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The 'Look of Tibet' Without Religion: a Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa

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The 'Look of Tibet' Without Religion: a Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 36 Number 1 Article 11 May 2016 The 'Look of Tibet' Without Religion: A Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa Leigh Miller Maitripa College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Miller, Leigh. 2016. The 'Look of Tibet' Without Religion: A Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa. HIMALAYA 36(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol36/iss1/11 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The 'Look of Tibet' Without Religion: A Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa Acknowledgements I cannot fully express my gratitude to Gadé for sharing so generously his artwork and friendship over the years. I am also grateful for Fulbright and Emory University funding that enabled the research that informs this study. The editors and reviewers of this article substantially improved it, although flaws of my own inevitably remain. This research article is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol36/iss1/11 The ‘Look of Tibet’ Without Religion: A Case Study in Contemporary Tibetan Art in Lhasa Leigh Miller The artworks and career phases of the Lhasa styles, compositions, and materials of contemporary artist Gadé illustrate the traditional Buddhist art is juxtaposed with the complex entanglement of religion and the equally familiar icons of globalization to depict secular in modern Lhasa, while illuminating hybridity, in which the fragmented nature of broader trends in contemporary Tibetan art his generations’ Buddhist inheritance shares as a cultural formation of local mediation of space with the humorous and curious in urban modernity’s strong influences. While the past is Tibet. This new shared visual language can vital to Gadé, he is driven to “locate traditional affirm deep connection to adition, on the one Tibetan art in a contemporary context” where hand, and distance or alienate from it on the it can also be “detached from religion,” raising other in its secular reconfigu ation. Yet, Gadé’s questions about representations of Tibet strategies can also be viewed as reclaiming and the cultural future. He takes a secular collective and personal agency in the midst of approach to the role of artists in society colonialism, globalization, and the secular in that, along with his cohorts in the emergent Tibet. contemporary Tibetan art movement since the Keywords: art, anthropology, Buddhism, identity, social 1980s, overturns Tibetan (Buddhist) artistic transformation, Tibet. conventions in favor of personal expression. In Gadé’s paintings and multimedia works from the 1990s to 2012, a collectively-recognized visual language derived from the symbols, 56 | HIMALAYA Spring 2016 Introduction This raises an important question: What might ‘Tibet’ look like without religion? For many, Tibet is associated first In the painting Father’s Nightmare (Fig. 1), a figure in a and foremost with the religion and imagery of Vajrayā- Mao suit lounges beneath a billowing gray cloud. Upon it, na Buddhism. Since importing Buddhist scholarly and cranes and dinosaurs tower over mannequins and mas- contemplative lineages from India, Tibet’s history and seuses in skimpy underwear, school children and gym- culture became thoroughly enmeshed in and expressed nasts, corpses and fornicating animals. A howling choir through an intricate system of Buddhist arts. In addition, serenades bathers, and inside the pagoda architecture are the Buddhist art of Tibet has constituted material access to the Grim Reaper, Hollywood’s iconic doomed couple on the Tibetan culture for outsiders for centuries, and this trend bow of The Titanic, and a hot pot restaurant. Considering continues through museum exhibitions and international the history of representations of Tibet and its religion, art dealers.1 The centrality of Buddhism to Tibetan culture and subsequent local and foreign expectations of Tibetan is thus integral to Tibetan, Western, Chinese, and other art, viewers may well wonder what this painting by Lhasa Asian constructions of Tibetanness. Gadé’s painting does contemporary artist Gadé (dga’ bde) could possibly have to not ‘look like’ what viewers have come to expect of (Bud- do with Tibetan culture, let alone Tibetan Buddhism. dhist) art from Tibet. Figure 1. Father’s Nightmare, by Gadé; mixed media on canvas, 146 x 117cm. (Plum Blossoms Gallery, 2007). HIMALAYA Volume 36, Number 1 | 57 And yet, for Gadé it does very deliberately have the look of in Lhasa. He has also developed new artistic technologies Tibetan painting. Father’s Nightmare is a work that belongs for working with molds and sculptural materials. In 2010, to the second phase of Gadé’s artistic career, about which Gadé was a co-curator with Chinese art critic Li Xianting of the artist himself has said: Scorching Sun of Tibet at Songzhuang Art Center in Beijing, for which he collected artwork and films from over forty To locate traditional Tibetan art in a contempo- Tibetan artists, mostly living in the People’s Republic of rary context is something that I have always been China (PRC), and several Chinese artists. The sweeping and thinking of doing. I try to imagine what a Tibetan unparalleled exhibition included multimedia works, sever- painting looks like when it is detached from reli- al large-scale installations, such as Yak Tsétan’s (g.yag tshe gion (Gadé 2008). brtan) towering Arak Stupa of empty green beer bottles, His statement raises significant questions: Why would a and other instances of the secularization of Buddhist ico- contemporary Tibetan artist want his work to be detached nography and depictions of modernity in Tibet (Xianting Li from religion, and what might such cultural discourse and and Gadé 2010). By focusing on Gadé, this article illumi- secular art productions show us about socio-religious iden- nates significant trends in the development of contemp - tities in urban Lhasa lives today? What might the absence rary Tibetan art. or presence of Tibetan Buddhist imagery and materials in Contemporary art by Tibetans may be diagnostic of broad- contemporary art suggest for understanding the secular in er processes of secularization in Tibet, and emblematic of Lhasa? a generation conflicted about their personal, cultural, and The connection between Tibetan civilization and religion social relationships to Buddhism in contexts of colonialism has undergone radical and unsettling changes in the twen- and globalization. It suggests re-evaluation of specifically tieth century, first from the traditional Buddhist society religious constructions of Tibet and Tibetans within China that was relatively stable under the rule of Dalai Lamas in and consideration of religion as a representational strat- central Tibet to religious persecution under Chinese com- egy in cultural expressions. In this regard, contemporary munism, and subsequent shifts with the restrained post- secular art is part of a broader trend of emergent cultural Mao revival of religion in increasingly urban Lhasa.2 Thus expressions in literature, film, and music that seek to va - arises a dilemma in which Buddhism, as it is experienced idate and authenticate specifically Tibetan modernity. Art and represented, is many things at once; some visions of quite literally makes visible the state of Tibetan modernity, Buddhism are at times incompatible or in tension with oth- as artists engage in a process of observing, reflecting, and ers. These tensions impact local understandings of ‘art’ and then commenting on the social world in which they are ‘artists,’ particularly those who make secular contempo- embedded but also often impact. This world, as I explore rary art. Given the religious constructions of Tibet by out- though Gadé’s paintings, is one in which religion is entan- siders, and ongoing expectations within Tibet and abroad gled in complex ways with memory and identity politics, about the role of religion in post-Mao and post-Deng Tibet, local and foreign expectations for artists and their pro- the diversity of artistic references to Buddhism that has ductions, and ongoing colonial circumstances. Within this emerged since the 1980s warrants special attention. After ever-shifting constellation of issues, ‘Buddhism’ becomes, Tibetans’ traumatic twentieth century, establishing con- in Gadé’s paintings, fragments in a larger mosaic depicting tinuity from Tibetan Buddhist historical art to the secular the hybridity and secularization of Lhasa today. art productions of today has been felt by certain artists as a cultural imperative. Yet it involves complex negotiations ‘Art’ and Religion in Tibet of artistic, social, religious, and personal identities. First, I introduce the emergent field of contemporary This article offers a study of the Lhasa artist Gadé, who is a Tibetan art to situate Gadé and his citations of the Tibet- pioneering figure in Tibetan contemporary art and foun - an Buddhist artist tradition within artistic
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