Mapping Identity: Conversation with Tibetan Artist Gonkar Gyatso / International Food Fair Reception
March 23, 4:30PM
WCC Art Gallery
International Food Fair to follow conversation outside the gallery.
Description
A "Conversation with Tibetan Artist Gonkar Gyatso," Tuesday, March 23 at 4:30 p.m. in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery followed by an International Food Fair Reception outside the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Whitehead Campus Center.
About the Artist:
Gonkar Gyatso was born in Lhasa, Tibet in 1961. Growing up under Chinese rule, he had little sense of his Tibetan identity, commenting that he was "educated to have a Chinese socialist intellect within a Tibetan body." In 1980, he began his art education at China's prestigious Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, specializing in traditional Chinese ink-and-brush painting. He returned to Lhasa in 1984 during a period of Tibetan cultural reawakening, and was finally able to visit Tibet's monasteries and temples, which had reopened. While living in Dharamsala, India, in the mid-1990s, Gyatso was invited to continue his studies in London, and he moved there in 1997. A recent participant in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), he identifies himself as a "London-based transnational artist."
The Buddha, a subject first taken up by the artist in 1989, has become his signature motif. The Shambala of the Modern Times is representative of this ongoing fascination with Tibetan art and also incorporates his more recent interest in Western popular culture. Ordered grids and Chinese calligraphy reference a Tibetan technique and aesthetic, while a lush explosion of color and images from Western popular culture surround the divine Buddha. Shambala is a state of "secular enlightenment," an individual's achievement of harmony between his or her physical existence and the surrounding existence of others. The Shambala of the Modern Times represents Gyatso's Shambala, fusing Tibetan spirituality with quotidian British life. In his most recent work, Gyatso has turned to the medium of sculpture, once again focusing on the historical Buddha as subject.
The Shambala of the Modern Times, 2009, mixed media screen-prints, silkscreen varnished with silver and gold leaf in four parts, artist's proof, edition of 16, 78.7 x 86.2 in., collection of Fabio Rossi.
Appears courtesy of the artist.
Mapping Identity, an exhibition of works by 11 international artists co-curated by Haverford College Visiting Associate Professor Carol Solomon and Haverford senior Janet Yoon, will run in the College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery March 19-April 30, 2010.
Support for the exhibition and related programs has been generously provided by the John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center, the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, Haverford President Steve Emerson, the Paul J. R. Desjardins Colloquium Fund, the Distinguished Visitors Program, the Margaret Gest Program, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Funding for artist talk supported by the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center's grant from the Leaves of Grass Foundation.
Overseen by the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, Campus Exhibitions Coordinator, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu.
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For More Info
Carol Solomon
csolomon@haverford.edu
http://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/121702
