Gonkar Gyatso in the New York Times

Gonkar Gyatso, Shangri La, 2014

Yesterday, the New York Times featured Gonkar Gyatso in the article, Tibetan Artists Rise to the Fore. Mentioned are the artist's current Hong Kong solo exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries, and his inclusion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's, Tibet and India: Buddist Traditions and Transformations, which took place earlier this year.

The Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso was in Hong Kong last month, putting the final touches on his latest exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries. A bookish figure in black glasses and a blue button-up shirt, he stopped to inspect one of his new works, a 10-foot by 10-foot collage that showed a construction crane hook holding up the concentric spheres of a mandala, a Tibetan spiritual symbol. Cartoon trucks and diggers surrounded the spheres, which were dripping and melting like the polar caps. The piece, called “Shangri La” (2014), is one of 16 in the show, which runs through Oct. 31… (click for full article)

Gonkar Gyatso: Three Realms in Brisbane, Australia

Beyer Projects congratulates Gonkar Gyatso on his Three Realms exhibition, organized by the Griffith University Art Gallery and exhibition partners The University of Queensland Art Museum and the Institute of Modern Art from August 2011 to April 2012. The exhibition includes sculpture produced by Beyer Projects  in collaboration with the artist, and is accompanied by the most extensive published monograph on the artist to date.
 
"For many years Gonkar Gyatso has encrusted traditional Buddhist iconography with pop cultural referents to explore issues of identity, globalisation, hybridity, and consumerism. Significant new directions in his practice signal an opportune moment to consider one of world art’s rising contemporary art stars…

Much of Gyatso's work charts shifts in identity in relation to continual migration. It has moved through traditional Chinese brush techniques and Buddhist iconography to high-density pop collages of colourful stickers and cut-out text, playing on but subverting typecast notions of pop art and Tibetan culture while reflecting on the popularity of Buddhism in the West. In combining references to traditional Tibetan life with references to a global mass-media culture that threatens to supplant and extinguish it, Gyatso creates a volatile, ambivalent mix…" (Source: Institute of Modern Art)