Gonkar Gyatso was born in Llasa, Tibet, in 1962, studying art at Llasa University until 1986. In 1992 following the Chinese invasion of Tibet Gyatso was forced to flee to Dharamasala and in 1995 immigrated to London, where he studied at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design and at Chelsea School of Art and Design. His work, which has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, explores his status as a transnational artist in exile and his cultural heritage.
Artist Gonkar Gyatso was born in Llasa, Tibet, in 1962. Growing up in the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Gyatso later reflected that ‘School was very strict. They were very focused on Communist ideological training. And no subjects included Tibetan culture or religion. It was forbidden to practice, or even learn about that’ (NY Times interview). In 1980 Gyatso was selected by scouts to attend a Beijing university for minority students, where he studied Chinese brush painting until 1984 before returning to Tibet to study art at Llasa University until 1986. There he became a pioneer member of the Tibetan avant-garde, forming a group called the Sweet Tea House which used the idea of the land as a way of re-engaging with Tibetan identity and to create specifically Tibetan contemporary art.
In 1992, following the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Gyatso was forced to flee to Dharamasala, the Indian home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community in exile, where he studied thangka (traditional Tibetan scroll painting). After three years at a mountainside retreat, in 1995 Gyatso immigrated to London where he was first exposed to the globalised culture of the West. In 1997 he was awarded a scholarship to study as a guest student at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design (now Central St Martins, University of the Arts London) and in 2000 he completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and Design. The training he received under very different cultural and ideological conditions in London is reflected in the evolution of his work. Gyatso has worked with textiles since arriving in England, referring to this particular body of work as a reflection of his life in exile. He uses shiny Tibetan brocades, as well as textiles and shirts found in London charity shops in order to explore his hybrid identity. For Alex Rotas, Gyatso’s ‘reconstructed shirts suggest the presence of the ‘stuffed shirts’ running the far reaches of Empire, with the collar fabrics hinting that while the uniformity of the male bureaucrat may be similar throughout the lands the Crown controls, the individual men themselves may well be recruited (and indoctrinated) locally. At the same time, their uncanniness is unnerving; shirts with three collars hinting at tri-cephalic mutations and bizarre corporeal, rather than spiritual trinities’ (Rotas 2012).
In 2003 Gyatso received a Leverhulme Fellowship and was artist-in-residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. During his residency he exhibited a giant Union flag. Hanging from the ceiling, the edges of the flag were attached to display cases in the museum space below, linking the emblem of empire symbolically with the objects on display. The colours and shapes within the flag were all in the correct position but there was something about the vibrancy and shine of the materials, as well as the additional white circles in the areas of red and blue, that demanded the viewer look again. The flag was simultaneously reassuringly familiar and unsettlingly Other, reflecting perhaps the sense of never quite belonging that Gyatso professes he continues to feel. He also explored this ambivalence in Soft Touch (2003), a cushion with a Union flag which reveals scores of dressmakers' pins piercing its surface when subject to closer scrutiny, satirising the commonplace notion that the UK is a ‘soft touch’ when it comes to allowing entry to asylum-seekers looking for a supposedly easy life. Originally created for fellow refugee artists'group exhibtion Leave to Remain, held during Refugee Week 2003, it is now on long-term display at the Museum of Immigration and Diversity in London. In 2003 Gyatso created My Identity Nos. 1– 4 (National Museum Liverpool), a quadriptych of digital portraits showing him as an artist in four different eras, illustrating the historical trajectory of an entire generation of Tibetans and investigating his status as a transnational artist in exile. The portraits present Gyatso working on canvases depicting, respectively, an abstract sand mandala, Buddha, Mao Zedong, and the Dalai Lama.
Gyatso's work often incorporates pencil, collage and stickers within the technique of the Tibetan thankga. Kitsch stickers are applied to drawings of the Buddha, often with the addition of commentary in speech bubbles. These images remind the viewer's attention of the tension between the meditative and spiritual aspects of Buddhism and worldly materialism, exploring Western consumer interests, the relationship between capitalism and culture, as well as conflict between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism. Gyatso also founded the Sweet Tea House in London, a contemporary art gallery dedicated to showing Tibetan work, which he ran from 2003–10. In 2009 Gyatso participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Gonkar Gyatso continues to live and work in London. His work is held by UK public collections including the Museum of Immigration and Diversity and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Gonkar Gyatso]
Publications related to [Gonkar Gyatso] in the Ben Uri Library