Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha@hotmail-1
2006
stickers, pencil on treated paper
28 x 20 inches
Collection of Wayne Warren, UK

Gonkar Gyatso , Panda Politics-1
2006
stickers, Indian ink on treated paper
28 x 20 inches
Collection of Anna Maria Rossi, London

Gonkar Gyatso, Pokemon Buddha
2004
stickers and pencil on treated paper
15 % x 11 A inches
Private Collection, London

Gonkar Gyatso
Gonkar Gyatso was born in Lhasa, Tibet, and studied fine art at the Central Arts Academy in Beijing, China, and at Central St. Martins and the Chelsea School of Design in London, UK. Gonkar is the founder of Sweet Tea House (London), the first gallery in Europe devoted to showcasing contemporary Tibetan Art. He has exhibited in London, Oxford, Zurich, Helsinki, New Delhi, New York, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. He has been a recipient of the Leverhulme Fellowship in 2003 as an Artist-in-Residence at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, as well as a fellow at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archive, Dharamsala, India for traditional Tibetan painting studies. Gonkar currently lives and works in London.

"Gonkar Gyatso, who lived in Tibet, then went into exile in Dharamsala, India, and later immigrated to the United Kingdom, also fuses numerous representational and conceptual approaches in his work. His carefully mapped sticker pieces, such as Buddha@hotmail-1 (2006), Panda Politics* -1 (2006), and Pokemon Buddha (2004), reveal his training in traditional Buddhist painting, in which figures and deities are carefully mapped on a grid to achieve preset idealized proportions. He plays with the Buddha as an icon that, ironically, has achieved a cult status in European and American society to investigate the contemporary meaning of Tibetan Buddhism and, by implication, Tibet itself. He intelligently fuses conceptualism and traditional Buddhist iconography to examine the fetishization of Tibet and Buddhism in the imagination of the West. In his performative photography work My Identity (series of four) (2004), he explores the identity pressures of the various cultures in which he has lived, as well as another identity he now also inhabits: the London artist." from Waves on the Turquoise Lake: Contemporary Expressions of Tibetan Art - by Lisa Tamiris Becker

Waves on the Turquoise Lake: Contemporary Expressions of Tibetan Art is the first major museum exhibition to bring together contemporary Tibetan artists working both in and outside Tibet. The exhibition highlights the emerging movement of contemporary Tibetan art as it appears in Tibetan communities across the globe. From reinterpretations of Tibetan Buddhist religious scroll paintings (thangkas) to digital and installation art, contemporary Tibetan art explores issues of tradition versus modernity, cultural hybridity, and personal identity through a diverse range of media and perspectives.