Gonkar Gyatso - Three Realms

Nicola Scott

Touring Exhibition

Institute of Modern Art

Gonkar Gyatso’s work merges Buddhist iconography and pop culture to create works that are breathtaking in the sheer density of their collaged imagery. Entering the exhibition the viewer is surrounded by seven large prints (colour copies of collaged found images) running around the grey walls of the smaller room at eye level that read “EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY”. Standing out against the white paper on which they are printed, these already intensely busy prints have been filled in with texta dots and overlaid with a variety of stickers: sparkly fairies, Australian fauna, comic book heroes, smiley faces. Their found imagery includes scraps of ephemera that reference Brisbane itself, a bus ticket emerges here, a Brisbane City Council sticker peeks out there. Gyatso has then marked and smudged the borders of the letters and their white support with black charcoal, giving the impression that the words are seeping a toxic material, or “crying” in Gyatso’s words (1).

In the adjacent room, the walls of the larger space are taken over by a mass of smaller works (about 20 x 10 cms) that hang around the room at eye level, in several horizontal rows on the back wall and two rows on the facing walls. These works feature a central image collaged from found material added to with pencil drawing and black, block text that runs around the inside frame. Each constitutes a critique of some element of the overlapping structures of popular culture and Western capitalism One features a newspaper picture of bling-covered Jay Z with hundred dollar notes and hand drawn dollar symbols. The text reads “IN NEED OF NEW ROLE MODELS?”. In the center of the room a spotlight falls on a waist-high, traditional statue of a sitting Buddha that has been entirely covered with tiny images – magazine pictures, newspaper clippings, stickers, snack wrappers, soft drink labels – a smiling monument to the collision of East and West, a trash and treasure deity for the times in which Gyatso lives and the cultures in which he is embedded (the artist lives and works between London, New York and Bejing).

It would be hard to miss the issues of identity, globalisation, hybridity, and consumerism that the IMA suggest Gyatso’s work explores, particularly in the mass of smaller works. Against the flat, austere grey paint of the gallery space, Gyatso has created a roaming trash or treasure temple of sorts, a colourful cacophony that assaults the eye and refuses to let it settle. Historically. collage/photomontage of found images, particularly when combined with text, have been powerful tools for critiquing mainstream culture and ideology. Using visual juxtaposition and bold, catchy text Gyatso’s works positions the viewer to look critically at the culture that surrounds and engulfs them, and the values it embodies. However the straightforward message and huge number of these becomes slightly repetitive. The Buddha and larger prints on the other hand, with their overwhelming colour and the density of their found imagery, are less didactic, instead drawing the viewer’s attention to these issues by effectively mimicking, in a concentrated dose, the overwhelming miasma of pop culture that awaits to assault their senses outside the gallery. The ambiguous line “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” was made famous by Jimi Hendrix in the song Purple Haze. He was widely considered to be referencing the affects of psychedelic drugs, and in these works Gyatso succeeds in drawing a line between the cultural effects of globalisation and the intoxicating affect of advertising, consumption and media, suggesting that worship of money, commodities and brands have replaced more traditional modes of spirituality, among other consequences. In being simultaneously playful and political, visually enticing and somehow repellent, Gyatso’s work reproduces the feelings of desire and despair that contemporary culture cultivates.

1. In conversation with the artist, 19 August 2011, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.