By Ian Findlay-Brown
Editor of Asian Art News
The Tibetan Autonomous Region is unique among China’s regions. Its environment and geography include some of the most magnificent mountain ranges, including Mount Everest, and valley systems and lakes in the world. Traveling through such scenery it is easy to understand just how sacred the land and animals are in this place, and just how fragile is the place of humankind here. Across the landscape one glimpses beautiful reminders of the power of Buddhist religious traditions, culture, and art, but not in a way that appears to separate one from the other, but as a whole everything integrated into life’s cycles. To the Western eye Tibet’s traditions may seem uncommonly esoteric, but one has only to remember that for many centuries Christianity and its rituals once dominated every aspect of Western society and people’s lives and cultures, as well as art. To understand this is to begin to understand the central place of Buddhism in the lives of Tibetans.
Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, lies beneath the magnificent Potala Palace. Though one sees centuries of ritual and highly defined art practices in the brilliance of the Palace’s religious art, the city itself has been altered irrevocably by revolution and time, and by the inexorable march of modernization that would have been unimaginable just three generations ago. The mysteriousness of Buddhist culture is fixed in one’s imagination through the myriad Buddhist images and the dramatic architecture of Tibetan monasteries that one has seen over many years. There are now intertwined with the modern marketplace and the car, new hotels and shops. Today the reality of modernity that catches the eye while walking the streets of Lhasa is a unique combination of Tibetan and Chinese culture.
The modern world is not only on the streets of Lhasa but also throughout contemporary Tibetan art practice. This is particularly true of the art of the past three decades, as Tibet has slowly been opened up to world. There are now new ways of looking at the world that unites tradition and modernity in the work of Tibet’s contemporary artists. (1) The 12 artists who make up this exhibition entitled Realms of Purity: Realms of Experience: Contemporary Tibetan Art show this clearly in their varied and dramatic paintings. (2)
Even with all the political, social, and cultural changes that have taken place in Tibet since the late 1950s, it is not possible to escape completely the hold that traditional religious culture and tangka painting have over contemporary Tibetan artists. Although art education has for a long time now included traditional Chinese art and Western art practices and history, traditional Tibetan art remains a profound influence on many of the youngest artists for whom tradition and religion have become just a part of history. Many of the long-time resident expatriate Chinese artists have also been profoundly influenced by traditional religious art, particularly tangkas, but also mural and fresco art, as well as architecture.
The richness and complexity of motifs, the beauty of color and form, and the intricacy of traditional philosophy, not only in tangkas, but in all forms, makes Buddhist art a rich source of inspiration for artists and has added greatly to the significance of contemporary art practice and imagery. The way in which many contemporary Tibetan artists choose color and apply it, for example, has a direct link to tradition. The way in which they use important motifs, symbols, legends, and myths in a contemporary setting to explain to a new world, the complexity of the human condition, and the place of nature in our world flows directly from tradition. The 12 artists here remind one just how powerful is the combination of tradition and modernity in making new art for a new time. Although there are different schools of art and art groups, some official and others loosely connected, the artists in this exhibition are predominately based in Lhasa, with the exception of Lhaba Tsering, who is in Shigatse, and Zhai Yuefei, who is based in
Beijing.
While there has been a clash of cultures to inform the work of contemporary Tibetan artists, some of whom have taken up residence and exhibited in Europe and North America, as well as around Asia, there is no single style that dominates contemporary Tibetan art, as can be seen in the work of these 12 artists of Realms of Purity: Realms of Experience, whose roads to becoming artists are varied indeed. A new Tibet requires new ways of looking at the world, as does every society where tradition is important and informs modern life in subtle ways. Tibetan and Chinese arts are rich in ways to inform local cultural experience that can reach beyond the local to the universal. Tibetan Buddhist art forms, for example, speak in their stillness and content to cultures with no direct relationship to Buddhism or Tibet. Religious influences, however, are a small, but important, part of the work in this exhibition. There are also quiet, lyrical narrative works by Tsering Namgyai (b. 1976, Lhasa), Lhaba Tsering (b. 1978, Shigatse), and Dezhoin (b. 1976, Lhasa), who is the only female artist in the group. There are paintings with a political and social edge as in the work of Jimei Chilei (b. 1958, Lhasa) and Gade (b. 1971, Lhasa). Among the other artists there is a broad range of expressionist figuration, landscape, abstraction, and symbolism, a truly rich range of styles highlighting a wide variety of content. The works of the artists here are all realized using mineral colors and pigments on cloth.
One memorable view of Tibet is its dramatic mountainous terrain. For both contemporary Tibetan and Chinese artists such a world offers extraordinary opportunities to make astonishing landscape paintings in which traditional and contemporary styles are brought boldly together in marvelous line and color, texture and space in truly dramatic ways.
The majesty and vastness of the Tibetan mountains realized in the work of Yu Youxin (b. 1940, Shandong province, China) is stunning indeed. Yu, who graduated from the Beijing Arts School, studied under such luminaries as Wu Jingbo, Bai Xueshi, Zhao Yu, and Wu Guanzhong. Since 1980, Yu has absorbed all things Tibetan. In such works as Yaks (2006), Bird Above the Lonely Valley (2007), and Rainbows Over the Snowland (2007), clearly influenced by his studies of traditional Chinese painting and techniques, Yu captures something of the tranquility and the monumentality of the mountains, undisturbed except for the passage of yaks, as if in a dream, and the cry of groups of flying crane. Yu’s world is an intangible, ephemeral, frosty one that is beautifully lit by his wisps of white cloud and snow that enhance the suggested texture of the brown mountainsides. Yu captures the majesty of all of this with great skill and a technique that is a result not just of study but also contemplation. In Yu’s world one can easily imagine Buddhist monks gathering for meditation amidst all this natural power.
There is also this power of natural majesty and dream in the art of Han Shuli (b. 1948, Beijing). He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under He Youzhi and Yang Xiangang. Today he represents the generation of artists who settled in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a particularly difficult time for Tibet and Chinese expatriates alike.
Since he arrived in Lhasa in 1973, Han has absorbed the realities of Tibet and its people and has seen the world around him alter almost beyond recognition. These changes have profoundly affected Han on a both personal and artistic level. His broad studies of Tibetan culture and painting gradually informed his painting, so much so that it is impossible to see him today as anything but a Tibetan artist of Chinese background. Such works as his New Five Dhyani Buddhas series (2003), Mural with Skylights (2002), New Clothes (2007), Form•Emptiness (2007), and Generation Gap (2007) confirm his Tibetan art practice.
The reality of Tibetan culture had an enormous pull on Han’s intellect and spirit. However, the transition was not always smooth. “I didn’t accept Tibetan culture straightaway but then I fell in love with the culture unconditionally,” he says. “During the first 15 years it has been unconditional. But there has been a break, too, which was because I began to see the faults in the culture for me. In reality the danger was in blindly believing in the religious teachings without understanding them. There is always a conflict between a non-materialist life and luxury.” (3)
As a painter steeped in the traditions of Chinese art, Han’s first major works in the 1970s were bright paintings on cotton. These were inspired by his initial studies of Tibetan folk culture. Later, he made ink-and-color-wash works that were informed by further studies of his new culture. In these works Buddhist imagery and references were clear. By combining Tibetan themes and subjects, along with traditional Chinese media and brushwork, as well as his studies in art theory, Han’s art has come to reflect some of the grandeur of time and place that affect him as an artist.
Although there are clear emotional and artistic elements that have survived throughout his career as a painter, Han says, “There have been many changes in my work over the past 30 years. I think that the most important change is that I found my own visual language. Now whatever object I paint in traditional ink it is painted with my spirit. But my ink painting is also influenced by Tibetan tangka, particularly in the use of background and my use of white space. But I have to say that in all monasteries there are secret rooms with the color black or blue and no windows. Under candlelight one sees only a vague part of the large tangka. This mood has inspired me to paint the way I do.”
To find a singular visual language that will ground an artist and open wide the doors to developing new work is a challenge indeed. Han Shuli knows this well, not only as an artist but also as a teacher who must inspire students to look beyond the easy view and to think about their own vision of the world. For his language he elaborates further: “It is to have a Chinese style of painting and traditional tangka come together. Chinese painting has a kind of emptiness. But combine this with Tibetan painting and it is vibrant. The feeling is very serious and there is great detail through the motifs and the symbolism that are revealed. I think in reality it became clear to me at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Sometimes the combination is good, but it is not always successful. Yet, even a failure doesn’t matter to me now. I am comfortable and I accept my work for what it is as the basic inspiration and themes of my paintings are based on my life in Tibet.”
Unlike many painters who stick to a definite format and sizes, Han Shuli’s work has ranged over traditional Chinese guohua, landscape, animal and human figures, Tibetan and Buddhist themes in a wide variety of sizes. His range and technical skill are impressive. He is a confident artist and his knowledge of both Chinese and Western art sets him apart. He notes that as well as Tibetan and Chinese art he looks at such artists as Matisse and Gauguin with great respect. “It is not the style of artists such as Gauguin and Matisse that has an influence on my art, but their spirit.”
Where Yu’s and Han’s landscapes range from the softly lyrical and dream-like to the subtly suggested power and majesty of the natural world, the art of Benba (b. 1972, Bainang County, Tibet) have a hard and ragged edge it. The lighting of his work, although suggestive of Yu Youxin’s, has a profoundly mystical quality to it. The dream-like vision of Benba’s paintings, in which the mountains seem to be floating above the earth, represents a magical, religious world in which peace is the essence of place.
For Benba, who graduated form Hebei Normal University and the University of Tibet, the road to his becoming an artist began in the humblest of circumstances, with few expectations, but a great deal of perseverance. But Benba today is an artist as far from his charcoal-on-rocks origins as it is possible. Rocks are now the mountains of his dramatic landscapes. In his works Benba references Buddhism, traditional Tibetan culture, and elements of traditional Chinese landscape painting to make unusual landscapes that provoke new ways of seeing the world and his culture. One has only to look at such works as Memories of the Past (2001–2006) and Wind & Rain I and II (both 2007).
Although Benba uses mineral colors and pigments on cloth for his art, it wasn’t always so. As he says, “My first painting was an oil painting on harvesting in autumn. In a way I was re-experiencing my childhood. My early oils on canvas, in 1996, had a wide range of landscape influences. But I thought that there was not much of a real visual language in the landscapes. Perhaps this is because I thought that oil painting was easy. It wasn’t, but it was a pleasant and comfortable experience for me.
“In 1998, I changed from oils to natural mineral colors and pigments. I changed because in oil I couldn’t really depict what I wanted to in the painting. Oil colors are vibrant but they don’t speak to me when I am painting in the way natural colors do. Oil doesn’t speak to my culture. Natural colors speak to Tibetan culture. And for me there is a relationship with traditional tangka. Using such colors was a way of getting back to my tradition and to create a new style of painting.” (4)
Benba says that every symbol and piece of his art have their own meaning. It is important, if he wishes to have an individual voice in his art, that he finds the right medium to depict these things. Selecting the medium is one thing but selecting content is another. “On my way back from the Himalayas I saw various temples and when I saw the condition they were in I was moved. I saw life and its cycle as built into that and then it was demolished. But it could be rebuilt through painting. Everything has a soul. The Memories From The Past, which is in three parts, represents this. This work is read from different places and put together as one piece.
“For me the light is stronger when using an acrylic and pigment mix. In traditional Tibetan painting there were no such colors as oil and acrylic to highlight the natural colors. Tangka, which is strictly controlled in its making, is color with no shadow or shading. But today the rules are being broken. The conservative elements in the painting world don’t like this. The conservatives frown upon individuality. I am not very exposed to outside cultures, but I am not a conservative in Tibetan culture or in my lifestyle. I am an observer. I find that conservative culture is not so successful. One reason is that they are too religious. They cannot accept new ways of thinking. I don’t disagree with changes. But I don’t agree with all change just for the sake of change.”
The figurative works in the show represents a thoughtful and interesting range of styles and narrative, from the religious to the contemporary. The most abstract of the work is by Bama Zhaxi (b. 1961, Shigatse), a self-taught artist who began to paint only when he was 18 year old. There is a cubist element to some of his pieces: his large painting entitled Waiting (2006) is a good example of this. Here the faces seem to fold into each other creating a tension of line and form within a monochromatic color field that is striking. While there is a certain mystery within Waiting, a work such as Flower of Snow Lotus (2006), with a woman’s face in the center of the painting, her head covered with a veil, looking out at the world with a sultry expression, suggests a hidden world of sensuality. Bama’s other paintings are clearly influenced by Buddhist art with a leaning towards tangka painting. His The Buddha’s Direction (2006) is a tarnished image influenced, as Bama recalls, by his visits to Dunhuang, which he used to visit when he drove a truck there in the mid-1980s.
This quality of aging and the sense of passing time is also found in the work of Li Zhibao (born 1952, Jianghua, China), a member of the Yao minority ethnic group, who graduated from the fine art department of Human Normal University. Li has been working in Tibet since 1976 and has long since relinquished his early relationship with the New Literati Painting movement to become a thoroughly Tibetan painter. In his figurative work Li not only emphasizes the female form, which frequently appear to represents an Indo-Tibetan appearance, but also the color. Li’s colors, however, are not those that one would normally find used in traditional figurative mural or fresco art or tangka painting. His work has a wonderful sense of aging about it with the figures—their lips, skin, and hands— seeming to be in the process of disintegrating, which is the way Li wants his work to appear. Time and the elements have eaten away at his lost worlds that were once tinged with romance and sensuality.
The figurative narrative of Zhai Yuefei (born 1962, Yuanping, Shanxi) is drawn from his 15-year stay in Tibet. His art is about ceremony and celebration. The groups of dancers are realized almost in a naïve manner. His most interesting painting, and certainly the busiest, is The Snowland (2007) in which half-dressed figures are involved in celebration with animals.
Tsering Namygai (b.1976, Lhasa) has a striking style and this can be seen in his nine-panel work entitled Thanksgiving (2007). Its overall hues of mineral blue create a dreamy effect. The reclining Buddha is attended by numerous tiny figures, the painted eye, and motifs that one finds in traditional tangka. This is an intricate work with elements of the surreal and cubism that demands to be looked at.
The most dramatic narrative in the exhibition is by Jimei Chilei (b. 1958, Lhasa), who studied art at both University of Tibet and the Ethnic Fine Arts Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. While his other narrative paintings, with the figures dressed in traditional clothes, have an intimacy about them as well as a dream-like quality, his three-panel work entitled Beijing – Train – Lhasa (2007) speaks to a very different world, one in which change comes from a great distance and is anonymous and threatening in the way of powerful machines of which we have no control.
In Beijing – Train – Lhasa each panel has a group of traditionally dressed Tibetans in the foreground. They stand with their backs to us as they peer across the distant plane. In the first panel is Beijing’s Forbidden City, in the middle panel is a long train heading west, in the third panel is an image of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The people are waiting silently, and one suspects sadly, as they view the outside world and modernity inexorably hurtling towards them in the shape of a train full of people, anonymous and threatening in its distant presence. Jimei expresses his narrative through a range of wonderfully muted colors that draw the viewer into each scene. His line and colors create a geometry that one would have seen daily in Lhasa in the old days.
The sadness that one finds in such a painting as Beijing – Train – Lhasa is also to be found in the work of Domin, Norbu Tsering (b.1963, Lhasa), referred to also as Nortse and Norbu. But there is an added tone to Norbu’s work and that is a quiet ferocity and it resonates through such works as Memory (2008) and Shambhala (2008). These mummy-like figures speak to a new iconography of silent protest. Among many post-1989 mainland Chinese artists a new figuration has been developed that is as striking and as uninhibited as one might wish for in our new consumerist age. The portrait itself has become a central icon among both commercial and avant-garde artists, so much so that the power of distorted images of Mao Zedong, workers, peasants, soldiers, and the nude no longer shock. Nortse’s paintings, however, do shock and possess a vibrancy that is both fresh and vital. Alone in the center of many of his canvases the anonymous protagonist appears trapped, the bandaged head suggesting that the voice has been silenced, that censorship is alive. Nortse’s painting is direct and achieves iconic status in the anonymity of the figure. But at the same time as reading his pictures as a memory of the past, they can also be read as something that represents the global sameness of much of contemporary society’s fixation with trends and the creation of iconic figures, from the emaciated super-model to the political dissident to the overachieving sports heroes. Nortse is a very thoughtful artist and his art calls to mind the surreal happenings that afflict society and the individual. Indeed, there is something Kafkaeque about his content. There is also something about China’s alienated youth behind the surface of his art. The mood that Nortse creates through his painting is one through which he hopes to achieve a dialogue with the viewer and to this end the edgy quality lies his work wide open to a very broad range of cultural, social, and political interpretations.
Gade’s New Idol series (2008) featuring McDonald’s logos, young pioneers and their red scarves, and Spiderman is in essence a protest that mocks the new capitalist iconography that inhabits all times and places today. Gade, 37, has a subtle edge to his work that draws the viewer into the narrative that is expressed behind the images. Lhasa-based Gade, whose combination of the modern and the traditional is fresh and exciting, is one of the generation of Tibetan artists born in Lhasa during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Gade was quickly recognized as an outstanding artist. After studying in the fine arts department of Tibet University as a teenager, he studied art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. During his studies in both Lhasa and Beijing he was introduced to the painting traditions of both Tibet and Western art.
By the beginning of 1990s what set Gade apart from his peers was both his abstraction, which reminded many people of Picasso’s art, and his use of Chinese mineral colors as opposed to oil paints on canvas, which were popular among other artists. Gade’s paintings from the early 1990s were almost exclusively mineral colors on cloth, which fitted well with his need to preserve his painterly links to Tibetan social and religious traditions, as well as embracing a highly stylized figuration that included brooding, erotic nudes that appeared to float within ethereal spaces, both aerial and aquatic. Many of his Tibetan and Buddhist figures were set within formally constructed interiors, which could be interpreted as temples or niches carved out of rock. In his towering landscapes at that time there was a surreal quality, too, with a wide variety of symbolism that harked back to religious tangka painting and Tibetan mythology.
“When I went to Beijing to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1992, I wanted to show how the traditional and the contemporary could be brought together in my work. But I wasn’t very satisfied with this. I was young then and I didn’t have very much life experience,” says Gade. “When I look back at that time I see that I was looking at the Tibetan tradition and the contemporary like I was looking at mathematics, as some kind of formula. But since Buddhism and the culture were strongest for me so they dominated the look of my work, which was to represent Tibetan culture. Slowly I learned to see that bringing things together was not like a formula.
“I really like traditional Tibetan culture but I found it difficult to understand at times because there was a gap due the Cultural Revolution. When you want to repeat the tradition I couldn’t because of the changes then and my life at that time didn’t allow for it. I thought that depicting tradition wasn’t real for me because when I was young, Chinese and foreign influences had a big impact on me and on my memories of childhood. But in painting I saw that a lot of artists were trying to make their tradition mysterious. But I knew that I didn’t want my work to become mere decoration for people’s houses. I felt that I had a responsibility as an artist to my society, its culture, and its traditions.”(5)
The change in the artistic iconography among mainland Chinese artists became particularly pronounced during the 1990s. This was a time when so many traditional taboos were broken. As Western capitalist icons proliferated they, too, became the new icons of Political Pop art and other genres. Sanitized communist culture had taken on a contemporary look.
For Gade, however, 2000 was the year of significant change. “I adopted my present art style. I used to elaborate more on tradition, but I began to use more contemporary ideas to talk about the realities of life as it is in Tibet.
“Visual language is very important and I don’t have to use to very contemporary techniques. For example, computer installation art – I feel that I need to use the most suitable medium. I still use traditional media like Tibetan cotton, Tibetan paper and colors and so on. I still use traditional imagery, but tradition doesn’t change.”
The dream-like qualities of the early 1990s art has given way in recent years to a more robust and contemporary style, with an iconography to fit. At the same time, however, outside attitudes towards Tibet can annoy such artists as Gade.
“Sometimes I really don’t get the ideas expressed by tourists that Tibetans should stick to their own culture and way of living. The earth is like a village. I don’t want it to be just Western either. It should be represented by all cultures and be equal.
“Now there have been many changes. The culture has been changing very quickly. Now I am wondering what Tibetan really is. How do you classify it? Today, Tibetan culture has many other elements so it is not just the traditional. A lot of traditional buildings are being demolished and replaced by new influences. There are so many Chinese and foreign influences apart from the buildings. There are spiritual things and new beliefs. The traditional way of living and all that is part of this are vanishing. I feel that this is not within anyone’s control. Tibetans feel that they want the right of choice to live the way that they want.”
On a much lighter note is the work of Lhaba Tsering (b.1978, Shigatse). In this show his Auspicious Kite series reveals Tibetan secular traditions. His geometry is that of clouds, random, fluffy, and ephemeral. His colors are the colors of traditional painting. Lhaba’s sense of the ethereal, the childhood dream, is also to be found in the art of Dezhoin (b.1976, Lhasa), who is the only female painter in the exhibition. Dezhoin, who graduated from the art department of the University of Tibet, makes highly detailed narrative of place and time, what is now and what is lost. Her works Village of High Spirit (2007) and Memories of Barkhor (2007) are human narratives at heart that leave one with the realization of the complexity of human endeavor and spiritual needs.
The artists whose works make up Realms of Purity: Realms of Experience: Contemporary Tibetan Art are but a small part of Lhasa’s very active art scene. But what they have to say through their art touches the work of many others. Their art also speaks to many universal ideas that concern the loss of tradition and the dominance of the modern world whose individualism would appear to be creating a world of discord in which the importance of tradition in developing a new world is often ignored. These artists and their work ask important questions, the answers to which lie within the viewer.
Notes:
1. This essay is an extended and re-edited version of the article “Art From The Roof Of The World” by Ian Findlay, published in Asian Art News, Volume 18 Number 3, May/June 2008.
2. The 12 artists featured in Realms of Purity: Realms of Experience: Contemporary Tibetan Art are Domin, Norbu Tsering, Bamazaxi, Benba, Tsering Namygai, Dezhoin , Jimei Chilei, Lhaba Tsering, Gade, Han Shuli, Yu Youxin, Li Zhibao, and Zhai Yuefei.
3. All quotes are edited from the author’s interview with Han Shuli in Lhasa, on July 16, 2007.
4 All quotes are edited from the author’s interview with Benba, in Lhasa, on July 11, 2007.
5. All quotes are from an interview with Gade, in Lhasa, on July 15, 2007
Ian Findlay-Brown is the editor of Asian Art News.
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Copyright © Ian Findlay-Brown 2008
