Modern Tibet

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Presenting Tibet: A Curators’ Roundtable Discussion

The Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and the Rubin Museum of Art are pleased to announce an upcoming roundtable discussion where four curators will share the processes behind the acquisition and presentation of the museums’ Tibetan collections. Representing different American museums, our panelists include:

Karl Debreczeny, Senior Curator, Rubin Museum of Art, New York
Elena Pakhoutova, Senior Curator, Rubin Museum of Art, New York
Kurt Behrendt, Associate Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Jeff Durham, Associate Curator, The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

How do curators approach representing Tibetan collections in their respective museums? What are the ways in which they make their collections accessible to the public and their specific audience? What digital initiatives related to Tibetan art and culture these museums offer or plan to develop? To find out more about this topic, please join us for an afternoon discussion on May 4 at 2pm. The event will start with individual presentations from each of the curators followed by a discussion. We will follow up with the questions from the audience the curators will address.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

This event is cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and the Rubin Museum of Art.

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Development of Modern Art in Tibet

Please join us for a lecture with:

Tsewang Tashi, Professor, Tibet University, Lhasa, PRC

This talk is mainly drawn from Tsewang Tashi’s recently published book A History of Art in Twentieth Century Tibet, for which he has done over ten years of fieldwork in different art sites and institutions home and abroad, including museums, monasteries, workshops and so on. We will start with a review of existing scholarship on modern art of Tibet and discuss the development of modern art in Tibet. Through an introduction of Gedun Choepel, a scholar and non-traditional artist in Tibet and his student Amdo Jampa, whose works are considered landmarks of early Tibetan modern art, we trace the emergence of modern art in Tibet and its development after the 1950s. In the 1960s, local Tibetan artists were actively creating works and engaging with artists from inland China who came to Tibet for artistic inspirations. We will also touch on art during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. After the Cultural Revolution when propaganda paintings proliferated, traditional art of Tibet has been revived and flourishing since the implementation of Reform and Open Policy, subsequently giving birth to the innovation of traditional art and diversified development of Tibetan art today.

This event will be conducted via Zoom. Registration required.

Organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Co-sponsored by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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Charting a Tibetan Cartography

Please join us for a lecture with:

Kenneth Bauer, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College

Moderated by:

Eveline Washul, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Drawing upon fieldwork in western Nepal, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the eastern Tibetan Plateau as well as historical and contemporary maps, I will argue that there is a recognizable but as yet underappreciated body of knowledge and traditions that comprise a Tibetan cartography. In addition to describing a coherent set of representational and embodied practices that were foundational to Tibetan efforts to map their worlds, I will argue that mapping practices were, in fact, integral to governance in pre-1950s Tibet. Though the Tibetan state may justly be called “minimal” (Jansen 2019) prior to assimilation by the People’s Republic of China, the delineation and claiming of territory through mapping occurred at multiple levels and was, as Scott (1995) instructs, one way that the state ‘saw’ its territory. Even as we recognize aspects of cartographic practices that are shared between contemporary scientific and Tibetan approaches, the case of Tibet can also catalyze an expanded notion of geography beyond the material bounds and geopolitical purposes to which scientific cartographers aspire, but also limit themselves.

This event will be streamed live on WEAI’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/WeatherheadEastAsianInstitute/live. Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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