My Identity 1
Gonkar Gyatso
贡嘎嘉措
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
C-type print
Measurements
44 x 61 cm
Notes
In ‘My Identity’ Gonkar Gyatso appropriates and re-enacts a 1937 photograph by American explorer, naturalist and writer C. Suydam Cutting, described (very problematically) by the New York Times in his 1972 obituary as ‘the first white Christian ever to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa in Tibet’. Cutting’s photograph depicted the Dala Lama’s senior thangka painter at work in the Potala Palace. Gyatso uses this photograph, which represents in many ways an ‘orientalist gaze’, to explore his own hybrid identity. Born in Lhasa to parents who were senior figures in the People’s Liberation Army, he was educated in Chinese culture and studied Chinese brush painting at Minzu University (then the Central University of Nationalities) in Beijing. He later studied thangka painting in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama in exile, before travelling to study in London.
Each of his four photographs is a self-portrait based on the 1937 original. In the first, he is seated in a Tibetan interior, dressed in the robes of a Lama, working on a devotional thangka painting of the Buddha. In the second, he sits in a room with walls papered in Communist Party newspapers, dressed in a PLA uniform and painting a portrait of Mao Zedong. The third shows the artist as a Tibetan in India. He is seated in a corrugated iron hut; his suitcase behind him and a Bangla beer carton serving as his table are symbols of the precarity of exile. He paints a portrait of the Dalai Lama superimposed on an image of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. In the fourth, final image, the short-haired artist in western dress sits in a London flat, painting an abstract work. Gonkar Gyatso says the work was a search for his identity that took a long time: ‘In London I made my peace with this and realised that in fact there is no pure Tibetan identity. I’m just this guy, I have Chinese inside me, and I have western influences inside me, so I’m just this hybrid Tibetan guy.’
Each of his four photographs is a self-portrait based on the 1937 original. In the first, he is seated in a Tibetan interior, dressed in the robes of a Lama, working on a devotional thangka painting of the Buddha. In the second, he sits in a room with walls papered in Communist Party newspapers, dressed in a PLA uniform and painting a portrait of Mao Zedong. The third shows the artist as a Tibetan in India. He is seated in a corrugated iron hut; his suitcase behind him and a Bangla beer carton serving as his table are symbols of the precarity of exile. He paints a portrait of the Dalai Lama superimposed on an image of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. In the fourth, final image, the short-haired artist in western dress sits in a London flat, painting an abstract work. Gonkar Gyatso says the work was a search for his identity that took a long time: ‘In London I made my peace with this and realised that in fact there is no pure Tibetan identity. I’m just this guy, I have Chinese inside me, and I have western influences inside me, so I’m just this hybrid Tibetan guy.’
Accession number
2007.038