Experiment with forms, an amazing show by the extremely talented Tenzing Rigdol, is our first exhibition of 2009, a year which promises to be as full and exciting as 2008. Apart from our continuous support of the Tibetan artists we have been working with since 2005, our programme will include artists fromIran, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong. We will also be exhibiting again in Dubai, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Furthermore, one of our artists, Gonkar Gyatso, has been invited to the Venice Biennale and to the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, an important recognition of his great talent. Despite the economic downturn, we feel confident that the artists we are working with will continue to flourish.

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Tenzing Rigdol is definitely one of the leading artists from the younger generation of Tibetan origin. Only 27, he is not only a painter, a sculptor and a video-maker but also an accomplished and published writer and poet, and a student of philosophy. Furthermore, he is an active member in his community, having been a founding member of an association of young creative Tibetans living in New York. His talent and his accomplishment manipulating in different media is evident in this show: oil, acrylic, pastel, collage etc. Tenzing’s work embraces tradition and modernity, complex visual imagery and the written word, poetry and music and he is at ease with both his Tibetan heritage and the Western culture in which he is immersed. His approach to the traditional background is innovative: “I discovered that the axiomof the Tibetan Buddhist thought stands on the idea of change but, ironically, Tibetan social conscience has always resisted any sort of change, at least with respect to contemporary art and cultural practices. . . Hence, my approach in the past eight years has been to reinterpret the traditional forms in all possible ways so as to loosen the tight aesthetic belt that Tibetans have been wearing since aeons.”

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