Gade at Peaceful Wind Contemporary
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Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Jan 28, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8 Ancient AND Fresh Asian artist unites tr aditional conventions with modern symbols Art Issues MALIN WILSONPOWELL For the Journal Contemporary artist Gade calls his half-Tibetan and half-Chinese heritage a “contrary condition” that is “an extremely contradictory and complicated psychological state.” His skillful, complex, Poporiented paintings reflect Tibet’s rapid shift to globalism, its turbulent recent history, and ongoing cultural churning. All of Gade’s work mirrors his inborn tensions. The beautiful circular canvas titled “Money Tree” (2010), like most of his extraordinary canvasses, uses a palette and compositional conventions common to Tibetan thangka paintings going back to the 13th century. Traditional thangka-like monastery murals overflow with symbolism and were strictly laid out by Buddhist scripture. Thangkas were portable meditation and teaching tools for the devout on the path to enlightenment. In his busy life, Gade’s path has been a mixed bag of “thangka painting, martial arts, Hollywood movies, Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, rock ‘n’ roll and McDonald’s.” Like traditional thangkas, his updated versions perform many different functions. They invite multiple interpretations and are replete with ornate details depicting various profane personifications and icons. As a child, he found happiness in drawing cartoons, and that exuberance is evident in compositions that also retain the fierceness and death references of pre-Buddhist imagery, the animation of multitudinous arms and deities of Buddhist devotional images, and the refinements of Chinese court painting. His “Money Tree” delights, sobers and challenges all at once, with branches supporting such unlikely figures as Zorro, an Alice-in-Wonderland caterpillar, a foursome of Chinese military men in riot gear, a hog-tied swine, a bikini-clad chorus line, and many different cultural caricatures acting while blindfolded. Sewn onto the canvas are Chinese coins over-painted with gold, and the whole is finished as if stained and distressed, suggesting antiquity. It is an incisive metaphor for the difficulties of transition from “a people once led by the spirit” to a society “permeated with material desires.” Gade calls his method “reconstruction and replacement” resulting in a “personal image diary.” Although he recognizes the narrative function of traditional Tibetan painting is “not valued in Western painting or Chinese literati painting,” he is committed to this complexity based on his mother tongue. Born in 1971 to a Tibetan mother and Chinese father, he grew up and lives in a rapidly changing and expanding Lhasa, Tibet’s urban center, with an estimated population of 250,000. Only two short decades before his birth, half the population of Lhasa (then approximately 30,000) was monks. It was the hub of a religious state until the Chinese government invaded and overwhelmed the country in the 1950s. Gade’s current exhibition of 12 new paintings and five earlier works is an exceptional opportunity for viewers in our little city. It is the direct result of Gade’s loyalty to Ian Alsop, founder and director of the Peaceful Wind Gallery of Himalayan art, a regular visitor to the region since 1986. Gade and Alsop met in 2003 on Alsop’s annual visit to Tibet. It was the year the Gendun Choephel collective gallery of 20 artists opened their gallery, including virtually all of Tibet’s contemporary artists still living there. Gade credits Alsop with being the first Western art dealer to discover the value of the collective’s art. Gade’s work was first shown at Peaceful Wind in a May 2004 group show of Tibetan contemporary art, and his “Railway Train” — included in this exhibition — was a highlight of the gallery’s exhibition marking the July 2006 opening of the world’s highest rail track to Lhasa. It is a 48-hour trip from Beijing through an active earthquake zone, over barely permanent permafrost, through tunnels as long as 16,000 feet, over 675 bridges in train cars with an oxygen supply for each passenger (due to the high altitude). Since emerging onto the international art market in the mid-1990s, Gade’s works are increasingly in demand worldwide for museum installations and by galleries in London, Hong Kong and Beijing. Most of the works at PW Contemporary, a recently opened branch across the hallway from Peaceful Wind, were shipped from the September 2010 “Scorching Sun of Tibet” exhibition at Beijing’s premier Songzhuang Art Museum. This was the first large-scale, mainstream exhibition of Tibetan contemporary art. As one of the organizers, Gade, who is also a teacher at Tibet University, wrote: “In fact it is hard to determine [if] contemporary art exists in Tibet in a strict sense.” He muses “From serf emancipation praising in the ’50s to Tibetan local culture depicting in the ’80s, to today’s mysterious and wonderful Shangri-Lastyle boom, Tibet is always in the state of ‘outsider’s imaginary type expressionism.’… In the context of economic changes, secularization and globalization, every Tibetan is in the middle of … spiritual transition and religious transformation.” Although the color and forms of early Tibetan thangkas have inspired Gade, and he won a prize for traditional painting in 1990 while he was a student in Beijing at the Central Academy of Arts, he’s most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt. He equates the “Scorching Sun of Tibet” exhibition with the 1985 New Wave Art Movement in China, a kind of explosive answer to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. It was a time when China was not only cut off from the rest of the world, but was also forced to disown and renounce its own culture. The result was an explosive reaction — the ’85 New Wave Movement with artists pursuing multiple lines of inquiry. Although long considered an isolated Shangri-La untouched by outside forces, Tibet has — for more than a millennium — been a stronghold of indigenous cultural traditions repeatedly infused with foreign ideas. In the 14th century, Chinese art and luxury goods pouring into Tibet as a result of political ties with the Mongol emperors of China, profoundly affecting the development of Tibetan painting. In a twist, the late-20th century Tibetan diaspora and invasion, initiated by the Chinese, has propelled Tibetans onto a global stage. Their fierce dedication to their roots has given them leading roles of conscience far beyond their ancient mountain kingdom. If you go WHAT: “Gade: Half Tibetan – Half Chinese” WHERE: PW Contemporary, 129 W. San Francisco St. (upstairs) WHEN: Through February. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. CONTACT: 505-983-7658 or art@ pwcontemporary.com ANCIENT AND FRESH http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol... 1 of 3 5/3/11 4:56 PM
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Review of Gade: Half Tibetan - Half Chinese exhibition at Peaceful Wind Contemporary
Transcript of Gade at Peaceful Wind Contemporary
Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Jan 28, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8
Ancient AND Fresh Asian artist unites tr aditional conventions with modern symbols Art Issues
MALIN WILSONPOWELL
For the Journal
Contemporary artist Gade calls his half-Tibetan and half-Chinese heritage a “contrary condition” that is “an extremely contradictory and complicated psychological state.”His skillful, complex, Poporiented paintings reflect Tibet’s rapid shift to globalism, its turbulent recent history, and ongoing cultural churning.
All of Gade’s work mirrors his inborn tensions. The beautiful circular canvas titled “Money Tree” (2010), like most of his extraordinary canvasses, uses a palette andcompositional conventions common to Tibetan thangka paintings going back to the 13th century. Traditional thangka-like monastery murals overflow with symbolism andwere strictly laid out by Buddhist scripture. Thangkas were portable meditation and teaching tools for the devout on the path to enlightenment.
In his busy life, Gade’s path has been a mixed bag of “thangka painting, martial arts, Hollywood movies, Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, rock ‘n’ roll and McDonald’s.”Like traditional thangkas, his updated versions perform many different functions. They invite multiple interpretations and are replete with ornate details depicting variousprofane personifications and icons. As a child, he found happiness in drawing cartoons, and that exuberance is evident in compositions that also retain the fierceness anddeath references of pre-Buddhist imagery, the animation of multitudinous arms and deities of Buddhist devotional images, and the refinements of Chinese court painting.
His “Money Tree” delights, sobers and challenges all at once, with branches supporting such unlikely figures as Zorro, an Alice-in-Wonderland caterpillar, a foursome ofChinese military men in riot gear, a hog-tied swine, a bikini-clad chorus line, and many different cultural caricatures acting while blindfolded. Sewn onto the canvas areChinese coins over-painted with gold, and the whole is finished as if stained and distressed, suggesting antiquity. It is an incisive metaphor for the difficulties oftransition from “a people once led by the spirit” to a society “permeated with material desires.”
Gade calls his method “reconstruction and replacement” resulting in a “personal image diary.” Although he recognizes the narrative function of traditional Tibetanpainting is “not valued in Western painting or Chinese literati painting,” he is committed to this complexity based on his mother tongue.
Born in 1971 to a Tibetan mother and Chinese father, he grew up and lives in a rapidly changing and expanding Lhasa, Tibet’s urban center, with an estimatedpopulation of 250,000. Only two short decades before his birth, half the population of Lhasa (then approximately 30,000) was monks. It was the hub of a religious stateuntil the Chinese government invaded and overwhelmed the country in the 1950s.
Gade’s current exhibition of 12 new paintings and five earlier works is an exceptional opportunity for viewers in our little city. It is the direct result of Gade’s loyalty toIan Alsop, founder and director of the Peaceful Wind Gallery of Himalayan art, a regular visitor to the region since 1986. Gade and Alsop met in 2003 on Alsop’s annualvisit to Tibet. It was the year the Gendun Choephel collective gallery of 20 artists opened their gallery, including virtually all of Tibet’s contemporary artists still livingthere. Gade credits Alsop with being the first Western art dealer to discover the value of the collective’s art.
Gade’s work was first shown at Peaceful Wind in a May 2004 group show of Tibetan contemporary art, and his “Railway Train” — included in this exhibition — was ahighlight of the gallery’s exhibition marking the July 2006 opening of the world’s highest rail track to Lhasa. It is a 48-hour trip from Beijing through an active earthquakezone, over barely permanent permafrost, through tunnels as long as 16,000 feet, over 675 bridges in train cars with an oxygen supply for each passenger (due to thehigh altitude).
Since emerging onto the international art market in the mid-1990s, Gade’s works are increasingly in demand worldwide for museum installations and by galleries inLondon, Hong Kong and Beijing. Most of the works at PW Contemporary, a recently opened branch across the hallway from Peaceful Wind, were shipped from theSeptember 2010 “Scorching Sun of Tibet” exhibition at Beijing’s premier Songzhuang Art Museum. This was the first large-scale, mainstream exhibition of Tibetancontemporary art.
As one of the organizers, Gade, who is also a teacher at Tibet University, wrote: “In fact it is hard to determine [if] contemporary art exists in Tibet in a strict sense.” Hemuses “From serf emancipation praising in the ’50s to Tibetan local culture depicting in the ’80s, to today’s mysterious and wonderful Shangri-Lastyle boom, Tibet isalways in the state of ‘outsider’s imaginary type expressionism.’… In the context of economic changes, secularization and globalization, every Tibetan is in the middle of… spiritual transition and religious transformation.”
Although the color and forms of early Tibetan thangkas have inspired Gade, and he won a prize for traditional painting in 1990 while he was a student in Beijing at theCentral Academy of Arts, he’s most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt. He equates the “Scorching Sun of Tibet” exhibition with the 1985 New Wave Art Movement inChina, a kind of explosive answer to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. It was a time when China was not only cut off from the rest of the world, but was alsoforced to disown and renounce its own culture. The result was an explosive reaction — the ’85 New Wave Movement with artists pursuing multiple lines of inquiry.
Although long considered an isolated Shangri-La untouched by outside forces, Tibet has — for more than a millennium — been a stronghold of indigenous culturaltraditions repeatedly infused with foreign ideas. In the 14th century, Chinese art and luxury goods pouring into Tibet as a result of political ties with the Mongol emperorsof China, profoundly affecting the development of Tibetan painting. In a twist, the late-20th century Tibetan diaspora and invasion, initiated by the Chinese, haspropelled Tibetans onto a global stage. Their fierce dedication to their roots has given them leading roles of conscience far beyond their ancient mountain kingdom. Ifyou go
WHAT: “Gade: Half Tibetan – Half Chinese”
WHERE: PW Contemporary, 129 W. San Francisco St. (upstairs)
WHEN: Through February. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
CONTACT: 505-983-7658 or art@ pwcontemporary.com
ANCIENT AND FRESH http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol...
1 of 3 5/3/11 4:56 PM
Tibetan-Chinese artist Gade’s painting “Money Tree,” an acrylic and natural pigment on canvas, is done in the traditional Tibetan thangka style, but with an eclectic mixof contemporary cultural caricatures.
ANCIENT AND FRESH http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol...
2 of 3 5/3/11 4:56 PM
COURTESY PW CONTEMPORARY
“Railway Train,” a 2006 mixed-media on Tibetan paper by Gade, commemorates the opening of the world’s highest rail line — from Beijing to Lhasa.
ANCIENT AND FRESH http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol...
3 of 3 5/3/11 4:56 PM
![Jalousie [Jealousy by JACOB GADE for Piano] · PDF fileLysvin lee Artist page : About the piece Title: Jalousie [Jealousy by JACOB GADE for Piano]](https://static.fdocuments.in/doc/165x107/5aad61937f8b9aa9488e2c81/jalousie-jealousy-by-jacob-gade-for-piano-lee-artist-page-about-the-piece-title.jpg)
