Tibetan Artist: Gonkar Gyatso

An interesting look at contemporary Tibetan art, culture and self-reflection:

It is a relatively recent situation for Tibetans to remove art from its iconographical, religious origins of thangkas and scrolls and recontextualize it within the modern dialectic. The most striking example of this process can be found in the work of Gonkar Gyatso, an artist who uses ideological identity portraiture and sophisticated graphics to discuss the modernist dilemma facing contemporary Tibetans...

In My Identity 1-4, Gyatso represents himself alternately as a Tibetan native painting a traditional thangka; a Communist Chinese painting a portrait of Mao; a refugee painting a picture of The Dalai Lama; and finally, an international urban sophisticate painting a picture of the cosmos. Who, however, is the real Gonkar?

A telling portrait of a culture under seige in the post-post-modern world of schizophrenic, reflective self-identification.

B and I spent what I consider one of the most important parts of our trip to China in Xiahe, a town in western China known for the Labrang Monestary that's located there, where Buddhists from all over the world make the pilgramage as part of the Yellow Hat sect that the Dalai Lama is spiritual leader to.

One of the most striking memories I have of our time there was at a little restaurant we found tucked away; there, we ate fried noodles and greens with a roomful of monks-in-training, who--in all their red-robed majesty--were yucking up watching the NBA semi-finals on tv. One of them even had a black ace bandage around his elbow, suggesting an injury he might have received while playing basketball himself. The impression of that contrast, between the centuries-old traditional red robes of a monk and the spandex'd sports brace of a modern-day athletic teen, has never left me--and it is perhaps one of the strongest memories I have from my entire trip through China. Why? I think because, in this secular culture I live in, the "divinity" of the Tibetan monk is something beyond which I can inherently understand. And yet they live in this, the modern world.

These pieces of art (posted) reveal a similar conflict to that which I saw in that little restaurant in Xiahe. The traditional world of a sacred religion comingling with the reality of today, with its liberalism, technology, severe isolation and indulgent self- reflection and expression.