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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Eat the Buddha: Reportage on the Tibetan Plateau

Please join us for a lecture with:

Barbara Demick, former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library

Moderated by: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick talks about her recent book, Eat the Buddha, and discusses the challenges of reporting on the Tibetan Plateau. In her latest book, she tells the story of the Tibetan town of Ngaba, one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation.

Barbara Demick is the former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for The Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
This event will be conducted via Zoom. Registration required. Please register here.

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University.

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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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