Tibetan Artists’ Contemporary Practices

In the placid and reflective surface of the water sits a glittering, translucent statue of a buddha made of ice, with the Potala Palace in the background. Under the scorching sunlight, Ice Buddha gradually melts and sinks into the river.

Eight photographs document the 2006 conceptual installation by the artist Gade (fig. 1). He collected water from the Kyichu River, which flows through the city of Lhasa, froze the water, and, following traditional proportions and visual conventions, sculpted the ice into a statue of Buddha Shakyamuni. As the statue melted, the river’s own water returned to its source, which flows through India—where Buddhism originated before it was introduced to Tibet—eventually reaching the Indian Ocean.1

In Ice Buddha Gade uses the most recognizable Buddhist symbol and the temporality of water as his medium. He connects the water’s changing forms, from liquid to solid ice and back to water, with the Buddhist philosophical concepts of impermanence and reincarnation in the karmically driven cycle of successive existences (samsara). The artist preserves the essence of the Buddha’s form, but moves away from the traditional formats of two-dimensional painting and static metal sculpture to performative aspects and installation in nature, using impermanent media not previously explored in emerging Tibetan contemporary art.2 

Viewers can read much into this work’s multilayered meaning. The connotations it evokes range from the purely philosophical to the culturally astute, socially relevant, and personally evocative. To name a few: impermanence, the cyclical nature of existence and reincarnation; the fragility of traditional cultural values; the dissolution of Tibetan Buddhist culture; change; and reflections on the passage of time.

Interpretations of Traditional Forms

The buddha image is the most representative visual form and religious symbol associated with contemplative qualities. A buddha’s form embodies Buddhist teachings on the nature of reality, and universal philosophical notions of impermanence and emptiness,3 as well as cultural practices and personal connections to the teachings (dharma). Contemporary Tibetan artists explore and often contest the richly symbolic religious and cultural associations of this form.   

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, several artists engaged the buddha’s form in ways that challenged assumptions and preconceptions about Tibetan Buddhist culture. Their work addressed on the one hand, the loss of traditional culture and the pervasiveness of popular culture with its new icons,4 and on the other hand, consumption of Buddhist images and the “commercialization” of Tibetan Buddhism. In his earlier works, Gonkar Gyatso, an artist based in the United Kingdom and China, used colorful stickers and commercial logos to fill an outlined buddha’s head, replacing the buddha’s features.5 For a 2010 work titled Do What You Love, he made a three-dimensional scan of a traditionally cast fourteenth-century sculpture, digitally manipulated the image, and mass-produced buddha figures, positioning them with their heads stuck in the wall and their backs toward the viewer (fig. 2). Other artists, including the Lhasa-based Nortse and Angsang, and the US-based Ang Tsherin Sherpa and Tenzing Rigdol, have addressed various aspects of their present-day lives through the images of the buddha’s form.6 

Artists have also reinterpreted another recognizable Buddhist symbol that represents the Buddha’s mind, the stupa. The US-based Palden Weinreb, in his Untitled (Stupa), created in encaustic wax and made luminous from within by LED lights, reaffirms the traditional symbolic power of the stupa, but reconsiders its form as both solid and illusory. Yak Tseten took a very different medium—beer bottles—to fashion a large stupa in Tibetan grasslands and then reassembled it at an exhibition space in Beijing several months later.  

Tibetan artists have also employed Buddhist texts (pecha), important objects of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Tenzing Rigdol’s radical engagement with Tibetan Buddhist texts in his 2009 performance work Scripture Noodles is documented in a video.7 He sliced up pages of Tibetan Buddhist texts as noodles, stir-fried them with vegetables, and consumed this dish, disposing of the leftovers in a trash bin. The video caused a considerable backlash from some Tibetans, who felt the artist disrespected Tibetan culture and Buddhist teachings, which the pages literally represent. 

Contemporary artists often intentionally combine religious forms with the profane or mundane. Kesang Lamdark, based in Switzerland, uses found ordinary objects in mandala-like installations and tantric montages, and includes depictions of sex in his light boxes, needle-pierced metallic surfaces, and mirrors.8 An apparent freedom in modifying the sacred images often raises fiercely protective and angry feelings in some viewers. This sort of religious “censorship” may be expected and extends to the works that use images considered sacred in mundane contexts, as traditionally these were separate areas of human experience. For Tibetan artists, no matter where they practice, such explorations often relate to the notion of cultural identity.

Exploring Identity, Collectively and Individually

Like-minded artists working in Lhasa have organized collectives to explore their identity as Tibetan contemporary artists, to share and grow in their individual practices while jointly experimenting with contemporary art forms.

The Sweet Tea House movement grew out of the first exhibition of modern Tibetan painting, presented in a tea house in 1985 (fig. 3). The pioneering work of its organizers—Gonkar Gyatso, Angsang, Angqing, and Aibu—and others, shown in several exhibitions in Lhasa, had a profound impact on the development of contemporary Tibetan art.9 

Another group of artists established the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild in response to formulaic state-sponsored exhibitions in Lhasa in the late twentieth century and to mark the one-hundredth birth anniversary of the renowned Tibetan intellectual and self-taught painter Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) in 2003 (fig. 4).10 It became a platform for free creative expression and artistic dialogue. In their statement, the artists declare their respect for traditional Tibetan art and culture and a desire to express themselves in whatever medium they choose as contemporary artists in a changing modern world.11 Gade’s Ice Buddha is one manifestation of such work.

Navigating complexities of contemporary life, responding to cultural changes while communicating the sense of being through their art—these are constants among many artists who create in Tibetan areas and around the world.12 A momentous event in 2006—the arrival of Beijing-Lhasa railway service—has altered the city of Lhasa, bringing more visitors from mainland China and foreign tourists.13 In this changed reality, in 2007 a few artists established the Melong (Mirror) group. In 2009 another eight Tibetan painters founded Botson (Tibetan paint); they hold annual exhibitions in Lhasa and participate in shows elsewhere in China and abroad. 

Many address in their art the importance of Tibetan language and cultural history. Sodhon’s use of Tibetan letters as major elements in his painting and Nortse’s installation 30 Letters of the Tibetan alphabet made out of rusting iron14 comment on the fragility and erosion of their native language. Some artists explore the art of calligraphy, using flowing lines of Tibetan script to deliver meaning or form abstract images. In recent work, the artist Penpa created rubbings of windows from demolished traditional buildings in Lhasa’s Tolung neighborhood as tactile memories of the lives lived in those buildings (fig. 5).

Scorching Sun of Tibet, a 2010 exhibition at the Songzhuang Art Museum in Beijing, displayed a broad range of artistic sensibilities in diverse forms and mediums (fig.6).15 Cocurated by Gade and Li Xianting, a well-known art critic, with attention to the works’ contemporary significance, it is the most comprehensive, self-reflexive exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art to date.16 In 2016 Gade and Nortse opened the Scorching Sun Art Lab in Lhasa to provide a platform for local groups and young artists to show their work (fig. 7). The Lab cooperated with galleries in mainland China running an artist-in-residence exchange program until its closure in 2019.

Many exhibitions organized in the West and India, in commercial galleries and public spaces, continue to be curated with formulaic notions of Tibetan contemporary art as juxtaposed with traditional art and as seen through the lens of Tibetan identity.17

Tibetan artists who are internationally active are aware of and critically responsive to external expectations of spirituality and “Tibetan-ness” in their art.18 Their work often focuses on the complexity and realness of their experiences. Tenzing Rigdol, based in the United States and India, in his Our Land, Our People (2011), experimented with a site-specific installation. Soil from Tibet was secretly brought to India for Tibetans living in exile to stand on, symbolically and physically connecting them with their land. Rigdol’s communal and interactive project is a social commentary that also reflects the artist’s own examination of identity.19 Gonkar Gyatso’s Family Album (2016) shows the multiple identities of his family members, who include a member of the Communist Party, a Buddhist nun, an artist, and others. He questions the monolithic view of Tibetan-ness in the multilayered and complex contemporary Tibetan world. Photographs by Nyema Droma (Nyedron) of young international Tibetans at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in 2019, created in response to the early twentieth-century photographs of Tibet and Tibetans by the British, showed very different but “just as cool” Tibetans. 20

A Different Kind of Identity 

In 2003 Lhasa witnessed the first exhibition dedicated to paintings and ideas of six women artists, Dedron, Chime Dolkar, Tsering Lhamo, Tsering Dolma, Zhang Linhong, and Zhang Ping. In 2017 Gade curated the exhibition Her in Lhasa, intended as the first in a series of shows to highlight women in different creative fields—visual art, literature, music, film, dance, and fashion. It included photographs by Nyema Droma and paintings of Dedron, Tsering Lhamo, Tsering Dolma, and Dangsel Dawa (fig. 8). In 2020 the first solo exhibition in Lhasa of a Tibetan woman painter, Tsering Dolma’s Dance! Dance! Dance!, traced her creative journey from the 1980s to the present and introduced younger viewers to contemporary work by women artists in Tibet.

Beyond the “Identity Box,” Belonging to the Larger World

Identity has never been the only framework for Tibetan artists; they have assembled for other reasons and causes, such as the collaborative ecological project Keepers of the Water organized by Betsy Damon in Chengdu (1995) and Lhasa (1996). A series of art events revealing the interconnectedness of humans and environment, the Lhasa presentation of Keepers of the Water took place along the Kyichu River in August–September 1996. Artists from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Tibet, Switzerland, and the United States came together to raise awareness about water protection through installation and performance art. The Lhasa-based artists engaged the local community to make art as an embodied practice of awareness about ecology (fig. 9). Much of their work was inspired by Tibetan culture, land, and environment.21 

Tibetan artists around the world continue exploring these notions. Sonam Dolma Brauen, unlike most Tibetan artists, does not generally employ traditional Tibetan cultural markers in her work. She uses the language of modern art to address themes that are informed by her worldview. Her installation works, such as My Father’s Death (2010), Boomerang (2010), and DNA (2013), are deeply personal and universal in their themes.22 Marie-Dolma Chophel’s paintings map and relate micro- and macrocosmic terrains, from a single atom to distant galaxies—atmospheric depictions of landscape and the cosmos, or a flux of the concrete and the abstract, natural and artificial, real and virtual, personal and shared. Palden Weinreb’s works—in delicate pencil drawing or large, glowing sculptures—embrace and mine diverse cultural and collective ideas and forms. Tsherin Sherpa’s Wish-Fulfilling Tree (2016), is a response to the devastating 2015 earthquake in Nepal, but also a communal acknowledgement of universal human suffering caused by a natural disaster. Nortse’s work, 2020, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is an overwhelming, looming sphere that seems to represent the globe and the virus; it conveys the sense of tangled lives, broken structures, and emergency (fig. 10). 

Changing Realities and New Practices

Although commercial galleries no longer play a dominant role in commissioning Tibetan artists, less representation does not affect the younger generation of artists and curators engaging with global trends in the digital age. Lhasa remains a cultural center for contemporary artists of different generations from within and without the Tibet Autonomous Region. An alternative art space founded in 2021, Lhasa Art Box (LAB), is a platform for diverse local artists to present their work and communicate with the outside world. In October 2021 LAB organized the citywide Sweet Tea House Art Festival, focused on the works of young artists and creatives.

All generations of Tibetan artists actively respond to the realities in which they live with distinct creative expressions, experimenting in new media and formats, and seek to engage in global discourse. Artists in Bhutan, Nepal, and Mongolia create in their own artistic spheres and in recent years have expanded into the global art scene.