Family Album: New Work by Gonkar Gyatso
Saturday, September 03, 2016 - Sunday, November 27, 2016
Gonkar Gyatso’s work explores competing and often conflicting conceptions of Tibetan identity. From his 2003 photographic series My Identity to his images of the Buddha, a mix of the traditional iconometric form and thousands of colorful stickers collected from around the world, he has challenged and expanded the definition of Tibetan art. Born in Lhasa in 1961, Gonkar Gyatso grew up during the Cultural Revolution and says that at the time he “did not really understand himself as Tibetan.” He learned traditional Chinese brush painting at Beijing’s University of the Minorities in the early 1980s, a time that coincided with the end of the Cultural Revolution. The Beijing of Gonkar’s university experience was suddenly inundated with the art, books, music, and movies of the West. He read books that introduced him to the Tibetan exile experience, initiating an introspective and aesthetic search for what constitutes “Tibetan-ness.” He was also introduced to the concept of an art market and experienced multiple art movements simultaneously, experimenting with the cubism of Braque and Picasso, the pure abstraction of Vassily Kandinsky, and the Op Art of Bridget Riley.
He returned to Lhasa in 1984 and co-founded the Sweet Tea House Association, a small group of Tibetan artists and scholars who developed new techniques and forms based on Tibet’s dramatic landscape and newly re-opened temples and religious sites. They sought to capture their own experiences of Tibet, in contrast to the images of the Chinese social realism of their youth and romanticized western conceptions of Tibet.
In 1992, Gonkar moved to Dharamsala, India, where he was able to immerse himself in the study of thangka paintings and Buddhism. He was inspired by the formalism of these traditional techniques and incorporated it in his own work, using the form of the Buddha in a secular fashion, which at times generated some resistance. He later moved to London to attend graduate school at the Chelsea School of Art and Design. There he continued to combine Buddhist iconography with the ephemera of pop culture, bridging East and West. In 2003, Gonkar completed his first series of photographs, My Identity, in which he explored his own personal ideological shifts across the political, social, and national boundaries that constitute “Tibet.”
Family Album, Gonkar’s second major photographic series, continues his exploration of contemporary Tibetan identity. Inspired by contemporary Tibetans’ interest in fashion and the proliferation of photographic media, Family Album investigates the changing representations of “Tibetanness” in an increasingly interconnected, globalized world. The images represent the varying roles embodied by members of the artist’s own family—bankers, footballers, artists, teachers, Communist party members, farmers, nuns, students, and the kinship relationships between them. Gonkar composed the photographs and standing figures in this exhibition as a family album, revealing the complex and nuanced roles of each family member. He investigates the ways in which the wardrobes and postures of contemporary Lhasans gracefully adapt to professional, familial, religious, and holiday settings. For the artist, these multiple transformations in outward appearance may also suggest inner states and the shifts between them that Tibetans navigate on a daily basis.
The photographs were taken in Lhasa in collaboration with Tibetan freelance photographer Zhadui. Born in Lhasa in 1976, Zhadui is now the Director of the Photography Association of Tibet and a member of the Photography Association of China. His work reflects the changing cultural and religious scene in Tibet. His first solo exhibition, Reforming Ideas, was held at the Genden Choephel Art Gallery, and he curated the exhibition Feel the Soul in Intangible Beauty, both in Lhasa in 2014.
This exhibition has been made possible through generous support from the Thalia N. Carlos and Chris M. Carlos Foundation, Inc.; the Thalia and Michael C. Carlos Foundation, Inc.; the Massey Charitable Trust; and John and Clara O'Shea.
He returned to Lhasa in 1984 and co-founded the Sweet Tea House Association, a small group of Tibetan artists and scholars who developed new techniques and forms based on Tibet’s dramatic landscape and newly re-opened temples and religious sites. They sought to capture their own experiences of Tibet, in contrast to the images of the Chinese social realism of their youth and romanticized western conceptions of Tibet.
In 1992, Gonkar moved to Dharamsala, India, where he was able to immerse himself in the study of thangka paintings and Buddhism. He was inspired by the formalism of these traditional techniques and incorporated it in his own work, using the form of the Buddha in a secular fashion, which at times generated some resistance. He later moved to London to attend graduate school at the Chelsea School of Art and Design. There he continued to combine Buddhist iconography with the ephemera of pop culture, bridging East and West. In 2003, Gonkar completed his first series of photographs, My Identity, in which he explored his own personal ideological shifts across the political, social, and national boundaries that constitute “Tibet.”
Family Album, Gonkar’s second major photographic series, continues his exploration of contemporary Tibetan identity. Inspired by contemporary Tibetans’ interest in fashion and the proliferation of photographic media, Family Album investigates the changing representations of “Tibetanness” in an increasingly interconnected, globalized world. The images represent the varying roles embodied by members of the artist’s own family—bankers, footballers, artists, teachers, Communist party members, farmers, nuns, students, and the kinship relationships between them. Gonkar composed the photographs and standing figures in this exhibition as a family album, revealing the complex and nuanced roles of each family member. He investigates the ways in which the wardrobes and postures of contemporary Lhasans gracefully adapt to professional, familial, religious, and holiday settings. For the artist, these multiple transformations in outward appearance may also suggest inner states and the shifts between them that Tibetans navigate on a daily basis.
The photographs were taken in Lhasa in collaboration with Tibetan freelance photographer Zhadui. Born in Lhasa in 1976, Zhadui is now the Director of the Photography Association of Tibet and a member of the Photography Association of China. His work reflects the changing cultural and religious scene in Tibet. His first solo exhibition, Reforming Ideas, was held at the Genden Choephel Art Gallery, and he curated the exhibition Feel the Soul in Intangible Beauty, both in Lhasa in 2014.
This exhibition has been made possible through generous support from the Thalia N. Carlos and Chris M. Carlos Foundation, Inc.; the Thalia and Michael C. Carlos Foundation, Inc.; the Massey Charitable Trust; and John and Clara O'Shea.
