Artist In Perpetual

Worldly Tibet-born artist GONKAR GYATSO tells ANDREW DEMBINA about his fascinations with both traditional and pop culture, politics and Himalayan landscapes

- Andrew Dembina

WITH TWEED CAP perched atop curly locks, Tibetan-born British artist Gonkar Gyatso, who studied fine art in Dharamsala, Beijing and London, is as happy to talk about what’s behind his often (but not always) Buddhist-themed mixed-media pieces, as he is about the geographical movements of his life. At this year’s Art Basel in Hong Kong, where he showed wall-hung pieces in the Pearl Lam Galleries’ stand and a large photographic installation in a shared area where singular avant-garde works were displayed, laid-back Gyatso waxed lyrical.

For the past two years, he’s been working on his mixed media Mandalas series. Most of these works create forms with repeated use of some of his self-designed stickers that bear images from Tibet.

“I’ve been using Tibetan monks,” he explains as we stand in front of an untitled work of spiralling circles of stickers that he made in late 2016. “This repeating is associated with all religions, as a part of their practice.”

Gyatso designed 26 different images for stickers that appear in the series, which he started work on almost 15 years ago. Many stickers he finds and uses, though, are devoid of Buddhist theme. Some pieces are reliant on stickers only, while others in the series mix media more prolifically — such as Shangri La, from 2014, with its gold backdrop and black industrial-equipment silhouettes that use acrylic paint and pencil in more obvious painterly ways.

Gyatso works on paper in many of his pieces. “I have a principle that my work should be accessible — with subject matter and price,” he says. “The limited edition of prints is such a good idea, because you can offer 100 or 50 at a much lower price [per work]. Somehow when works end up in a gallery or collection, they become quite expensive.”