Rossi & Rossi and Hanart Square are proud to co-present Kesang Lamdark and Palden Weinreb in Generation Exile - Exploring New Tibetan Identities. Lamdark and Weinreb represent a new generation of Tibetans who have been educated and enculturated in the West. What is familiar to Asian audiences is historical Tibetan culture and religion, but how the recent decades of diasporic experience and Western imagination have affected Tibetan culture in the global sphere remains to be properly explored. It is to the credit of Rossi & Rossi, a gallery long dedicated to the historical arts of the Himalayas, that this new and complex aspect of Tibetan art is now being introduced to Asian audiences.

The biographies of Kesang Lamdark and Palden Weinreb hint at the complexity of their own lives and those of many other Tibetans of the diaspora. Curator Dr. Clare Harris notes that their art: "points to the sense in which ‘identity’ is mobile and malleable, especially for those who have only known what it is to be Tibetan outside Tibet itself or who have undergone a repeated process of movement from one cultural context to another." For example, Kesang Lamdark was born in 1963 in Dharamsala, India, and later his parents moved to Switzerland where Kesang was, in effect, adopted by a German-speaking Swiss family. In his late twenties, Lamdark travelled to the US and studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York and Columbia University. He is now based in Switzerland. Palden Weinreb, on the other hand, was born in the US and he has travelled to Tibet and seen the Tibetan settlements of India as a visitor. He developed a passion for art and graduated with a degree in Studio Arts from Skidmore College in 2004. Palden lives and works in New York. "It is therefore unsurprising that neither artist wishes to be defined solely in terms of their ethnicity and yet they both acknowledge the formative influence of those from whom they gained their Tibetan ancestry."

As artists, both Palden Weinreb and Kesang Lamdark draw much inspiration from the religious culture and practices of Tibetan Buddhism. Palden Weinreb tends to associate with its more abstract and graceful features; Kesang Lamdark, on the other hand, revels in the darker, 'wilder', imagery of Tibetan temple art such as skulls and fearful dieties. As a Western scholar, Dr Clare Harris notices how "their oeuvre reprises a fundamental dichotomy at the heart of Western interpretations of Tibetan culture. Put simply, this is the otherworldly versus the earthly, the beautiful versus the bawdy.... In old Tibet, these contradictions had happily co-existed. When translated into the new context of the West, they were perpetuated and to some extent exaggerated. So, surprisingly as it may seem, I'd like to propose that these characterisations can offer a useful way of approaching the work of Palden Weinreb and Kesang Lamdark.

Palden Weinreb's "highly abstract artworks arose from a set of philosophic preoccupations, coupled with a rigorous investigation of the relationship between mind and body, to the extent that the fine lines he etches across paper could be interpreted as the physical trace of a kind of meditative state. As in Flow (2011), they suggest the potential for repetition ad infinitum: the viewer is merely glimpsing a detail of a larger pattern that is timeless and spatially limitless. We have the sensation of witnessing a frozen moment in the passage of time and of gazing upon a micro-component of the cosmos or, as in Entry (2011), a fragment of the architecture of the universe. Weinreb seeks to resist the temptations of the ‘real’ and it is the forms of the mind or the cosmological dimensions beyond the earthly realm that he aims to elucidate instead. Palden Weinreb is channelling a fundamentally Tibetan Buddhist principle: the pursuit of non-attachment to the material world and the hope of coming closer to the paradise of nirvana."

"While Weinreb, following Buddhist logic, aspires towards the subjugation of attachment and the suppression of desire, Lamdark appears to be specifically interested in engaging with the carnal and the crude." Lamdark does not shirk from pornographic imageries, nor from religious and political imageries that challenges both the religiously minded and the political correct. His acerbic comments on the commodification of Buddhism go beyond critique, and suggest that he "is intrigued by the potential for converting the remnants of consumerism into objects of beauty and fascination." The power of his new works using plexi-glass and light emitting diodes "lies less in their imageries than in the substance from which they are made. The mirroring effect forces the viewer to accommodate his or her own reflection into whatever Lamdark has illustrated and perhaps to consider their own mortality or complicity in the scenes they gaze upon."

For the generation of Weinreb and Lamdark who have grown up in the West, Dr. Clare Harris observes, "Tibet is a powerful idea, a historic locus of religiosity, the source of a shared vocabulary (linguistic and more broadly cultural) and a land they might dream of recreating imaginatively through the vehicle of art. But it is not home. Artists of this generation can help to articulate these conceptions and to remake Tibet anew elsewhere but ultimately they do so with several degrees of separation intervening. This means that their work is a translation from the original, so to speak: an attempt to understand and respond to the idea of Tibet in its absence." They have the freedom and option to innovate that their forebears didn't. "They may embrace the Western romance of Tibet - or not. They may depict Tibet differently -or even ignore it all together. Or they can make artworks that evoke the multiple worlds that they, as members of the post-exile generation, occupy."

Rossi & Rossi and Hanart Square co-present:- Kesang Lamdark and Palden Weinreb :
Generation Exile - Exploring New Tibetan Identities
Curated by Dr. Clare Harris