan art has been capturing international attention from galleries, collectors, dealers, the public and scholars alike, more and more art has been moving from inside Tibet to the outside world. Many of the works in this show will travel to Beijing, for the exhibition “Lhasa: New Works from Tibet,” co-curated by Tony Scott and myself, at the Red Gate Gallery in the 798 Arts District. Red Gate Gallery has been for 15 years one of the premier galleries for contemporary Chinese art, representing many artists from early in their careers who have in short time managed to become top sellers. Other moves from inside Tibet to the outside include having their work collected and on offer from Rossi & Rossi of London, Peaceful Wind Gallery of Santa Fe, and Plum Blossoms in Hong Kong. These moves from inside Tibet to the outside are then not insignificant, and represent a new phase of Tibetan self-representation to the world, and deserve the awareness and pride of their hometown. Thirdly, we all know the sudden sense of surprise experienced when something has been turned ‘inside out’ – something has changed from what we expected and so we become engaged with it. This exhibition was primarily intended as an invitation to the Lhasa community to take a look, be surprised, and engage with the visual creations and the artists emerging in their city. One of the GCAG members whose work was featured, Gade, contributed the Chinese title, FaSheng FaSheng, two words which sound identical but are written with different characters. The first means “Happening” and is a reminder that much is going on here in Lhasa’s art world. The second means “to make a sound,” and suggests artists in Lhasa are finding and using their own indigenous voices.
The opening reception welcomed about seventy people from all over the city: Tibet University Art School students, artists from the Shunnu Dameh (Incomparable Youth) group, foreign residents, NGO employees, media reporters, office workers, and friends and family of artists. The Artists’ Talk gave each participating artist the opportunity to introduce himself and his works on display for about ten minutes and to take a question or two from the audience. After each artist had finished, the floor was opened to general questions and answers, which continued for almost another hour. After the gathering was dismissed, some members of the audience clustered around works and artists, continuing the conversation yet further. When the guests had departed, the artists gathered in a tight circle on the gallery floor with a couple bottles of wine. They noted that even amongst the ‘inner circle’ of artists themselves, such in-depth conversation about art was rare, and such an event with the community unprecedented. Although one artist commented that it was clear from audience questions that they did not know much about contemporary art itself, this was an important first step towards building knowledge, appreciation, and communication.
Nortse and Shelkar commented in different ways upon the changes in the Lhasa art world since the 1980s when they began working as artists. Shelkar, with his 2007. No. 01- 08 satirically criticized the embrace of new technologies and colors simply because they seemed the most “contemporary” trends of the moment. This large (103 x 155 cm) digital print on synthetic fabric has eight startling tiles of Shelkar’s own photographic portrait, bald and shaven, in distorted shapes and unsettling hues of plum and chartreuse. At the same time, the work captures something of contemporary life, in the ways we put on different faces in different contexts. On the other hand, Nortse’s Cutting Through shows three fish (made of katag), emerging from slits in the surface as if from the lines of a net, to show the freedom artists have today, such that they would even cut their canvases! This is a liberating breakthrough in comparison to the training he received in traditional oil painting’s romantic realism and Socialist Realist cohesion of social elements. Similarly, Nortse’s other pieces in this show experiment with mediums and commentary on social issues. Memory molds katag and lace into the back of a pre-modern Western woman’s corset, the rent in the pale beige linen tight at the bottom and apparently just loosened at the top. Although the garment has never been part of Tibetan women’s couture, the first moment of deep breath after constriction is a sensation those in Lhasa can imagine relishing. Commenting on the proliferation of bars and subsequent alcoholism in Lhasa, the oil painting Endlessly Painted Bottle of Beer, shows a man’s head wrapped in white and red bandage cloths. Though his eyes, ears and even mouth are covered, he continues to imbibe, and needs the tender protection of a wounded patient or the recently consecrated Buddha statue carefully being transported to its altar.
Tsewang Tashi contributed two portraits, Untitled, No.1, 2007 and Untitled, No.2, 2007 (both 135 x 135 cm, oil). When introducing his work during the Artists’ Talk, he noted that there are so many competing perceptions of Tibet and Tibetans, in the midst of which he depicts the feeling of the environment in which individuals are presently living. A young Tibetan asked him how a portrait of one person could represent all the Tibetan culture and the diversity of its people. Tsewang replied that “contemporary art is not an introduction to a culture,” but is an expression of the artists’ thoughts and feelings. “Contemporary art cannot be created if contemporary life is ignored,” he concluded.
Two Chinese members of the Guild, Wang Shiming and Jiang Yung, brought their newest works in their ongoing series. Wang Shiming depicts Tibetan landscapes and woman in thick oil paint, affecting a somewhat quirky take on the romantic impressionist style. JiangYung has shifted from his traditionally Tibetan dressed dolls in fantastic landscapes to nudes, yet retained the title Barbie Doll for his two newest works: a young doll-faced girl with Tibetan ornaments in her hair, sitting atop a giant flower against a plain grey background. He introduces his work by explaining that the effects of globalization bring a certain degree of commonality around the world, particularly in commodities, yet each culture or location retains, and inflects, unique particularities which homogenizing market trends cannot erase.
Tsering Nyandak was a vital part of the exhibition, contributing work in three mediums! This year he has been working with female nudes in scenes just barely recognizable as part of the Tibetan landscape. In stripping people and places of easy ethnographic referents to signify Tibetan culture, he has been able to distill the core of his own emotional experience as a Tibetan individual in Lhasa today. In this show, we had his most successful woman in from water series: kneeling on pebbles in the shallow edge of a river, she clasps a translucent balloon to her chest, lips still pursed around the balloon’s opening. Although of course we usually inflate balloons, there is a feeling that perhaps she is drawing from it a breath of air. The slopping tilt of the horizon, the gathered clouds over a tiny distant chorten are too yellow-green to predict calm weather ahead, and her enlarged shoulder suggests the presence of an immense but invisible burden. Yet her face is a picture of peace, and the water a cool refreshing blue. To me and several Tibetan viewers, the ambiguities and mixed feelings of Tibetan-ness today are captured, with a brilliant mix of complexity, beauty, and discomfort. A second painting, Ladder No.1 is the first in perhaps a new series, and depicts a woman, her back to us seated on a middle rung of the ladder with her head hung low, half-heartedly reaching out an arm towards, or letting go of, the dangling string of a red balloon. The ladder is propped against a red brick wall (a building material that came to Tibet with the People’s Liberation Army) and the top of the ladder stops in mid-air. The ladder resembles the white rungs painted on the rocks of pilgrimage sites, willing beings to the higher realms of rebirth. But here, the ladder and balloon suggest an uncertain, faltering hope.
For the weekend show, Nyandak also offered an installation, constructed in the gallery hours before the opening, and all but vanishing by the end of the Sunday night talk. Stretching a long piece of black fabric on the floor, he laid upon it a traditional wooden board used by all school children in the past for practicing calligraphy (jangshing), borrowed from an older relative. He lightly sprinkled a layer of tsampa (old, no fresh tsampa was wasted) over it, then lifted the board and moved it a few inches over, and sprinkled again a slightly thicker dusting of tsampa, and so on gradually turning the other end of the fabric completely white, and leaving the board in place at the last placement. The early guests frequently inadvertently walked across it, and, as Nyandak intended, as the room filled, the footprints erased the tracings. Finally, in the need for space for the Artists’ Talk, some audience members took it upon themselves to simply roll it up in a tight bundle, a black swaddle in the middle of the floor.
Nyandak’s third work was a project specific piece created in collaboration with Yak Tsetan for the Rossi & Rossi exhibition Contemporary meets Tradition[2]. Four poster-like computer-based graphic designs feature a silhouette of the Buddha’s head, covered with small dew drops. Two include hands in potentially contemporary mudras, one grasping (or a wrathful deity’s clutch), one making the OK sign (or the turning the wheel of Dharma mudra). Three are against a deep blue field, but the fourth is a vividly contrasting red field with half a silhouette on the right side, filled in with green blue swirling that remind one of the earth from space or oil swimming in a puddle. Yak Tsetan’s own work in this show, Star, continued the theme of the Buddha head, a diversion from his usual works on paper and canvas of proud and ferocious yaks, adding a headphone set and black sunglasses, like a celebrity on stage.
Keltse is also working actively with computer based art, producing collages and hand-drawn works using CorelDraw and PhotoShop. He is turning his professional skills as a graphic designer into a new art form, in addition to already being an accomplished painter. For “Inside Out”, Keltse brought together Buddha silhouettes, each with an Om at the heart, one radiating rainbow lines, another filled with intricately spaced thin concentric lines. His second piece, Saka Dawa, features endlessly receding parading rows of Om characters in several directions around a white circle, outlined in tiny beads with a beaded Buddha shape in the center. The work cleverly evokes the feeling of the teeming circumambulating pilgrims, as well as the rows of beggars, under a full moon. In a new painting, Raining Flowers, the Potala is set against a black sky, filled with delicate pale flowers, and a menagerie of people and animals below. Keltse skillfully handles the icon of Tibet which is so frequently emptied of meaning by its overuse, rendering with lightheartedness a personal desire to remember the Potala sans traffic and street lights. But it is not nostalgic or seeking solace in tradition, for above the black hat dancer flies a jet plane!
Gade crowned the show with two sets of stunning work, displaying versatility in mediums, conceptualizations, and feelings. Gade paints on both thin fabric and Tibetan handmade paper; two of each were in this show, in addition to the photographic documentation of an outdoor installation. Two works, Made in China (on paper scrolls) and Precious Items (on cloth) feature a myriad of things, mostly modern commodities, now available in Lhasa. They range from simple everyday items like cigarettes, lipstick and shoes, to the tools of various trades such as painters’ colors and brushes or workers’ hammers and wrenches, to household goods like thermoses and televisions. However, the more than 300 objects in Precious Items seem also to reflect the prevalence of certain types of objects and lifestyles and, like a sociological study, reveal most acquisitions these days seem to center on food, drink and entertainment, while those objects which were daily necessities in the past are here barely present, the tsampa bags and wooden teacups replaced by instant noodles and wine glasses. Yet, the overall arrangements of the products do fall within a Tibetan form: Made in China utilizes the grid blocks and diagonal colored squares of monastic poetry to frame the goods, Precious Items puts each shinny new thing in a small crumbling lotus base and halo backed frame, the central squares toned gold surrounded by a border in which the spaces between objects are colored dark blue, like the brocade around a gold thangka. This suggests two readings to me. Optimistically, all the influences of the market are still containable within a very distinctly Tibetan form, being shaped by Tibetan culture rather than the other way around. Or, the outer Tibet forms remain recognizable, but their inner meanings are completely re-ordered, dislocating traditional values.
In Gade’s Pecha Nagpo (Black Scripture), two long paper scrolls, innumerable tiny cut out windows form a script of Gade’s invention, combining Chinese and Tibet characters into an unreadable but beautiful black text. Red ‘Do Not…’symbols are laid on top, referencing all the ways in which one has to restrain behavior in the urban public: no parking, no smoking, etc.
Many in the audience succumbed to Gade’s exact audience expectation with his most popular painted work. From a distance, the long vertical piece resembles the faded, water damage streaked murals of the former Guge kingdom in far western Tibet. A central space in the painting features the vacated halos that remain embedded in the former temple walls where statues once stood, and is surrounded with rows and rows of identical figures, each on their own lotus-petalled throne. Our knowledge of this type of image seems to fill in miniature Buddhas before our eyes actually perceive them, for when we come closer to look – and surprised smiles and laughs spontaneously arise – we see they are in fact rows of smiling, robe-clad Mickey Mouses! Mickey Mouse Mural is light-hearted, sumptuously colored and gilded, and also contains many layers of meaning, for between the Mickey of today and the ruins of the past, the artist signals a vast distance he has trouble meaningfully bridging.
In a smaller room in the gallery, we installed a series of photographs that document a day’s outdoor temporary installation, Ice Buddha No.1 – Kyi Chu River. Gade conceptualized the event, collaborated with Jason Sangster for the photography, and enlisted the aide of a handful of other artists for the outing (a combined installation and picnic) last December. Gade worked with a sculptor friend to create a special type of mold, and invested in a waist high freezer everyone in Lhasa associates with ice cream sold in tiny shops along the streets. He gathered water from the Kyi Chu, the River of Happiness which runs along the south side of Lhasa, poured it in the mold, and after many weeks of experimentation, had produced lovely clear ice sculptures of Shakyamuni Buddha. We positioned one in the water with the Potala in the background; Gade felt without the Potala this installation could have been any place in the world, but he wanted viewers to see the location as definitively in Lhasa. Then we all observed and documented the ice Buddha melting in the bright Tibetan sunshine.
Gade explained that for him, this project was about the cycle of birth, life and death, coming from elements into form and returning to the elements. As the water from the river froze and then melted again into the stream, so is our cycle of our lives. However, Gade is also particularly interested in what thoughts, emotions, meanings or narratives will come to mind for others, and wishes this work to remain open to anyone’s interpretation. My own associations while observing the process - with decline of culture, violence done to statues and religion in the past (statues raided and destroyed in Lhasa’s temples having been dumped into the same river during the Cultural Revolution, I am told), and the loss of religious knowledge in the land of the Potala – have been shifting lately. When we installed a series of eight 30 x 20 cm photographs in the Gedun Choephel Gallery for the exhibition, I was surprised when Gade told audiences that the chronological ordering of photos could be read either from left to right (melting), or right to left (emerging from the water)! A friend of mine shared her feeling that the gleaming brilliant image conveyed the clarity and luminescence of the Buddha, and could be useful in attracting the attention and arousing the faith of those grown too accustomed to the traditional brilliance of gold and brocade, that is, a new medium for an old purpose. This effect was especially conveyed perhaps by two large prints, Ice Buddha No. 1, 2006 – Liu Bridge (approx. 60 x 80 cm) captured the glowing white ice Buddha from the side, facing the new bridge under construction to connect Lhasa’s western suburbs with the railroad station, arches and bars of steel tower into the sky and reflections in the water ripple around the still point of the Buddha. Looking at this work, I still hear the sounds of the hammers, workmen’s shouts and rhythmic clanking of trucks passing back and forth on unsecured plates of metal. The gorgeous print Ice Buddha No. 1, 2006 (approx 80 x 60 cm) is a close up of the radiant ice Buddha surrounded only by deep blue waters, reflection caught in the ripples stirred by a gust of wind.
“Inside Out” was an exhibition of strong works, showing some of the best of what artists here can produce. Local audiences enjoyed the works and guidance from the artists in learning how to look and respond to art. Lhasa artists certainly have a promising future ahead, both internationally and at home.
[Note: Gade and Jason Sangster’s Ice Buddha photographs are issued in a Limited Edition of 25, and some remain available for sale. Inquires regarding these or the works of other Lhasa artists may be directed to leigh.sangster@gmail.com.]
[1] I cannot express enough my tremendous gratitude to all the members of the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild, who, exhibiting in this show or not, supported this experiment and lent helping hands to the installation process. As previous works came off the walls, a chain of artists stretched from the gallery’s main room around a corner and up the stairs to the roof storage room. They patiently drank tea while I arranged and re-arranged the space, then came down with balls of white line, scissors, stool and chair, and hung everything where I’d placed them in record time. Particular thanks are especially due to Keltse for design work and printing of the lovely exhibition poster, Nortse for taking so seriously this endeavor and driving around to post said posters, Gade for his collaborative spirit and practical assistance with frames, and especially to Tsering Nyandak for his tireless translations, errand running of all kinds, and ever-friendly conversation about art and life.
[2] Please see “Old Buddhas in New Clothes,” the catalogue essay for the Rossi & Rossi exhibition Contemporary Meets Tradition, Asia Week (March 2007) New York City, also posted on www.mechak.org.
May 20 -22, 2007
Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild Gallery
Lhasa, Tibet
please also see installation and art work images in the Inside Out gallery at
http://picasaweb.google.com/leigh.sangster
By Leigh M. Sangster
A special exhibition was recently held at the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild (GCAG) Gallery, in the Barkhor neighborhood of Lhasa, to celebrate some outstanding new works by local artists[1]. Members of the Guild invited me to curate a show in Lhasa, and I had also been hoping for an opportunity to show works commissioned for a Beijing exhibition to Lhasa audiences before they left the city. After working closely with several members, we proposed to the GCAG Board a three day exhibition, which would include an opening reception and an artists’ talk, various publicity in the city, and professional touches such as a Works’ List and bi-lingual labels which are not always easily incorporated into the Gallery’s ever-shifting works on view. The result was a diverse exhibition of works (chosen by myself in conjunction with the members) of oil and acrylic paintings, photography, multi-media, and computer generated digital prints, which together touched on a range of themes, from the representation of Tibetan culture to questions of defining “contemporary” in Lhasa art today.
The show was titled Inside Out/FaShengFaSheng for several reasons, the connotations of just one language’s phrase being impossible to render in a tri-lingual translation. Inside Out first tells us that all of the GCAG members share a commitment to using their artworks to communicate - a conceptual idea or an emotional state or a memory – to their viewers. I wanted to acknowledge that what audiences are seeing is an inner reality made visible, a movement from inside an artist out onto canvas or other medium. As contemporary Tibetan art has been capturing international attention from galleries, collectors, dealers, the public and scholars alike, more and more art has been moving from inside Tibet to the outside world. Many of the works in this show will travel to Beijing, for the exhibition “Lhasa: New Works from Tibet,” co-curated by Tony Scott and myself, at the Red Gate Gallery in the 798 Arts District. Red Gate Gallery has been for 15 years one of the premier galleries for contemporary Chinese art, representing many artists from early in their careers who have in short time managed to become top sellers. Other moves from inside Tibet to the outside include having their work collected and on offer from Rossi & Rossi of London, Peaceful Wind Gallery of Santa Fe, and Plum Blossoms in Hong Kong. These moves from inside Tibet to the outside are then not insignificant, and represent a new phase of Tibetan self-representation to the world, and deserve the awareness and pride of their hometown. Thirdly, we all know the sudden sense of surprise experienced when something has been turned ‘inside out’ – something has changed from what we expected and so we become engaged with it. This exhibition was primarily intended as an invitation to the Lhasa community to take a look, be surprised, and engage with the visual creations and the artists emerging in their city. One of the GCAG members whose work was featured, Gade, contributed the Chinese title, FaSheng FaSheng, two words which sound identical but are written with different characters. The first means “Happening” and is a reminder that much is going on here in Lhasa’s art world. The second means “to make a sound,” and suggests artists in Lhasa are finding and using their own indigenous voices.
The opening reception welcomed about seventy people from all over the city: Tibet University Art School students, artists from the Shunnu Dameh (Incomparable Youth) group, foreign residents, NGO employees, media reporters, office workers, and friends and family of artists. The Artists’ Talk gave each participating artist the opportunity to introduce himself and his works on display for about ten minutes and to take a question or two from the audience. After each artist had finished, the floor was opened to general questions and answers, which continued for almost another hour. After the gathering was dismissed, some members of the audience clustered around works and artists, continuing the conversation yet further. When the guests had departed, the artists gathered in a tight circle on the gallery floor with a couple bottles of wine. They noted that even amongst the ‘inner circle’ of artists themselves, such in-depth conversation about art was rare, and such an event with the community unprecedented. Although one artist commented that it was clear from audience questions that they did not know much about contemporary art itself, this was an important first step towards building knowledge, appreciation, and communication.
Nortse and Shelkar commented in different ways upon the changes in the Lhasa art world since the 1980s when they began working as artists. Shelkar, with his 2007. No. 01- 08 satirically criticized the embrace of new technologies and colors simply because they seemed the most “contemporary” trends of the moment. This large (103 x 155 cm) digital print on synthetic fabric has eight startling tiles of Shelkar’s own photographic portrait, bald and shaven, in distorted shapes and unsettling hues of plum and chartreuse. At the same time, the work captures something of contemporary life, in the ways we put on different faces in different contexts. On the other hand, Nortse’s Cutting Through shows three fish (made of katag), emerging from slits in the surface as if from the lines of a net, to show the freedom artists have today, such that they would even cut their canvases! This is a liberating breakthrough in comparison to the training he received in traditional oil painting’s romantic realism and Socialist Realist cohesion of social elements. Similarly, Nortse’s other pieces in this show experiment with mediums and commentary on social issues. Memory molds katag and lace into the back of a pre-modern Western woman’s corset, the rent in the pale beige linen tight at the bottom and apparently just loosened at the top. Although the garment has never been part of Tibetan women’s couture, the first moment of deep breath after constriction is a sensation those in Lhasa can imagine relishing. Commenting on the proliferation of bars and subsequent alcoholism in Lhasa, the oil painting Endlessly Painted Bottle of Beer, shows a man’s head wrapped in white and red bandage cloths. Though his eyes, ears and even mouth are covered, he continues to imbibe, and needs the tender protection of a wounded patient or the recently consecrated Buddha statue carefully being transported to its altar.
Tsewang Tashi contributed two portraits, Untitled, No.1, 2007 and Untitled, No.2, 2007 (both 135 x 135 cm, oil). When introducing his work during the Artists’ Talk, he noted that there are so many competing perceptions of Tibet and Tibetans, in the midst of which he depicts the feeling of the environment in which individuals are presently living. A young Tibetan asked him how a portrait of one person could represent all the Tibetan culture and the diversity of its people. Tsewang replied that “contemporary art is not an introduction to a culture,” but is an expression of the artists’ thoughts and feelings. “Contemporary art cannot be created if contemporary life is ignored,” he concluded.
Two Chinese members of the Guild, Wang Shiming and Jiang Yung, brought their newest works in their ongoing series. Wang Shiming depicts Tibetan landscapes and woman in thick oil paint, affecting a somewhat quirky take on the romantic impressionist style. JiangYung has shifted from his traditionally Tibetan dressed dolls in fantastic landscapes to nudes, yet retained the title Barbie Doll for his two newest works: a young doll-faced girl with Tibetan ornaments in her hair, sitting atop a giant flower against a plain grey background. He introduces his work by explaining that the effects of globalization bring a certain degree of commonality around the world, particularly in commodities, yet each culture or location retains, and inflects, unique particularities which homogenizing market trends cannot erase.
Tsering Nyandak was a vital part of the exhibition, contributing work in three mediums! This year he has been working with female nudes in scenes just barely recognizable as part of the Tibetan landscape. In stripping people and places of easy ethnographic referents to signify Tibetan culture, he has been able to distill the core of his own emotional experience as a Tibetan individual in Lhasa today. In this show, we had his most successful woman in from water series: kneeling on pebbles in the shallow edge of a river, she clasps a translucent balloon to her chest, lips still pursed around the balloon’s opening. Although of course we usually inflate balloons, there is a feeling that perhaps she is drawing from it a breath of air. The slopping tilt of the horizon, the gathered clouds over a tiny distant chorten are too yellow-green to predict calm weather ahead, and her enlarged shoulder suggests the presence of an immense but invisible burden. Yet her face is a picture of peace, and the water a cool refreshing blue. To me and several Tibetan viewers, the ambiguities and mixed feelings of Tibetan-ness today are captured, with a brilliant mix of complexity, beauty, and discomfort. A second painting, Ladder No.1 is the first in perhaps a new series, and depicts a woman, her back to us seated on a middle rung of the ladder with her head hung low, half-heartedly reaching out an arm towards, or letting go of, the dangling string of a red balloon. The ladder is propped against a red brick wall (a building material that came to Tibet with the People’s Liberation Army) and the top of the ladder stops in mid-air. The ladder resembles the white rungs painted on the rocks of pilgrimage sites, willing beings to the higher realms of rebirth. But here, the ladder and balloon suggest an uncertain, faltering hope.
For the weekend show, Nyandak also offered an installation, constructed in the gallery hours before the opening, and all but vanishing by the end of the Sunday night talk. Stretching a long piece of black fabric on the floor, he laid upon it a traditional wooden board used by all school children in the past for practicing calligraphy (jangshing), borrowed from an older relative. He lightly sprinkled a layer of tsampa (old, no fresh tsampa was wasted) over it, then lifted the board and moved it a few inches over, and sprinkled again a slightly thicker dusting of tsampa, and so on gradually turning the other end of the fabric completely white, and leaving the board in place at the last placement. The early guests frequently inadvertently walked across it, and, as Nyandak intended, as the room filled, the footprints erased the tracings. Finally, in the need for space for the Artists’ Talk, some audience members took it upon themselves to simply roll it up in a tight bundle, a black swaddle in the middle of the floor.
Nyandak’s third work was a project specific piece created in collaboration with Yak Tsetan for the Rossi & Rossi exhibition Contemporary meets Tradition[2]. Four poster-like computer-based graphic designs feature a silhouette of the Buddha’s head, covered with small dew drops. Two include hands in potentially contemporary mudras, one grasping (or a wrathful deity’s clutch), one making the OK sign (or the turning the wheel of Dharma mudra). Three are against a deep blue field, but the fourth is a vividly contrasting red field with half a silhouette on the right side, filled in with green blue swirling that remind one of the earth from space or oil swimming in a puddle. Yak Tsetan’s own work in this show, Star, continued the theme of the Buddha head, a diversion from his usual works on paper and canvas of proud and ferocious yaks, adding a headphone set and black sunglasses, like a celebrity on stage.Keltse is also working actively with computer based art, producing collages and hand-drawn works using CorelDraw and PhotoShop. He is turning his professional skills as a graphic designer into a new art form, in addition to already being an accomplished painter. For “Inside Out”, Keltse brought together Buddha silhouettes, each with an Om at the heart, one radiating rainbow lines, another filled with intricately spaced thin concentric lines. His second piece, Saka Dawa, features endlessly receding parading rows of Om characters in several directions around a white circle, outlined in tiny beads with a beaded Buddha shape in the center. The work cleverly evokes the feeling of the teeming circumambulating pilgrims, as well as the rows of beggars, under a full moon. In a new painting, Raining Flowers, the Potala is set against a black sky, filled with delicate pale flowers, and a menagerie of people and animals below. Keltse skillfully handles the icon of Tibet which is so frequently emptied of meaning by its overuse, rendering with lightheartedness a personal desire to remember the Potala sans traffic and street lights. But it is not nostalgic or seeking solace in tradition, for above the black hat dancer flies a jet plane!
Gade crowned the show with two sets of stunning work, displaying versatility in mediums, conceptualizations, and feelings. Gade paints on both thin fabric and Tibetan handmade paper; two of each were in this show, in addition to the photographic documentation of an outdoor installation. Two works, Made in China (on paper scrolls) and Precious Items (on cloth) feature a myriad of things, mostly modern commodities, now available in Lhasa. They range from simple everyday items like cigarettes, lipstick and shoes, to the tools of various trades such as painters’ colors and brushes or workers’ hammers and wrenches, to household goods like thermoses and televisions. However, the more than 300 objects in Precious Items seem also to reflect the prevalence of certain types of objects and lifestyles and, like a sociological study, reveal most acquisitions these days seem to center on food, drink and entertainment, while those objects which were daily necessities in the past are here barely present, the tsampa bags and wooden teacups replaced by instant noodles and wine glasses. Yet, the overall arrangements of the products do fall within a Tibetan form: Made in China utilizes the grid blocks and diagonal colored squares of monastic poetry to frame the goods, Precious Items puts each shinny new thing in a small crumbling lotus base and halo backed frame, the central squares toned gold surrounded by a border in which the spaces between objects are colored dark blue, like the brocade around a gold thangka. This suggests two readings to me. Optimistically, all the influences of the market are still containable within a very distinctly Tibetan form, being shaped by Tibetan culture rather than the other way around. Or, the outer Tibet forms remain recognizable, but their inner meanings are completely re-ordered, dislocating traditional values.
In Gade’s Pecha Nagpo (Black Scripture), two long paper scrolls, innumerable tiny cut out windows form a script of Gade’s invention, combining Chinese and Tibet characters into an unreadable but beautiful black text. Red ‘Do Not…’symbols are laid on top, referencing all the ways in which one has to restrain behavior in the urban public: no parking, no smoking, etc.
Many in the audience succumbed to Gade’s exact audience expectation with his most popular painted work. From a distance, the long vertical piece resembles the faded, water damage streaked murals of the former Guge kingdom in far western Tibet. A central space in the painting features the vacated halos that remain embedded in the former temple walls where statues once stood, and is surrounded with rows and rows of identical figures, each on their own lotus-petalled throne. Our knowledge of this type of image seems to fill in miniature Buddhas before our eyes actually perceive them, for when we come closer to look – and surprised smiles and laughs spontaneously arise – we see they are in fact rows of smiling, robe-clad Mickey Mouses! Mickey Mouse Mural is light-hearted, sumptuously colored and gilded, and also contains many layers of meaning, for between the Mickey of today and the ruins of the past, the artist signals a vast distance he has trouble meaningfully bridging.
In a smaller room in the gallery, we installed a series of photographs that document a day’s outdoor temporary installation, Ice Buddha No.1 – Kyi Chu River. Gade conceptualized the event, collaborated with Jason Sangster for the photography, and enlisted the aide of a handful of other artists for the outing (a combined installation and picnic) last December. Gade worked with a sculptor friend to create a special type of mold, and invested in a waist high freezer everyone in Lhasa associates with ice cream sold in tiny shops along the streets. He gathered water from the Kyi Chu, the River of Happiness which runs along the south side of Lhasa, poured it in the mold, and after many weeks of experimentation, had produced lovely clear ice sculptures of Shakyamuni Buddha. We positioned one in the water with the Potala in the background; Gade felt without the Potala this installation could have been any place in the world, but he wanted viewers to see the location as definitively in Lhasa. Then we all observed and documented the ice Buddha melting in the bright Tibetan sunshine.
Gade explained that for him, this project was about the cycle of birth, life and death, coming from elements into form and returning to the elements. As the water from the river froze and then melted again into the stream, so is our cycle of our lives. However, Gade is also particularly interested in what thoughts, emotions, meanings or narratives will come to mind for others, and wishes this work to remain open to anyone’s interpretation. My own associations while observing the process - with decline of culture, violence done to statues and religion in the past (statues raided and destroyed in Lhasa’s temples having been dumped into the same river during the Cultural Revolution, I am told), and the loss of religious knowledge in the land of the Potala – have been shifting lately. When we installed a series of eight 30 x 20 cm photographs in the Gedun Choephel Gallery for the exhibition, I was surprised when Gade told audiences that the chronological ordering of photos could be read either from left to right (melting), or right to left (emerging from the water)! A friend of mine shared her feeling that the gleaming brilliant image conveyed the clarity and luminescence of the Buddha, and could be useful in attracting the attention and arousing the faith of those grown too accustomed to the traditional brilliance of gold and brocade, that is, a new medium for an old purpose. This effect was especially conveyed perhaps by two large prints, Ice Buddha No. 1, 2006 – Liu Bridge (approx. 60 x 80 cm) captured the glowing white ice Buddha from the side, facing the new bridge under construction to connect Lhasa’s western suburbs with the railroad station, arches and bars of steel tower into the sky and reflections in the water ripple around the still point of the Buddha. Looking at this work, I still hear the sounds of the hammers, workmen’s shouts and rhythmic clanking of trucks passing back and forth on unsecured plates of metal. The gorgeous print Ice Buddha No. 1, 2006 (approx 80 x 60 cm) is a close up of the radiant ice Buddha surrounded only by deep blue waters, reflection caught in the ripples stirred by a gust of wind.
“Inside Out” was an exhibition of strong works, showing some of the best of what artists here can produce. Local audiences enjoyed the works and guidance from the artists in learning how to look and respond to art. Lhasa artists certainly have a promising future ahead, both internationally and at home.
[Note: Gade and Jason Sangster’s Ice Buddha photographs are issued in a Limited Edition of 25, and some remain available for sale. Inquires regarding these or the works of other Lhasa artists may be directed to leigh.sangster@gmail.com.]
[1] I cannot express enough my tremendous gratitude to all the members of the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild, who, exhibiting in this show or not, supported this experiment and lent helping hands to the installation process. As previous works came off the walls, a chain of artists stretched from the gallery’s main room around a corner and up the stairs to the roof storage room. They patiently drank tea while I arranged and re-arranged the space, then came down with balls of white line, scissors, stool and chair, and hung everything where I’d placed them in record time. Particular thanks are especially due to Keltse for design work and printing of the lovely exhibition poster, Nortse for taking so seriously this endeavor and driving around to post said posters, Gade for his collaborative spirit and practical assistance with frames, and especially to Tsering Nyandak for his tireless translations, errand running of all kinds, and ever-friendly conversation about art and life.
[2] Please see “Old Buddhas in New Clothes,” the catalogue essay for the Rossi & Rossi exhibition Contemporary Meets Tradition, Asia Week (March 2007) New York City, also posted on www.mechak.org.
posted by leigh sangster at 4:54 AM
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