Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art

Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art in Manhattan

So I have been meaning to write about the Kyigudo earthquake but I am going to have to do that another time. Because I don’t have the time or energy tonight to write coherently about something so awful and important and I don’t want to reduce it or diminish it, not that anything can of course, by putting up a crap post about it.

 So instead this post is about a small exhibition that was launched in Manhattan on Tuesday, April 20. The exhibition, called Ancient Art in a Modern City: An Exhibition of Contemporary Tibetan Art, is exhibited at the International Center in New York on 23^rd Street near 5^th Avenue as part of New York Immigrant Week. The artists displayed are Rabkar Wangchuk, Tenzin Phakmo, Sodhon, Thupten N Chakrishar, Jamyang Dorjee Chakrishar, Selhatso, Lobsang Choephel, Chungpo Tsering and Tenzin Menzin.

The opening on Tuesday featured a discussion with some of the artists whose works were displayed. A friend was going and so I dragged my feet and went along because sometimes you feel guilty about passing up “culture” and also there might be food. The discussion had just begun when we entered the room and there were two empty seats up front which we took. This was a mistake, as it quickly became clear when Sodhon la, one of the featured artists, said he would like an interpreter and Thupten Nyima’s eyes scanned the audience and homed in on me. I didn’t mind, actually, as long as I didn’t have to translate iffy words like “illusion” or “beauty”. If this meant I now had to pay attention to what the speakers were saying, so much the better. 

Sodhon la, Rabkar Wangchuk and Thupten Nyima spoke about their work. Tenzin Rigdol, a talented and successful artist who helped curate this show (although perhaps this show was not curated so much as …er… heaped together) later joined the conversation. It was actually very interesting and very cool, listening to these contemporary artists talk about their paintings, their background and the influences that shape their work.

It seems to me that, both for the artist and the audience, contemporary Tibetan art is defined not so much by what it is as by what it is not - it is not traditional thangka painting; it is not religious art. So paradoxically this means that thangka art has enormous influence over contemporary Tibetan artists. Whether they are informed and inspired by thangka painting or they are stifled and challenged by it, thangka art’s influence on contemporary Tibetan artists manifests clearly either on the artist’s canvas (such as Rabkar’s Passion or Sodhon’s Frivolity of Life) or in the artist’s conversation (such as Tenzin Rigdol’s remarks).

As far as the exhibits were concerned, Chungpo’s Untitled, the mani khorlo and the bell, is a serene and peaceful painting and Thupten Nyima’s digital art West Side Highway, with the deities cruising in the sky in an open convertible, is striking. 

My favorites were Selhatso’s Behind the Shoeba Mask (pictured to the left) and Tenzin Phakmo’s My Land? #3. 

Bhuchung La of ICT Writes About Space

Bhuchung Tsering la of International Campaign for Tibet maintains a blog pretty diligently. More diligently for sure than other people I know, like me. Here are Bhuchung la's thoughts on whether Tibetan should be spaced or not, and on Tibetan language reform:

Bhuchung la on Tibetan language reform debate and er...me

BHUTAN: OUR NEIGHBOR TO THE SOUTH

Very recently I went to Bhutan to visit a friend. I was already in India and from there it’s a hop (although an expensive hop) on Druk Air. Druk Air is the only airline flying in and out of Paro International Airport so what they charge you pay. So I paid and I sat in my window seat and there was this legend (below). 

Sometimes it’s the small things that get you- like “Please fasten your seatbelt” written in your mother’s tongue or “Gyeltsen’s Carrier” written on the side of a cargo truck or “Sonam’s General Store” on the doorway of a convenience shop.

Wouldn’t it be a good and beautiful thing one day to fly Tibetan Airlines and to go to the airplane toilet and see “Flush” written in Tibetan? 

A SMALL PLACE

I have been reading Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place". Jamaica Kincaid, who was actually one of my instructors, now mostly gardens, I believe. If she keeps writing, I think she will win a Nobel. "A Small Place" is a thin book, anorexic almost. But my god, it's powerful. It's utterly gorgeous language, simple and all-encompassing in the way that a blue sky is simple and all-encompassing, and the savage ferocity with which Jamaica attacks her English colonizers is something to behold. Here is a nugget of gold:

"The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now. That Antigua no longer exists. That Antigua no longer exists partly for the usual reason, the passing of time, and partly because the bad-minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so. (But the English have become such a pitiful lot these days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now that they no longer have one quarter of the earth's human population bowing and scraping before them. They don't seem to know that this business was all wrong and they should, at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death might have been better. And so all this fuss over empire-what went wrong here, what went wrong there-always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that." Pg 23-24

It's as if she takes this whole event of invasion and occupation and colonization of this small island nation of Antigua and she strips away the varnish and the paint and she shows you what it was actually like and it's so simple and so ugly. And that's what colonization is: it's so simple and so ugly and so 19th century that people think it just doesn't exist anymore. Or people do know that it exists and it's Kitty Genovese all over again - being stabbed to death in broad daylight while whole bunch of cowardly people look through their beautiful curtained windows.

So anyway I have had "A Small Place" on my mind these last few days, perhaps partly because I am in Dharamsala right now, which is a small place in its own special way.

Rangzen Shonu

A friend of mine, Tenzin Tsetan, is launching a fan site for Rangzen Shonu, basically the best music band in the history of Tibet. www.RangzenShonu.webs.com I was lucky enough to get to write the following introduction:

Rangzen Shonu is a Tibetan rock band that burst on to the exile music scene in the late 1980s, firmly establishing the genre of Tibetan rock and forever changing the landscape of Tibetan music. As one of the first Tibetan rock bands, Rangzen Shonu’s signature sound of soulful song and meaningful lyrics accompanied only by the acoustic and electric guitar captured the hearts and minds of Tibetans in Tibet and in exile. The release in 1987 of their self-produced album titled Rangzen Shonu albums marked a historic moment in the nascent Tibetan music industry.

Rangzen Shonu’s three members were Tenzin Choesang, Norbu Choephel and Paljor. Their songwriter was Professor Ngawang Jinpa. The songs are folk-like in simplicity and sound, evocative of the old songs of the highlands, and yet nuanced and complex in meaning and melody, full of poetry and passion. These absolutely beautiful songs are infused with the spirit of freedom and resistance and resonate powerfully with Tibetans of all generations even today. Their song “We Tibetan Nomads”, one of the most popular Tibetan songs of all time, can be said to function as an unofficial Tibetan national anthem.

Although Rangzen Shonu has now been disbanded for many years, Tibetan music lovers honor and remember their immeasurable contribution to Tibetan music.

BREATHING SPACE: How Word Separation Can Save the Tibetan Language (3)

Tendor, an activist and a musician, who first started advocating word separation in written Tibetan a year ago, has been writing with word separation at his bilingual blog www.yarlungraging.com. Although “aerated” Tibetan script may look startling at first, this minor change has the capacity to turn the chore of reading into a pleasure.

I believe that a study by the Tibetan Department of Education or a similar institution should formally assess the merits of word separation. A top-down implementation of an aerated writing system in the Tibetan schools, starting with the elementary classes and moving up to the higher grades, can bring about the immediate revival and long-term survival of the Tibetan language. Imagine if ten years from now, Tibetan students can read Tibetan with the same ease with which they can speak it, and children crave and nag for Tibetan language comic books! Such a future is certainly possible if we adopt word separation today, making the same leap that almost all other literate cultures have already made.

If this top-down implementation sounds too radical at this time, it might be more realistic to urge a bottom-up initiative that can gradually spread among the Tibetan public. To this end, I ask bloggers and writers in and outside Tibet to experiment with aerated script, to add space between words.

Written Tibetan can remain hallowed and privileged, or it can be accessible and popular. Since the time of Emperor Songtsen Gampo, it has been written Tibetan, bod-yig, that has bound the three provinces together, bod-yig that has preserved the intrinsic unity of the Tibetan people through imperial fragmentation and governmental dissolution. Bod-yig, Sambhota’s legacy to all Tibetans, has saved us time and again. Now it’s time for us to save this legacy. Future generations will thank us for allowing our words to breathe and to live.

How Word Separation Can Save the Tibetan Language (2)

When Thonmi Sambhota, the outstanding innovator of the Tibetan script, single-handedly devised the Tibetan writing system in the 7^th century (and among other innovations introduced the dot between syllables), there were considerations which no longer hold true now: at that time, parchment or paper was scarce and expensive. Printing was done laboriously from woodblocks and dense continuous script fit more words onto the woodblock and more content on the page. These considerations are irrelevant today thanks to advanced printing technology.

Let’s not forget that in the early days the script was not meant for mass consumption but rather seen as an elite privilege that one needed years of laborious training to master. After all, most writing systems in the world were developed not for mass consumption, but for the administration of empire and for governance. In fact for the greater part of the written word’s six thousand-year history, the different writing systems have required the presence of scribes who trained for long years to be proficient in reading and writing them. In Tibet, of course, the spread and diffusion of Buddhism has meant that the Tibetan writing system became the ultimate tool to preserve and transmit the teachings through the culture of the great monasteries. Within the monastic curriculum itself, years could be devoted to instill reading and writing proficiency in the young student.

Today, with the public school system – with the medium of study often Chinese or English – taking precedence over the monastic model, we no longer have the luxury of a long training period. And the Tibetan writing system is already complicated enough without the handicap of a script that may look beautiful but might well suffocate itself. The variations in spelling are mostly unpronounced, and words are often said differently from the way they are written. If space between words can be as an inhaler to the asthmatic, and revive Tibetan literacy for future generations, what might be the costs of whitespace?

A legitimate concern is that the unparalleled canon of Tibetan literature will be inaccessible to future readers accustomed to reading separated words. However, a few hours’ practice should allow scholars who will be fluent readers to access old manuscripts. Word separation will be crucial not only to beginning readers parsing lines, it will be an aid for scholars engaged in reference reading by facilitating swift silent reading and an expanded field of vision. As an interesting aside, it will also simplify the creation of a computer spell-check program and translation program for Tibetan.

I know this proposition will upset and outrage many Tibetans, because we have always been resistant to change – and we have been writing this way for centuries. But remember that traditionally scripture was written in stanzas so that readers always knew where to pause even without space. Most writers writing in Tibetan today do so in prose. The young reader slogs through, stumbling ever so often. Even the learned scholar trips every once in a while.

All things being equal, where words are spaced and comprehension is easier, more people will pick up a book. My brother Tendor and I have been informally testing the merits of word separation on a number of Tibetans, making them read two copies of the exact same text, one containing continuous script and the other containing separated script. Without exception, every one of the surveyed Tibetans found it easier to read and comprehend the separated script. We hope to continue the survey online and make it available to all interested participants.