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Adding to the atmosphere of the upcoming Spring Festival,
Tibetan Thangka master painter Tseten Namgyal's solo art show is
being held at the Art Gallery of the Chaoyang District Culture
Centre in downtown Beijing. The exhibition runs from 10 am to 7 pm
daily until February 13.
On display are at least 80 of the painter's works selected from
the past few years, according to Chodron Wangmo, deputy director of
the Tibetan Folk Artists Association, who organized the show in
collaboration with the gallery.
Thangka, a kind of scroll painting mounted on silk, bears a
distinctive artistic and religious flavour. It is a very popular
local art form in the Tibet Autonomous Region and neighbouring
areas such as Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan provinces.
Done with natural and mineral colors, the Thangka paintings
cover a wide range of themes taken from Tibetan history, social
life, personages (including religious figures), folk customs,
astronomy, the Tibetan calendar and traditional Tibetan
medicine.
Tseten Namgyal was born in 1960 in a peasant's family in Lunzhub
County and began to learn the Thangka art at the age of 19 in Lhasa
from the eighth generation master painter Jampel Wangchug of
Maintang School.
The Maintang School is the most influential Thangka painting
school in Tibet and its creative credits include most murals in
Lhasa's Jokhang, Sera, Ganden and Drepung monasteries, Potala
Palace, and Norbulingka Summer Palace.
Nowadays, more and more people from home and abroad are
interested in China's diverse ethnic and folk cultures, including
Tibetan culture.
"By holding this exhibition, one of a series of Tibetan art
projects to come, we hope to help the viewers gain a better
understanding of the best genuine Tibetan arts and culture and
hopefully attract them to pay a personal visit to Tibet," Chodron
Wangmo told China Daily last weekend in Beijing.
(China Daily January 27, 2006)
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