Gonkar Gyatso
was born in 1961 in Lhasa and studied Fine Art in Beijing and
London.
He is the founder of the contemporary Tibetan art gallery The
Sweet Tea House and is currently based and working between London
and Beijing.
His work has been internationally published and exhibited in
galleries and museums including The Chinese National Art Gallery
(Beijing), The Kangra Museum (India), The Glasgow Gallery of Modern
Art (Scotland), the Courtauld Institute of Art (London),
Tyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna), and the Wereld Museum
Rotterdam (Netherlands). Works by Gyatso are now held in the Newark
Museum (USA), the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), Queensland Gallery
of Modern Art (Australia), Burger Collection (Switzerland), Museum
of Fine Art Boston (USA), The Newark Museum (New York), and
numerous private collections. He has taken part in the 2009 Venice
Beinnale and the 2010 Sydney Biennale.
Artist Statement
My current work comes out of a fascination
with material and pop culture and a desire to bring equal attention
to the mundane as well as the extraordinary, the imminent and the
superfluous. These contradictions are often found in the same
painting. The work can be very silly and uncanny and at the same
time come out of concerns that are shaping our times. I love poking
fun and fill my work with a kind of unabashed whimsy and
imagination. As my own experience has been one that reflects a kind
of hybridity and transformation my work also holds this quality. We
are all repositories of our time and place and I think the work can
not help but reveal the politics and cultures that have shaped me.
In this way my work has a spatial and temporal component to them;
where time and place collide into each other. While in the
past I have not intentionally been overtly political, I have
explored political themes. And just as the identity of my
motherland, Tibet, can not be separated from religion and politics,
I think my own sensibility has been shaped by the undeniable bond
between the two.